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.
This probably isn’t the forum for this, lol, but there’s nothing stopping someone from posting a headline from and archive link to Breitbart and putting (Bloomberg) in the title. The actual source URL being visible and linked to the post goes a long way to prevent that kind of chicanery. And if a UI hides the source URL, it’s a bad UI lol.
It may get modded once someone reports the discrepancy, but in the time between it was posted and the time it gets modded, people will still see a tabloid headline thinking it’s legit. (Assuming most people just read the headline which is pretty common on social media).
Something to think about.
This problem applies to literally anything shared on lemmy. Someone could also just put a nyt link and change the headline to make it look like it says something different than it actually does.
To a degree yeah, that’s true. Most UIs, though, show the embed metadata which has the actual title. Though in the case of NYT, they’re notoriously bad about blocking non-browser requests (e.g. when Lemmy fetches the metadata server-side).
Oh I didn’t know that. My UI doesn’t do previews.
I use Tesseract 99% of the time and occasionally Photon; they both show the full metadata. I just checked against Lemmy UI and it just shows the description and not the title. Voayger just the link. So scratch “most UIs” from my previous statement then lol.
I thought at least Lemmy UI showed the embed title and description, but maybe they changed it since 0.18.whatever when I last used it.
As someone who (embarrassedly given today’s news) owns an apple device where the only functional lemmy app is voyager, makes sense I never noticed there were UI’s where metadata is shown ahah.
What happened to Arctic?
http://lemmyapps.com/
I’m on Android, but when I had an iphone as a secondary device, I just pinned a Lemmy webapp to the home screen. I try to keep my installed apps to a minimum. My way of not getting sucked into the thing all day.
But yeah, good/sad to know that the metadata isn’t as widely displayed as I thought it was :(
My device is pretty old (7 years old now) so anything on my browser that is resource intensive (including lemmy) is extremely buggy.