this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
264 points (99.6% liked)
Videos
17677 readers
199 users here now
For sharing interesting videos from around the Web!
Rules
- Videos only (aside from meta posts flagged with [META])
- Follow the global Mastodon.World rules and the Lemmy.World TOS while posting and commenting.
- Don't be a jerk
- No advertising
- No political videos, post those to !politicalvideos@lemmy.world instead.
- Avoid clickbait titles. (Tip: Use dearrow)
- Link directly to the video source and not for example an embedded video in an article or tracked sharing link.
- Duplicate posts may be removed
- AI generated content must be tagged with "[AI] …" ^Discussion^
Note: bans may apply to both !videos@lemmy.world and !politicalvideos@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.