When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.

I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.

This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    It would be great if link cleaning and auto-mirroring was part of the lemmy UI itself.

    • locuester@lemmy.zip
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      16 minutes ago

      Yeah, would be best within particular client implementations. Not core Lemmy tho. Too many ways to do this and high maintenance.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 hours ago

      The problem is that there is an almost infinite way to design these kinds of URLs, so maintaining a database of what should be stripped out isn’t trivial.

    • ExperimentalGuy@programming.dev
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      2 hours ago

      I think that would probably be a client implemented feature, not a Lemmy one. I also don’t design social medias, so I don’t really know.

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        Yeah “lemmy-ui” is the official web app for lemmy. There might be other web frontends or clients that already do this.