I’ve posted before about my fediverser project, and I am now looking to see who is interested in participating.
The short description is that it does the following:
- it runs a lemmy instance which will be the home of bots that mirror accounts on reddit.
- The admin of this instance can choose what subreddits are going to be monitored from this instance. Let’s say that these are the “source” communities.
- For these selected subreddits, the admin can define where the posts from these subreddits should be posted in the other lemmy instances. We can, e.g, map posts from /r/selfhosted to !main@selfhosted.forum or !selfhosted@lemmy.world .
- You can choose whether to mirror the posts only or the whole thread with comments from reddit. Each of these will be authored by the account that mirrors the original reddit user.
- (WIP, optional) responses to the reddit mirror accounts will create a comment on reddit with a link to original lemmy thread.
So, now I finally got to deploy the first lemmy fediversed instance, and I’d like to know the following:
- which subreddits you still follow but would like to bring to the fediverse?
- For instance admins and community mods, what communities you would like to be the destination of the mirror posts, and would you be interested in having the posts only or the whole thread?
Bear in mind that this is NOT advised to be done for the bigger subs. The idea here is not to create a huge army of bots and overwhelm the fediverse, but mostly to create a migration path to those who rely on the more niche subreddits.
aaaa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion. We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying, and they just flood the feed with posts that people won’t engage with.
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post. Nobody wants to have a discussion about a hackernews or slashdot post. If Lemmy just looks like a place to mirror Reddit content, people will see that and just go to Reddit and engage directly.
We need more people posting to Lemmy. If this is just a place for bots to have discussions with themselves, nobody will stay here very long.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper. First, this is not the goal of this tool. The idea is eventually to have mirror accounts ends to work as proxys to allow for two-way bridges. Second, a lot of people know that they are not with reddit, but when they have come to lemmy they bounced back because they couldn’t find the content they were used to.
Agree, but If we follow the rule of 90/9/1 for lurkers/commenters/posters, this means that we can bring 90% of reddit’s userbase to the fediverse just by bringing the content here. The posters and commenters will eventually follow.
The logic is simple: unless I start breaking into people’s phones and computers, I can not force people them to post to Lemmy, but I can get their content here. A tool like this can help the intolerant minority to drive the behavior of the majority.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If we’re interacting with Reddit anyway what’s the point of using Lemmy
aaaa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Okay not precisely, but we have a bot (I think it’s the one at smeargle.fans) that reposts Reddit threads and replicates all of their comments, which nobody engages with
Well that term just doesn’t apply. I’m not saying “Real Lemmy users avoid anything to do with Reddit” or anything along those lines. You asked for feedback, and I gave you my honest criticism of it.
I understand that you found a project that sounds fun to make, and it probably will be. This is what we engineers do, we get excited to build things that seem to have clever technical answers. However in my past few months on Lemmy, I have seen these ideas, and have seen the way they tend to work out so far.
The logic may be simple, but human psychology is rarely as simple as engineers wish it could be.
Feel free to build your project. All aspiring engineers should make things that they want to make. But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong. Not all solutions end up working out the way you hope, and that’s part of the engineering life. And based on prior experience, this one is likely to get the same treatment that the other repost bots get.
9point6@lemmy.world 1 year ago
lemmit.online did this and was recently defederated, partially because the one admin wasn’t able to prevent the volume of posts being generated from ending up filled with spam.
There’s a few HN bots too, but unfortunately the posts never get much engagement here, so I have to go through to HN to read some discussion about it (which I will do, but a much bigger proportion of people just don’t appear to engage with mirrored content here)
elbarto777@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You lost me at calling the poster a gatekeeper.
Spzi@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Two examples:
I wonder if the time people had to spend for removing their spam from their feed already surpasses the time the developers have spent setting them up. I know, I know, you intend your bot to be different, so not ‘precisely’ that, but I’m worried the result might be the same. Lots of posts with zero engagement, which give people the impression Lemmy consists of bot posts, ultimately driving user engagement down.
shagie@programming.dev 1 year ago
You do realize how fast this would be used to spam users on Reddit and then how absurdly quickly it would result in the API keys getting restricted?
CoconutGirl@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Precisely, a lot of us left that horrible place to escape all the rampant transphobia and persecution they have over there. We don’t need their kind of “content” mirrored here. My first thing I’m going to do when they allow us to block instances is to immediately block those that have mostly spambots.
I think Lemmy as a whole should forbid any links from Reddit just protect everyone here. Is it censorship? Yes, but it’s for a good cause.