It's because Lemmy can't fetch YouTube thumbnails. I swear it used to fetch thumbnail and title automatically before, hmm
Whoa
My dream of uploading meme videos on the fediverse is becoming real
Oh wow I completely forgot lol
i kinda want to upload all my shitposts gallery on PeerTube but i can't even find a single instance that is open for registration lol
Let me give you my opinion, specifically as a React developer, if you don't mind.
And let's be clear: I intend this to be a constructive criticism. I hope you understand and don't take it the wrong way.
To be honest, I don't know how good or bad federating one-way is. This is more of a "people" problem rather than a technical problem.
But, to be honest, what I am bothered by, is the fact that the website doesn't give an attribution in the UI about which instance certain users are from and which instance certain certain community are from.
Take a look at this post: https://clubsall.com/posts/theyre-trying-to-charge-luigi-with-terrorism-imagine-that-qfF82
The UI says that the post was posted by u[slash]BytesOnBikes. If I didn't know better, I'd have assumed this was from a user from clubsall. But if you click the username, you realize that the link says u[slash]BytesOnBikes[at]slrpnk.net. I think this would be confusing as a user. What if there is the same user under the username BytesOnBikes from clubsall? At least if you include the instance name, user would know right away that both users are different. But if you didn't include the instance name, I feel like this can be abused to impersonate user. This is a bad thing to happen to your website, don't you agree?
Now that we both understand that lack of attribution is a bad thing to clubsall... What's stopping you from adding an instance name to the username? I'm sure the app has a way to know which instance certain users are from. From what I gather, I feel like this is as easy as appending a string in the code.
I haven't even talked about the community name on the UI. Or the ethicality of misleading attribution.
I don't think people liked the idea lol.
I actually liked kbin/mbin. I used it before moving to Lemmy. I just can't code in PHP (and I have had some trauma using it while doing internship)
The things redditors mentioned are very good already. Primarily screenshots. Please, please always add screenshots to let me have a general idea of the UI.
I've read this mentioned many times. Is it really that bad XD
Gonna go out-of-topic from the post but I need this to get this off my chest:
Do you know what prompted me to contribute to PieFed's code?
Recently, a developer of Lemmy straight up posted a link to a website to a China propaganda in a community in my Lemmy instance. Yes, a propaganda.
Tbf, slrpnk.net receives a lot of China-related posts, and that's due to China out-competing other countries in many sectors (EV, for example), and in those post OP usually critical enough to acknowledge that while China achievement is good, the crimes Chinese government has done shouldn't be ignored.
But the post is different. From the domain name, the "About Us" section of the website, the bias in the article. Clearly this was posted with an ill intention. A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting
I downvoted said post, but I hesitated to call it out. Because, I'm gonna be honest--I'm genuinely scared of interacting with those kind of people. And I don't want to have a deep discussion about politics or propaganda anyway. I'm not that kind of person.
This made me realize, I also don't tell people I use fediverse or don't reach out to other forums to open a community in Lemmy. This is because the fediverse, or at least Lemmy have a bad reputation: tankie.
There is a saying in my country that says "One person ate jackfruit, everyone got the sap". The genocide deniers ate the jackfruit, and everyone got the sap. The genocide deniers ruined fediverse's name and everyone else got the consequence. I don't wanna recommend people to use softwares made by those terrible people, and I doubt most people want to use softwares that has a reputation of being a genocide deniers playgrounds.
Honestly OP from the link in the post (https://feddit.org/post/4920887) kind of made a good point.
At this point, I would prefer just quitting Lemmy altogether.
But I remembered, the fediverse is an open source effort. I use open source software a lot. I feel like I need to give back something. And I have a community that still needed moderating.
And recently I found PieFed that is still in early days but show some great promise. I happen to understand HTMX (I use it in my personal projects) and Python (I learned it way back in junior high). Seems perfect to me, so I contributed one.
Honestly, it feels kinda unfair to me that software made by a genocide deniers gets the funding, meanwhile a software made by a good person (PieFed) has to be a hobby project.
You know what, disregard my previous comments and try creating the community. I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt.
What I'm kinda worried is the exact same kind of user mention in the post will post on the community. And I also have visited subreddit that calls out bad users in reddit in the past (like r/redditmoment for example) and I kinda don't like it, because to me it's kind of a waste of time. Probably a personal preference.
But if it calls out/exposes bad users in the community, probably good. Probably
@OpenStars@piefed.social because I'm not sure if PieFed can already mention user lol
So I take a peek at the Lemmy's source code.
When you see a thumbnail and title of a URL (including YouTube video links) on Lemmy, what happens is that Lemmy server fetched the website HTML file and get the
og:titleandog:image(this convention is called OpenGraph protocol ^1) located inside<head>HTML tag.For example, for this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbYuEEU5e50, the OpenGraph metadata inside the HTML looks like this:
Try opening the "Create Post" page, then enter URL of a YouTube video. You might notice that a loading spinner will appear. During this, the frontend of Lemmy is actually creating a request to
/api/v3/post/site_metadata?url=[insert your URL]. When the backend side of Lemmy receives the request from front end, it will run this code ^2 to fetch the HTML and parse it to find the OpenGraph metadata. If the metadata is found, the backend will return it to front end, and you willl see recommended title and the "Thumbnail URL" field should be filled.In theory, this should work fine, regardless of any website. I personally tried to view the HTML code of a YouTube video and the HTML file indeed contains OpenGraph metadata.
But it doesn't for YouTube videos in Lemmy somehow. And I'm not sure.
I'm suspecting YouTube thought that Lemmy servers are bots and because of that instead of receiving the HTML file of a YouTube video, instead it received a HTML file of a captcha page. I think I'm gonna try contacting admins of my instance to see whether YouTube URL works or not.