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…

  • hono4kami@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    Also, this is a good tip in general:

    You can’t fetch title and thumbnail for YouTube links that starts with youtu.be. This applies not only in Lemmy, but other websites too, for example Twitter (even before Elon’s era).

    This is, IMO due to the link doesn’t really contain HTML and OpenGraph metadata. It only redirects you. If you try cURL-ing the youtu.be link, you will see that it doesn’t have a response body, only some header including Location header that will tell you where to redirect. The response code itself is 301.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      There are people on shitjustworks posting youtu.be links on !videos@lemmy.world that do have thumbnails, so whatever they’re doing doesn’t seem to have that problem

      My .ee account has a field to put in a thumbnail URL, so other comments in this thread are kinda leading me to believe it may be a combination of instance version, and how the instance is configured