why do some YouTube videos on lemmy have a thumbnail, while some don't? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by Cris_Color@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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If you go to !videos@lemmy.world and scroll you'll see some of the posts have a youtube thumbnail image, but not all.

I wanna post YouTube videos, but no one seems to engage much without a thumbnail, which makes sense, but I'm not sure what would result in the post actually having a thumbnail

If anyone has advice or guidance I'd appreciate it :) Thanks!

EDIT: so far it seems like it's potentially a combination of what version of lemmy the posters account is running, and how that instance is configured...

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[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It's because YouTube puts a bunch of JavaScript at the start of the file (1MiB) before the opengraph tags and Lemmy only fetches the first 512 KiB (a fix was merged a couple days ago).

[-] hono4kami@slrpnk.net 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

If you don't put a whopping 1MB of JavaScript in your website, you're doing web development wrong.

[-] Enoril@jlai.lu 2 points 6 days ago

Don’t forget to add also the 2856 partners intrusive code lines and cookies to have a "better experience"

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

I can fetch the damn thumbnail just fine. I have to do it on every YT post I submit.

Reddit can fetch thumbnails from hundreds of websites, all of them different, including a bunch of porn sites. Pretty sure they have to code each site to map out the right URL and tags to parse.

I know Lemmy is OSS, but I really wish it wasn't so slow on the uptake with these things.