For one, even if I wanted to use it, piped never works for me.
Second, on mobile, my alternative of choice doesn’t recognize everyone’s non-yt links, so it removes my choice in the matter.
Third, I have no reason to trust the weird-ass domains I see, and to un-fuck the url takes much more time then just handing out the original YT links and letting people choose for themselves how they view the video.
Agree totally. Any YT link can be turned easily into an alternate frontend link, so leave it up to the clients to rewrite those as they want (either via browser extension or UI feature).
Granted, it’s just as easy to turn an alternate frontend link into a YT or other alternative link, but then the client would have to know of every random Invidious/Piped instance, so it’s much less practical.