this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Fediverse

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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] 55 points 1 year ago (21 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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 repost bots.

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.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Honestly the fist thing i did after join Lemmy was to block any bot in the setting and filter off all "Reddit something" groups. Just my preference ofk.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These bots merely advertise for reddit. They drown the All feed in zero engagement posts, hiding actual activity.

Experienced users might be able to handle this (although the question persists why one unresponsible bot admin should be able to force thousands of users to take action), but new Lemmy users will not look for a fix. They will leave and never come back.

These bots make Lemmy a worse and shallow copy of reddit. Please stop running them, or make it in instances which do not federate their content to the rest of Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

There's an entire instance for that already - lemmit.online and it sucks. There's no engagement, no interaction. Nobody wants it. Everyone hates it.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you are doing this PLEASE do it on your own instance, so we can just block the instance if we want to and you don't waste someone else's bandwidth

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

Yes, all bots will be running on the same instance, and I will only send mirrored posts to communities if I get explicit approval from the mods.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why isn't the focus aimed at creating more communities over here, that actually add to engagement & interaction...if I want to see what's happening over there, I'll go and take a look... I'm one of those that has bots blocked anyway, so makes little difference to me really..

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not a fan of mirroring Reddit, but I can't stop you. Make sure it is easy to block (such as one bot user posting all posts but not comments) if you don't want to be defedded from a bunch of instances.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it took me less than a minute to block the lemnit bot.

We want to grow beyond just being a Reddit clone/replacement - mirroring active discussions here just feels like stalking an ex on Facebook.

That said, in a previous discussion about about archiving good answers from Reddit, I did suggest that this would be a great use for a wiki that was integrated into Lemmy. Being about to semi-automate the retrieval and formatting would be useful. I think starting new threads for them isn't the way to go.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Interesting initiative!

FYI, there is already https://lemmit.online/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Yeah, I know of lemmit but AFAIK it has the opposite ideas in many cases:

  • It seems to be archiving the most popular instances, not so much the niche ones
  • It is going to mirror posts only, not the discussion.
  • All posts are created by the same bot account, so we lose information about the original content.

I wonder if the dev from lemmit would be interested in being the host of some of the "fediversed" communities, so that we can have comments as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You have it follow whatever instance you want it to follow. There’s a request community that you post to and it’s then added to the queue.

I don’t understand the point of this at all. Might be a fun project for you to do, but nobody wants a bunch of communication set before them that you can’t interact with. It doesn’t help this grow at all.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Love the idea for subreddits I can't find a Lemmy sub for. But I don't want all the rest. I specifically went out of my way to block seeing bots on Lemmy. I don't think there is a way to opt in to seeing just one and even if there was I don't see how I would transition that into only seeing bots for the subs on reddit I'd still want to engage with. I don't understand how you're planning to manage this?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I see what you’re trying to accomplish and congratulate you for trying to make Lemmy a better place, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. As many people here I’ve blocked @[email protected] precisely because it just posts Reddit content and floods my feed, with what is basically spam. Also many people came here just to avoid Reddit and to try and make something better. Sure, when 0.19.0 comes out and people will be able to block instances, lemmings will have a choice if they want to see that instance, but what about new users, or people just checking Lemmy out? Do we really want them to see reposted reddit content? Because they can already do this on reddit. What we need is to stop being so invested in “our ex” and just grow as a community, in a natural way.

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

What if I don't want the content I post to Reddit mirrored on Lemmy? How can individual users opt out?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 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

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Let's say I have a favorite sport and there exists a sub_ named: r/.

Let's also say there already exits a Lemmy community and that community is struggling to get off the ground: [email protected]

I can see a value add if your project directly helps [email protected] get started; but I don't see how it does. If anything wouldn't your project compete with [email protected] and therefore hinder it?

It might be different if your project directly tied r/ to [email protected] but it doesn't.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is silly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What an interesting idea. As this project scales, how would you think of getting around the Reddit API limit problem? This sounds pretty API intensive. I also wonder if Reddit might see this as a TOS violation (particularly when the bot was posting comments) and killing it without even reaching an API limit.

That said, I applauded you for trying to think of creative ways to increase content on Lemmy. One thing in particular that I miss are the questions on niche subreddits, particularly hobby subreddits. You can learn so much just by reading others’ questions. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base and reach to support stuff like that yet, so I like that you’re trying to think of ways to increase that content here.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Isn't this like stealing, guys? No, not from Reddit - from authors. Ask for a consent before mirroring anything, for the love of Fediverse. Cheers!

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