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.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
    53·
    3 days ago

    In general, solid advice. Though there are some extra params such as start, t, and end which can be useful if you want to reference a specific part of a video. Sadly, though, those params are no longer honored when viewing a video embed and only now seem to work on YT proper.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      17·
      3 days ago

      URLCheck (available in F-Droid) is a nice tool for inspecting URLs and removing tracking and other nonsense. It includes a lot of nice features such as:

      • Url Cleaner: Uses the ClearURLs catalog to remove referral and useless parameters from the url. It also allows for common offline url redirections. Built-in catalog from https://docs.clearurls.xyz/latest/specs/rules/
      • Unshortener: Uses https://unshorten.me/ to unshorten urls remotely.
      • Queries remover: Displays the decoded individual url queries, which you can remove or check.

      It’s handy for checking/editing links before pasting them into posts/comments, and also for checking links before you open them.

      • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I just installed and tested out the app. I have been using Léon - The URL Cleaner for a while.

        I “shared” your clearurls link to URLChecker as a quick test, and then hit the “Unshorten” button, even though I knew it wasn’t a short URL. This is what it resolved it to:

         url=../../../1.26.1/specs/rules

        Haha… Thanks?

        In the end, it takes more taps to do what I want than Leon does. If I share a YouTube link, I have to press “Unshort” then “Apply” to remove useless parameters. Meanwhile, with Leon, it’s already done. As soon as you share to it, it presents the plain YouTube URL with a simpler UI where the buttons have words on them instead of just icons.

        Compare:

        URLChecker

        Leon

        To be fair, it appears to have fewer features. Leon can’t simply remove all parameters or check the URL status. URLChecker also had it’s own quick list of share targets in that central drop-down in addition to a traditional Share button.

        I think I’ll keep both installed in case URLChecker does a better job with non-YouTube URLs.