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Show HN: Metacheck – preview how any link appears on social media and chat apps (metacheck.appstate.co)

165 points by talljohnson1234 ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I’ve been an indie hacker for a while, but I haven’t had much success with my past projects. Recently, I came across Marc Lou’s advice about building free tools just for fun, so I decided to give it a shot.

I built Metacheck, a simple tool that lets you preview how any link will appear on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Telegram, and other platforms. No API keys, no setup—just paste a link and see the preview.

Why I built this I often ran into issues where social platforms displayed broken or unexpected link previews. Debugging Open Graph meta tags was annoying, so I made a tool to make it easier.

How it works Fetches metadata from any URL Parses Open Graph & Twitter Card tags Shows real-time previews of how the link will look when shared

Try it out: https://metacheck.appstate.co/

47 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread
gigatree
Probably want to have https appended automatically
talljohnson1234
Would push a fix for this, apologies for the inconvenience.
talljohnson1234
a fix has been pushed for this, you can try it now.

I Deeply appreciate the feedback.

pizzly
This is very good. One thing though Telegram (at least the linux version) does not support transparency and makes the transparency red. However, Metacheck shows it as transparent. Having all this on one page is a massive time saver.
imcritic
An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error instance which may provide additional details about the nature of the error.
talljohnson1234
Will look into this issue and push a fix.
imcritic
Seems to work today. Nice service, thank you for it!
gazook89
I like it, and one additional thing (because isn’t there always): It’d be nice if this could be offline to use with local development.
vivzkestrel
An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error instance which may provide additional details about the nature of the error.
toteroni
This is awesome! I can’t believe this never occurred to me- my wife texts me links to her UX all the time to see how her changes look before the changes go to prod.
bryanhogan
Can anyone tell me why WhatsApp seems so random whether it display the social preview image and text or not? E.g. for my own website https://bryanhogan.com/ it shows up in the tool but not in actual chats.
mh-
I've noticed this just as a casual user of WhatsApp, when pasting links into a conversation. I'm not sure what triggers it either, but I can say that it sometimes works for (e.g.) one tweet and not another.
esafak
Maybe it times out depending on the load.
leonhard
I just tried your URL on my WhatsApp and it shows up exactly as in the preview from the tool. My experience is is has to be the full URL with https:// and it only shows the first link, and it sometimes gets confused when you have multiple links in a message and shuffle them around/delete some of them.
ulrischa
A good idea bit the visualisation ist wrong. I.e. the preview image will not be shown correctly
flas9sd
well done.. made me enable my static-sitegens opengraph plugin, add images, rewrite summaries, thanks!

Mastodon preview? :)

marcellus23
Should add support for Apple platforms (i.e. LPLinkView used in Notes/Messages/Mail etc.)
uneekname
Well done! I was recently looking around for something like this and didn't love the options. Bookmarked Metacheck :)
mediumsmart
Very good. I use metatags.io at the moment. Local version would be great.
vladkens
Great idea! Quick and easy link previewing is super useful.
eddiejaoude
Awesome! Love these previews tools! Super useful.

I am creating a free tool to preview the whole social post.