I was aware (and used) alternative frontends to various proprietary sites (invidious, teddit, nitter etc…).

On lemmy, it seems that when people want to share a link to a youtube video, or a reddit post, they often share a link to said video/post but through one of those alternative frontends.

In some ways this is great as it allows discovering the alternatives as well as avoiding privacy issues. However, there are still a few issues which makes me think we should keep using links to the original website:

1. There are addons that make the redirection for you anyway
2. Alternative frontend instances get rate limited. This is most often the case with invidious instances. Having a link toward a specific instance means that it can get rate limited if the post becomes popular, also for people not familiar with it, it leads to a video that doesn’t load, which is a terrible experience. Addons can reduce this issue by redirecting to multiple instances at random for example.
3. Instances get shutdown and this leads to nonoperational links. Redirection addons on the other hand can be updated regularly to point only towards operational instances.
4. On mobile, it prevents links from being opened in the proper app. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a video link on Lemmur and having the browser open an invidious instance instead of NewPipe. The same goes for Reddit and the countless FLOSS apps you can use to browse it, which are all a better experience than teddit on mobile.

This makes me think it is better to just share the link to the original website. It could be a feature of Lemmy to warn the users when they click on a link to a proprietary network and offer alternatives though.

I’m interested in getting some counter arguments.