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
    9·
    3 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
      10·
      3 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).

      • hono4kami@slrpnk.netEnglish
        71·
        3 days ago

        If you don’t put a whopping 1MB of JavaScript in your website, you’re doing web development wrong.

        /s

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I can fetch the damn thumbnail just fine. I have to do it on every YT post I submit.

        Reddit can fetch thumbnails from hundreds of websites, all of them different, including a bunch of porn sites. Pretty sure they have to code each site to map out the right URL and tags to parse.

        I know Lemmy is OSS, but I really wish it wasn’t so slow on the uptake with these things.

    • TehBamski@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      I can testify to this. I was there. I was there when Lemmy so valiantly fetched ye old YouTube thumbnails.