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.
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.
Fair enough. One of the design reasons that I am working from a separate instance for the bots is that it makes it easy for admins to block in case they are worried about being flooded.
If anything, this is just going to make Lemmy look more dead.
Folks browsing All to get a sense of what content exists on the instance they’re using are going to be flooded with mirrored Reddit content that they can’t really interact with.
It’s an interesting idea, but I think it’s also a bad idea.
Only if someone set this up to mirror some large subreddit, which would be frankly stupid: the service still requires a reddit API key and they would quickly go over the limits of the free tier if they pulled data from the larger subs, also instances that would be flooding other communities would quickly be banned.
This is why I am being very careful about setting this up. I am not going to set these bots to any community unless I get explicit approval from the admins and mods, and I am not going to create mirrors from any subreddit with more than 250k subscribers.
You missed my point.
It’s going to make Lemmy seem dead because the ghost-comments aren’t something someone can really reply to and get a response, like you can with Lemmy today. At best people would be commenting to the void.
Honestly, I like this idea, just because it means I could block your instance in my app and instantly filter out that kind of content, just like how someone can block lemmynsfw to get rid of almost all porn.
I hope this feature becomes included in all views soon. Some apps support it, others do not. Web view does not, AFAIK.
Even then, I think it’s concerning. Yes, advanced users have tools to deal with the problem. But not everyone is an advanced user. Most people will have to rely on their instance admin to take care of instance blocking.
We should consider the experience of newcomers, especially since the intent of this bot seems to be to increase activity in niche communities. Newcomers are the people who can increase activity. We should aim to make Lemmy more welcoming and interesting for them, out of the box, not expect them to tweak their settings to have a bearable experience.
That’s the spirit!