Comment on Discussion: Long-term need for automation tools for moderation

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asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy.

However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments and the amount of API requests will get bigger with the amount of communities the bot will moderate. There are also some problems with rate limiting.

They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who’s going to give you database access? So you’d have to selfhost lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I’d imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments. And even then, maintaining the required SQL query for Lemmy posts is the last thing I want to do.

Another solution would be using Lemmy’s new webhook system, but I don’t know how reliable it will be.

So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:

With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find an instance for it or even self host it yourself.

If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn’t be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn’t, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypu bstructs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.


Not really answering your question, but I’d like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the community (or I guess group) boundaries. They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.

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