 If you're posting a link to YouTube and there isn't any embedded video appearing in the post, it's possibly because YouTube has started automatically putting a shortener (youtu.be) on its sharing links. To have a link that will embed properly in a Mastodon etc post, use the full version of the YouTube video's address which begins youtube.com (instead of youtu.be). You can get this full version from the address bar of your web browser when you're watching the video. 15 comments
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services using youtube address bar to share link also avoids some google tracking  @MagentaRocks @FediTips Thanks for this (well remembered!) but I think it's an issue with the way YouTube is now inserting ads into the start of videos, not short URLs. I was trying to unpick it on this thread: https://mstdn.social/@stokes/112875572766386307 Hmm... 🤔 Posted the shortener thing above because someone had messaged me asking about it, and in their example the shortener didn't work while the full length address did work. I wonder if there are two different things happening at once here, as it doesn't seem as clearcut as it appeared at first? I just tried the example you gave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IKgpxLN86M) and that worked fine now. So, it seems to be an intermittent thing in some cases at least? (I'm assuming here that you can see the preview below, it's possible that your server won't render it as each server renders its own previews.) I'm using Freetube to watch youtube videos so I can't copy link with "youtube.com" but only "youtu.be" If you copy the youtu.be link into a browser, it will turn into a youtube.com link as that's the real address of the video.   |
Gregory's Server
@FediTips ohhhhhhh, thank you for this