How Stasher News handles X and YouTube links:How Stasher News handles X and YouTube links:

X (Twitter) links

• Tweet previews are built in-house, not embedded: when an X link is posted, our server fetches the post's public Embed metadata once (text, author, date), expands any t.co short links back to their real destinations, and captures the media image, which is then proxied through our own image server and stored with the post. Rendering never contacts x.com; the card is drawn entirely from our database, and the image is served via our proxy.
• Clicking an X link takes you to a Nitter frontend instead of x.com. Every rewritten link includes an "original on X ↗" escape hatch, plus "try another instance ↗".
• Your stored post URLs are never changed, only what the browser navigates to.

YouTube links

https://stasher.news/uploads/739

• The primary action is "open privately ↗", which routes the video page through an Invidious instance (with "try another instance ↗" as backup).
• No Google resources load until you explicitly click "Show embedded Youtube video player", no thumbnails, no iframe, nothing. Only after that click does the video play, in a privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com embed. Click again to hide; opening a different video asks for fresh consent.
• Timestamps and playlists (t/start, list, index, end) survive both private links and the embed. Invalid video IDs show "video unavailable" and never silently fall back to Google.
• Works identically in the feed and on the post page.

Cleaner links when posting/pasting

• YouTube tracking parameters (si, feature, utm_*, fbclid, gclid, etc.) are automatically stripped from newly posted or pasted links, while playback parameters are kept. Same for existing X link cleanup.
• Older, already-stored posts are left untouched, no bulk rewriting.
• Copying post content elsewhere still exports the original URLs.

Thank you for the feedback on @artemis 's post #340002

Happy Stashing!