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…

  • Andrew@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    It depends on what youtube is willing to provide. It seems more likely to provide a thumbnail if you use a youtu.be link than a youtube.com link.

    Instances running Lemmy from 0.19.4 onwards (I think) provide the option of providing a separate thumbnail manually, which is useful, but your instance is on 0.19.3.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      I tried again with a youtu.be link and unfortunately no dice, so it seems it might be an instance issue, I’m gonna go take a look at the videos comm and see if there’s anyone on .world who posted and got a thumbnail. I might also try again from my .ee account

  • hono4kami@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    It’s because Lemmy can’t fetch YouTube thumbnails. I swear it used to fetch thumbnail and title automatically before, hmm

    • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      20 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).