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Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content? (communick.news)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 [email protected] or [email protected] .
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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you going to foot the bill for the Reddit API fees?

Have you considered what you will do if Reddit cuts you off? IANAL, but it's fairly clear from the TOS that they will likely shut you down.

Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement:

license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content;

modify, prepare derivative works of, disassemble, decompile, or reverse engineer any part of the Services or Content; or

access the Services or Content in order to build a similar or competitive website, product, or service, except as permitted under any Additional Terms (as defined below).

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2023

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am not mirroring all of reddit, and the idea is that each "fediverser" instance pulls only enough data to stay under the 600 requests/ 10 minutes, which is free.

If they decide to go after these fediverser instances, they will have to play whack-a-mole, because anyone can get new keys and start anew.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It'll be easy enough for them to block fediverser/0.1.0 user-agents, so perhaps that's not a safe default value since it's an easy target.

I'll be honest, I saw a previous post of yours and was sceptical, but I think based on the idea, you've taken the best steps to make this a reality. Having the communities be part of instances where they fit in and can be maintained by moderators who care about the subjects is a challenge, but it does set it up for longer success.

As others have pointed out, there's still an imbalance where people don't realize they're replying to shadow accounts (like this for example). Maybe a good solution would be to DM someone who replies to a comment by one of the bot accounts explaining what's going on. Maybe asking the person who commented to reach out to the user on Reddit directly, and asking them to join the Fediverse would be a good solution and would bring in the human element to the process. This would avoid you having to build that feature (and likely appear to be a spammer) which might have a higher conversion ratio.

I'm not sure if you have a plan for it, but somehow allowing the Reddit user to take over the shadow account would probably achieve your goal of getting more people to convert, and would be a benefit to niche instances looking to grow their organic members. However you do this, it should be seamless to the new member, with the minimal number of hurdles.

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I really like the idea of getting the people already on Lemmy involved in the process of "fediversing" the people. I will definitely try to find a way to work this into the tool.