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I guess this is going to come down to desktop vs mobile preference.

In that case, perhaps linking to the mobile site would make sense, since it ought to work for both mobile and desktop:

https://m.xkcd.com/3090/

Still not equivalent, since it still requires multiple steps, and doesn’t work with privacy settings that forbid off-site images.

That splits the comic between two separate screens, and requires multiple steps (and page loads) to read it.

It’s not as good as linking to the whole comic, intact, in one place.

The mobile browsers I’ve used let you long-press the image to see the hover text.

If yours doesn’t, you can always prepend m. to the domain name, like this: https://m.xkcd.com/3090/

The thing is, with xkcd, the image is not the full comic. Part of the comic is the hover text, which you don’t get with the image alone.

The way things are now, I click the title and it takes me to a bare image, so I then have to go back, and then read through the post body to find the link to the whole comic, and then click that. It’s a hassle.

(And since you mentioned viewing comments alongside the image, you should be aware that Lemmy’s default interface shows only a thumbnail fragment of the image on the same page as the comic. I guess you might be using a mobile app.)

Dear bot maintainer,

Any chance of getting the bot to use the source page as the post link, rather than linking to the image alone and burying source link within the body?

That would make it easier to view the whole comic, complete with hover text, in one place.

Edit: Linking to the mobile site would also work, and perhaps better accommodate both mobile and desktop users. Like this: https://m.xkcd.com/3090/

Sure, but most YouTube streams aren’t delivered as a single webm or mp4 file, and the language & subtitle selection you’re referring to aren’t implemented by the browser (but instead by a JavaScript application downloaded from Google). So it’s not what OP asked about.

I’m not suggesting that it’s outrageous. Merely that it’s probably not a high priority.

Maybe webm and mp4 files with multiple language tracks are usually played with a media player, not a web browser?

Let’s not make things complicated when they don’t have to be.