this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Meet Leddit, a bot that crossposts Reddit threads - and their comments - to the Fediverse (github.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Happy July 1st! Starting today, free third-party Reddit apps will no longer be usable, but as much as we don't want to admit it, some of us still miss the content on Reddit, and it can be hard to resist the "just browse Old Reddit with an adblocker" loophole. Before we get into yet another "crossposting bots on the Fediverse" debate, here's a quick summary of what this bot is and is not intended to do:

Intended Not intended
Allow users to consolidate their link aggregation and discussion feeds onto an open-source, non-proprietary site "Increase activity" in a community by compensating for the lack of real users
Encourage ex-Redditors to spend more time on the Threadiverse when they are able to access their favorite content here Serve as a "bridge" between Reddit and the Fediverse. Threads are archives and messages will not be synced back to Reddit
Preserve thoughtful, valuable and informative content, and make them accessible without a privacy-hostile corporate platform

(Please don't leave comments on the Reddit archive threads on the demo instance.)

Leddit is a fork of lemmit.online and does not use the Reddit API at all. Unlike lemmit.online which is a public service, Leddit is meant to be self-hosted on a personal instance as syncing comments is a very slow process that will get rate-limited on a normal instance.

Based on my demo instance that syncs posts and comments from two subreddits with a combined subscriber count of about 1 million, this takes about the same amount of time that lemmit.online takes to sync only posts from more than 100 subreddits.

An example of a thread that is automatically created and updated by Leddit can be seen here. The header message and position can be customized. Leddit preserves the comment thread's structure and identifies the OP in the comments.

For shorter threads, all comments are synced, but comments in longer threads that are hidden below "show more comments" are not synced as they consume additional requests to Reddit with very little content in return.

If there's interest, I can also add a feature that allows the bot to archive entire subreddits instead of retrieving the newest posts. Please feel free to ask for support to set up your personal bot and instance in the Leddit Lounge community.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can write please just leave reddit content on Reddit. We don't need unapproved copies of people's posts here. If they want to come to lemmy and post, that's good, but copying their posts here without consent is not good.

Don't reddit our lemmy, keep that trash in reddit

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

Don’t Reddit our lemmy keep that trash in Reddit

Agreed. Smaller communities here remind me of Reddit after Digg imploded. Then of course it was years of decline into the shitshow it became.

I hope Lemmy becomes more popular but never as big as Reddit. That only brought in thoughts of exploiting the site for money.

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

My only question... Is it easy to block?

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

Yes, you can block any account (bot or real).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So... lemmy.world just defederated lemmit.online because of all the Reddit cross post spam... Will this create a whole bunch of personal instances whose Reddit scrapings will show up in the feeds, meaning the admin of lemmy.world will now have a whole bunch of personal instances they have to watch for and defederate from individually, and ongoing?

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

This just means that users on lemmy.world will see nothing from lemmit.online. Personally I blocked the main bot that was making all the posts so I at least don't see all the spam from it.

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

i am having a difficult time really understanding the federation architecture. i felt like i was doing pretty well with it... until i read your post.

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

For a simple explanation, imagine instances as servers. Servers can host the lemmy code, think of it like an opensource reddit. Instances can connect and interact with each other when they federate and they can defederate (break the connection).

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

i am having a difficult time really understanding the federation architecture. i felt like i was doing pretty well with it... until i read your post.

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

Stolen from another user:

Reddit sucks. Let's make our own reddit with blackjack and hookers.

Result: there are now 15 competing reddit knockoffs. Each one is small and lonely.

Solution: let the reddit knockoffs talk to each other. This solves the problem of a fractured userbase. This was always reddit's strength: disparate communities united, on the same site. This size and diversity meant there was a high likelihood of someone who knows what they're talking about or someone with a unique perspective stumbling across the post and chiming in.

By understanding the motivation, hopefully the concept of "Federation" makes more sense.

▫️▫️▫️

My own explanation: you can find a message board for pretty much anything somewhere on the internet, but you’d have to go to a different website for each message board you’re interested in separately - they can’t talk to each other. What Reddit did was create message boards (subreddits) that could interact with each other on the same site. The fediverse is the equivalent of Reddit.com. Communities are the subreddits.

I think the complicated bit are the instances - Reddit doesn’t have those. Instances are like servers. You need to join an instance to access the fediverse. It doesn’t matter which instance you register to unless you’re really interested in the alt-right (for example). A couple of alt-right instances have been defederated because they’re pretty hateful. They have splinted off and can make their own message boards/communities/subreddits but you can’t see or interact with them unless you join that instance separately. Unless whatever instance you’ve registered to defederates (unlikely if you’re in a mainstream one like lemmy.world) you don’t need to worry about instances or join a second one.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

a bot that crossposts Reddit threads - and their comments - to the Fediverse

Why?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Explained in the post. A very common complaint I see in the migration discussions is "my hobby's community isn't on the Fediverse/doesn't have an active community like Reddit so I still have to visit Reddit". Unless they intend to participate in that Reddit community (which most users don't), they can bring their community's knowledge here instead of giving Reddit more traffic.

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

We survived for decades without Reddit and we will survive without it in the future. There’s no shame in checking up on small subs there and a community here. And if there isn’t a community here yet. We can make one.

The problem with a copybot, aside from the potential legality, is that all the threads here will be static/stale. There is no reason to interact with them here as the comms are one way.

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

Archiving publicly available content is not illegal, otherwise sites like archive.org would have been taken down ages ago.

Users are where the content is, and most people don't have the energy to support a growing website that lacks content when another website that is full of content exists. Reddit's advantage was that people only needed one account on one website to see content related to diverse interests. Mirroring Reddit content (while being transparent about the fact that the content is mirrored) can help the Threadiverse gain this advantage and make it easier to retain users who will eventually contribute to the Threadiverse.

(In Reddit's early days, it was full of Digg crossposts too.)

The purpose of the bot is to make Reddit's content accessible without being forced to use a corporate platform. The value Reddit has, in my opinion, is the wealth of knowledge that is stored there. The content is often stale, but most of us have experienced finding a solution to a problem from a years-old Reddit thread. If you used Reddit for social interactions, this bot is not the solution for you.

Is the body of the post not appearing on certain apps or something? There is a summary that explains the bot's purpose in the post body.

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

That sounds like a nuisance. Maybe we could have one instance whose only job is to collect scraped Reddit data, but it shouldn’t have any ties to Lemmy instances where actual users want to post content.

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

That's exactly what https://lemmit.online is. Just one bot to block, or one instance to defederate from. It doesn't post anywhere else, so interested users can just request a subreddit on there, and follow what they want.

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

I keep blocking every community and bot I find doing this.

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

This has a lot of potential, very interesting

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

This is an interesting idea, I might have to try and spin up a private instance. Do you know if there's a better way to do that then only allowing local connections?

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

You can spin up a regular instance, check "Close signups" and uncheck "Enable federation" in your admin settings, which will make your instance a private forum that is accessible from the internet.

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

Thank you, I appreciate the help.

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

Do we really need that much dirt brought through here? I mean, the carpets were just installed. Can’t we wait before we let all that mess through here?

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

If you're copying people's comments without their consent, without their ability to delete them because it's too resource intensive, that's a GDPR issue.

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

Can’t wait to read all those Ai bot posts /s. I’m good thanks.