Attention Beige Party-goers! YouTube links in German? Warum nicht?
I've been getting reports of YouTube links showing text in German, and then the links being broken when you click them. I looked into this and I think it has to do with our servers being hosted by Hetzner, which is a German company (Though the actual servers are located in Finland). Preview cards are cached at the server side, so the German version of the YouTube page gets grabbed for the preview card. If you actually click the link itself, it will take you to the correct page, it's just the preview card that's broken. Though, the preview card is the most prominent clickable thing on the post so this is understandably confusing.
One thing to note, this only happens with the shortened youtu.be domain urls. These are what you get if you click the share button under the video. If you get the full URL (with the youtube.com domain) from the browser address bar, the preview card will load correctly. The problem is that it's pretty hard to get the full URL on mobile. I had to get the shortened link in the YouTube app, paste it into Chrome and then request the desktop site to get the full URL.
Edit: RolloTreadway (npub15n7…t9fk) came up with an easier way to get the full URL: https://beige.party/@RolloTreadway/112930593747828218
Needless to say, this is not ideal. This started happening relatively recently, so I suspect this might be a bug in the Mastodon code. I also noticed that, at first, clicking the link would take you to a generic splash page with German text, now it just sends you an undefined page that doesn't load, so it seems like things might have changed with the most recent update.
Until it gets fixed, there's not a whole lot we can do about it. For now we'll have to get by with workarounds:
1) If you see one of those posts with the broken preview card, try clicking the actual link text above it to get to the video.
2) If you're posting links to YouTube videos, make sure the URL you're using has the full youtube.com domain.
You can find more information about this phenomenon here: https://mastodon.world/@mlanger/112914323157956296
Or just type "YouTube links German" into the search bar. It looks like a lot of instances are having this problem because Hetzner is a popular hosting service for Mastodon instances.
Beige-Segne
