Yeah unfortunately Lemmy is really bad with YouTube links. It refuses to grab the title for the suggested title feature. (Though IIRC Piefed also fails on this.) It doesn’t pull any relevant information for the automatic description/summary feature displayed below the post. (Another problem Piefed shares.) And it doesn’t generate a thumbnail. Ever.
On Lemmy, unlike Piefed, you can specify a specific URL as the thumbnail for any post on the submission page. This gives you a way to fix the problem when Lemmy fails to automatically generate a good thumbnail. And unfortunately, when Piefed does a better job at generating thumbnails for its users, it doesn’t federate those over for Lemmy users to see.
Having said that, I’m really fucking annoyed that Lemmy hasn’t fixed this issue yet. Meanwhile, Reddit supports 500 thousand different kinds of thumbnail formats, and Lemmy can’t be bothered to support one of the most popular video platform.
For your thumbnail.
https://youtube-thumbnail-grabber.com/
Once you load the video thumnails you can copy the url into the post image url.
omg there’s a site that does it for you? I always pull up the browser inspector to grab the thumbnail URL myself manually, and it’s such a huge pain!
I dont understand. The video pops up with a thumbnail on piefed. Did it not on lemmy or something?
Yeah unfortunately Lemmy is really bad with YouTube links. It refuses to grab the title for the suggested title feature. (Though IIRC Piefed also fails on this.) It doesn’t pull any relevant information for the automatic description/summary feature displayed below the post. (Another problem Piefed shares.) And it doesn’t generate a thumbnail. Ever.
On Lemmy, unlike Piefed, you can specify a specific URL as the thumbnail for any post on the submission page. This gives you a way to fix the problem when Lemmy fails to automatically generate a good thumbnail. And unfortunately, when Piefed does a better job at generating thumbnails for its users, it doesn’t federate those over for Lemmy users to see.
I’m always have this URL format bookmarked for when I’m posting YT links on Lemmy:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KtQ9nt2ZeGM/maxresdefault.jpg
Just swap out the ID with the one you’re using.
Having said that, I’m really fucking annoyed that Lemmy hasn’t fixed this issue yet. Meanwhile, Reddit supports 500 thousand different kinds of thumbnail formats, and Lemmy can’t be bothered to support one of the most popular video platform.
If that’s the case then no need to worry about it.