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.

Pipepipe does not include this tracking, by default.

Same with freetube (which can be used for both mobile and desktop)

YSK PieFed automatically strips that out.

Edit: posts only, not in comments.

Like if you post a YouTube link, the platform detects it and automatically edits the link?

Yeah

Get YouTube Sharing URL sans Sharing / Tracking Code (for iOS users)

I never knew users could get the profile from it, I always thought that was a youtube internal thing. thats not cool

Thats great!

It's a very recent change

Additional PSA: TikTok does the same. Also Instagram, but in my experience it doesn't reveal the sharing user (yet).

On android, urlcheck is a great app to modify URLs before sharing or opening.
For this problem, you can use the json editor, and add the following two entries with small a regex I wrote:

  "shorten Youtube": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtube\\.com\/(.*)&.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },
  "shorten Youtu.be": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtu\\.be\/([^?]*)?.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },

A button to shorten the link appears in urkcheck when the pattern matches. You can all auto shorten them by replacing
"enabled": true
With
"automatic": true

Instagram absolutely does reveal the sharing user

Insta does. if you open it on web and you didn't log in, the popup that beg you to log in will also include the user who shared it.

Hopefully NewPipe does the same, as PipePipe's successor.

Always remove those search parameters before pasting links, even to my friends. F—k these big tech platforms, I'm not giving you any sharing data!

Wow. This is awesome. Thank you! I will have to see if the dev has a donate button.

FWIW I had to noodle with the spacing of your json after copying from Lemmy (Voyager android app) but I got it to work. Thanks for sharing!

Holy moly, better pay attention

What the fuck

Grayjay does too.

Newpipe and Tubular also share videos without the tracking, by default.

I'm preeeeety sure PipePipe is the successor. Or atleast a different fork with more updates.

Here's another. If the video you want to share is on youtube, it's also on invidious. Without ads, downloadable and just generally none of youtube's bullshit. It even uses the same video vURL address.

I remember telling this to people on reddit and getting downvoted to oblivion while redditors squawked "who tf cares bro"

You are correct. Or, rather, not the successor but an independent fork (doesn't necessarily adopt upstream changes).

I don't know what the hell I saw just the other day. I am 100% certain that I read that some GitHub project I was looking at said it was a fork of PipePipe, or in reverse, that "you should use NewPipe as it supersedes this repo".

🤨 I need to dive into my browser history...

Edit: ah! It was PipePipe! I just misinterpreted this line:

NewPipe, reimagined: faster, more stable, and packed with more features.

I took this to mean:

NewPipe is a reimagined fork of this project, which is faster, more stable, and packed with more features.

🤦‍♂️💁‍♂️ D'oh.

Nice!

Revanced strips it when copying or sharing the video url

Pretty cool!

Might not solve everything, but a good link cleaner utility is helpful too. I personally use this one: Trackless Links

Same here, the awful thing is if they click on it, they cannot see the comments under the video and can only "reply" to you. Not sure what that should do, since the link has already been shared.

I use Leon:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.svenjacobs.app.leon

I just share the URL from the browser.

Even on mobile: I don't use the YouTube app. On Android, this is a no-brainer, since you can run Firefox and uBlock Origin and bypass all the ads. On iOS it is a bit more dicey, but still advantageous to forego the app. Currently DuckDuckGo can bypass the ads for free. If you don't mind paying, Wipr2 can also do it, in Safari. Then you just put a web shortcut to YouTube and bam, ad-free YouTube. Shitty icon though (it's the regular icon in a white squircle). Either way, share from the browser, not YouTube.

Also, of course you can remove all the extra shit from the URL if you know how. That wisdom is lost on younger generations, but innate to older ones (who grew up around tech, like Millennials; or younger Gen X who adopted it at a young age — not like these iPad babies you have now).

Facebook and Instagram do the same btw. Just FYI.

Same with LibreTube.

Thank you for that.

I don't see how it's a generational thing. I remember when every link included the page type at the end, meaning there was nothing that could be truncated. If you don't know what si stands for or don't know that anything after a ? Is tracking bullshit, then you simply don't know. It's a "knowledgeable person" thing that can be learned at any time. I've pointed it out and many people I know still don't care

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

i would be surprised if it is true that "If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you", and a search just now didn't find anything to substantiate that.

It’s a very recent change

is it though? if so, how do you actually find out the profile name from the si parameter?

obviously tracking parameters from URLs should be removed in any case, but afaict only google can use this to find which user generated the link.

after some more reading i found conflicting reports but i think this might actually be happening; apparently it is only visible in the app?

People can't even unanimously agree on when each generation starts and ends (see terms like "zillenial" or "xillenial") so I'd even go so far as to say it's a completely redundant concept in the colloquial sense. Obviously most people care more about continuing to use the "kids these days" rhetoric so it hardly matters regardless, but it doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

Is

tbh I would still prefer receiving the raw youtube link so everybody can redirect it to their preferred way of watching e.g. Morphee. Invidious instances can go down or stop working.

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.

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

As a web developer, everything after the ? is actually parameters for the request. Anything could be in there, even important stuff (though hopefully nothing identifying, since that is extremely unsecure). You will likely break functionality if you delete everything without knowing what it is.

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.

TikTok too, actually. They’re just more clever about it by generating a slug when you share a video, so you can’t just lop off the end.

I don’t see how it’s a generational thing.

People who grew up when smartphones were already a thing might never have needed to learn how the Internet and URLs actually work. To a lot of everyday users nowadays, the Internet is just a series of smartphone or tablet apps you switch between. I used to think that the spread of the Internet into more segments of society would create a society of computer nerds, ha ha ha ha ha nope.

Is that so?

Edit: I posted this from PieFed, and it preserved the "?si=" part of the URL, which I have since edited out by hand.

This one I loaded from a private-browsing tab. The URL includes the tracking ID but it may not be connected to me.

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

They might be talking about the default web interface.