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.
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.
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.
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.
If we’re interacting with Reddit anyway what’s the point of using Lemmy
You won’t be interacting with Reddit. It’s the opposite. This tool is to make sure that those on the fediverse do not need Reddit, but those on Reddit start getting exposure to the Fediverse.
you’re literally building a bridge though, isn’t that interacting with reddit?
It’s one-way. You personally don’t interact with anything on Reddit.
A lifeless copy? Why would people want to engage with any of these posts or comments?
I can ask a question but will never get a reply. Why bother asking?
I understand you try to populate communities which lack activity, but this sounds like a recipe for frustration. People might learn it’s useless to comment, which could reduce activity even in actual, man-made posts and comments.
Hey I have a question because this actually interests me and contrary to popular opinionn on this sub I think this idea would work!
Since migrating I’ve found myself wanting to search Reddit dozens of times for content I needed but was too damned pissed to provide them with any traffic.
My input is: it seems that the main beef of most people here is the lack of engagement, making Lemmy seem like a ghost town. Would we be able to comment on the mirrored posts (on Lemmy) thus solving the engagement problem? I’m no techspert but feel like allowing comments underneath mirrored posts for Lemmy, not Reddit would be possible I guess? Or at least some equivalent?
I’m also interested in this because I have my own little feed I’m setting up, and it would be cool to be able to add more content very easily. I don’t really want it to be from Reddit but, just anything different I could do would be nice, and hey if there is something important I’d like to add from there or even just to take notes that’d be nice so I for one would use it.
A bridge that allows us access to reddits content, driving up their traffic (and server costs) - the whole reason for the API changes WHILE refusing them any engagement? Sounds like a win-win to me.
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.
Sorry for the bluntness, but I did not ask for any feedback at all. I am asking very specific questions and this post is mostly to collect information from those who can be interested in using it.
What an awful way to interact with potential users. Accepting constructive criticism leads to better and more successful projects.
A simple, dismissive “Okay thank you” would have sufficed.
Even more so considering most of his ‘users’ will be in that role without consent. OP prefers to pretend his userbase only consists of those who consent. I say for every person who finds this useful, there will be 10 or more who have to take action to shut it off. For some, this action might be to leave Lemmy altogether, backfiring on the intended effect of the tool.
I don’t mind criticism. If you go take a look at my post when I first announced the project you will see that I was accepting all the concerns that people were raising.
What I do mind is being lectured by someone who constructs a bunch of strawmen (“this is just like lemmit!”, “I don’t want this, therefore no one wants this!”) and then when called out for them responds with “they were just giving feedback”.
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)
You lost me at calling the poster a gatekeeper.
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.
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?
Ahead of you: one of the planned items to be worked on is a spam filter. ;)
If 90 accounts over the course of 15 minutes comment on a post in Lemmy, how many notifications would be sent to the person on Reddit? How frequently? Does it honor the reddit feature of unselecting “notify me about followup comments?”
the idea is simply to reply to the comment by replying to the comment, not by notifying the user or sending a DM
This is not implemented yet.
it is an open source project. Instead of playing armchair software architect, feel free to contribute if you worry so much about the implementation.
Python isn’t a language I am deeply familiar with.
I am more interested in Lemmy growing on its own, in a different direction than reddit - rather than trying to copy reddit and its features (and problems).
This looks like it is going to run smack into TOS problems. You can claim that its going to be playing whackamole with instances, if it is sufficiently problematic then lawyers can get involved.
Creating these copies of reddit content makes Lemmy look like a ghost town. Copying content from people who didn’t consent to having their content pushed onto the Fediverse and federated across multiple instances (how would you handle a GDPR request?) leads to other problems.
I’m not worried at all about the implementation. I believe that its goal and means are flawed and counterproductive to the growth of the Fediverse as its own thing and contribute to making Lemmy hollow budding of Reddit.
People point to early Reddit and say “see all the bots and fake accounts that were created early on? That’s a bad thing - we’re better than that.” (How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts)
This project is copying a reddit in content and culture.