@lauren @shuttersparks The "no image" thing is because someone's synchronization is slow. There's a program that runs in the background that copies photos from remote servers to the local server, and if either side is bogged down it will be a delay.

@ai6yr @shuttersparks Yeah, I've seen that with static images. The black video player though is something else, and I suspect it relates to people attempting to include videos from Twitter as opposed to YT.

@lauren @shuttersparks Yes, or Instagram, neither will play. Walled gardens...

@ai6yr @lauren Thanks for the tip!

@lauren I see the image is hosted on your own server so there's no reason for it to be "not available".

Even stranger is the fact that when Masto fuzzes photos, it uses the underlying photo so you get an extremely blurred version. That's what I see. It has the photo but is deliberately fuzzing it and says "Not available".

Must be a glitch of some kind. I'm sure the code that handles that stuff is well ironed out. I'll keep my eyes open.

@lauren @shuttersparks I’ve had trouble getting my YouTube links to “embedify” in Mastodon posts. No clue what’s going wrong.

@matt @shuttersparks At least for my server I just place them inline, e.g.:

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...

and they've automatically embedded in the post successfully (as far as I know, anyway).

@lauren @matt Hmm, I think it's not working as you intend. When I click on the URL link in the text it takes me not to a video but to the YouTube main index page. When I hover over the link, it shows a truncated URL .../watch?v= and nothing after the equals sign.

@shuttersparks @matt Of course. Because that's not a full YT URL, just an example of where to put the URL in a post. A full URL would have the video ID after the equal sign. If you put a full YT URL where I showed that example, it will embed properly. At least they do for me.

@lauren @matt Okay, I didn't realize it was supposed to be a dummy embed. Haha. You could have put a link to the Rick Astley video. ;-)

@shuttersparks @lauren I've had trouble getting this to work. I wonder what I'm doing wrong?

See here: https://mastodon.matthauger.com/@matt/109429693502118522

@shuttersparks @matt I'm really not into those games.

@lauren @matt Twas a good opportunity for a laugh.

@lauren @matt I've just been putting links inline too and they work as links. But Mastodon doesn't go find a graphic to display (if there is one) like some platforms do. Diaspora doesn't either.

@shuttersparks @matt Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It depends on how the target page is set up. I don't like that indeterminacy, that's why I use a white box or (now) a photo of Leela so I *know* what will be there.

@lauren @matt Interesting. I've never seen Mastodon or Diaspora dig a graphic out of a blog post and display it like on Twitter.

@shuttersparks @matt Yeah, it does. Sometimes. It even did it with that example YT URL, since I didn't provide a superseding image with that one.

@shuttersparks @lauren @matt - I am totally confused by the various ways to get an image to display on the various platforms.

@karlauerbach @shuttersparks @matt On here, if you want to take a chance on whatever image may be presented by a target page, you can just use the URL of the page. If you want to include a specific image (which will supersede any target page image from a link), use the attach function on the post. To embed a YT video, just reference the URL in the text of the post. It appears that referencing Twitter (and possibly Instagram) videos that way will result in a nonfunctional video player embed in many, most, or all cases.

@lauren @karlauerbach @matt Hmm. Here's a link to a blog post that has an image. https://shuttersparks.net/canned-food-is-fine/

@lauren @karlauerbach @matt What I see displayed is a frame with the title of the blog post and a tiny image. I'm just used to the image displayed larger on other platforms.

@lauren @karlauerbach @matt Hmm, I guess I'm not entirely correct. If I open the post I see the graphic at a good size. Only in the timeline is it really tiny. Good to know.

@lauren @shuttersparks I would love it if the editing pane gave me a live preview of whether / how the embed card would display.

@matt @shuttersparks Twitter didn't either. They don't actually fetch until the post is made. And then each instance goes out and retrieves it on their own, unless there is some other superseding image.