451
submitted 2 days ago by ptz@dubvee.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

I get it - Google sucks for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately, they own the largest video sharing platform, and it's difficult to avoid. Many people opt to use and share links to 3rd party web interfaces that greatly de-enshittify the experience (Piped/Invidious), and I'm glad for that and that those projects exist.

That said, when sharing a YT video, please just share the canonical YouTube link rather than a link to a random Piped/Invidious instance and let people handle using a 3rd party interface themselves.

Why?

Most People Who Care Probably Already Have a Mechanism in Place

People who want to use 3rd party YT frontends probably already have a mechanism in place to deal with that: integrated Lemmy client support, browser plugin to automatically redirect YT links to their preferred instance, mobile apps that handle YT links, annoying bot, etc.

You're Forcing Someone to Use Their Non-Preferred Instance

With YouTube having a relatively small number of domains, it's infinitely easier to detect YouTube links and automatically/transparently re-write them to a Piped/Invidious instance of the user's choice than the other way around.

It's much more difficult to do the opposite and account for all the random Inv/Piped instances in the wild, and there's no way to really identify them by URL alone (aside from a big list which is difficult to keep up-to-date or be all-inclusive).

The Invidious/Piped server you're linking to may work well for you, but could be on the other side of the planet for someone else. It may also be unreliable, slow, overloaded, or otherwise sub-optimal for sharing links with a wide audience.

Combined, this makes it much more difficult for people to use a local or preferred Invidious/Piped instance while also contributing to a degraded experience.

Boulevard of Broken ~~Dreams~~ Links

Invidious/Piped are in a constant cat and mouse game against Google. In between Google making a change to break Invidious/Piped and those projects implementing and deploying workarounds, we end up with a lot of non-functional links that need to be re-written to another instance or back to YT. That's not even accounting for Invidious/Piped instances that shut down/go permanently offline. Again, it's infinitely easier to re-write a YT link to another Inv/Piped instance than detect every possible Inv/Piped link and redirect those.

Conclusion

So, while people's desire to de-Google is laudable, please be aware that it can also be counterproductive. Sharing the canonical YT link allows the link to avoid dying due to numerous circumstances while also making it much easier for Lemmy clients, browser plugins, etc to use the user's preferred instance to avoid a degraded experience.

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[-] tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 28 points 2 days ago

It could also be helpful to explicitly provide the exact title and creator.

[-] haverholm@kbin.earth 13 points 2 days ago

Maybe even a note why this is worth clicking on, and not just a lazy teen spamming /all with anything they come across on a school night.

That may just be my preference 🤔

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 day ago

Fwiw both PieFed and the Tesseract front-end for Lemmy have YouTube embedding. And probably some apps too but I don't know which ones. This is the real dream: you don't even leave the post to watch it, if you want, and the preview pic is just already right there.

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That's the dream lol.

I'm 50/50 on whether I'll click a random, nondescript YT link someone drops in the comments (at least with posts, a title is required and it'll often fetch the video metadata). My Lemmy frontend will preview YT links without leaving the app, so it's now more like 80% I'll at least give it a glance lol.

[-] tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 7 points 2 days ago

I browse lemmy on an iPad and use freetube on my pc.

I’ve mostly just been not clicking any YouTube link. It just leads me to some insurance ad.

[-] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Youtube has decided for some reason on my device that the only adds I will get is BS “brain retraining” for profit “courses”.

It’s really sad how the (mental) health industry has so much for-profit pseudoscience.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago

I'm 0% clicking a random YouTube link. Switch and wait for the app to load, then the video, then the ad (if applicable), then wait to figure out wtf I'm watching and why? No thanks.

this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
451 points (97.5% liked)

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