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rglullis @communick.news

Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content?

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.

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125 comments

  • Interesting initiative!

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

    • 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.

      • 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.

        • There’s a request community that you post to and it’s then added to the queue.

          But only the posts, while I want to have all of the conversation, comments included.

          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.

          What if I told you that I started working on this precisely because some of the people who were active on /r/emacs wanted to leave reddit but would also like to support those coming with questions? With this tool we can see the content on Lemmy, respond on Lemmy and (WIP) end up notifying the original asker on reddit.

      • Something a bit similar to what lemmit is already doing, but more powerful with your addition of comments: read-only, best-of archives of really old content from popular subs.

        10-5 year old askreddit posts for instance would be interesting blasts from the past to read today. Isn’t there already a ‘best of Reddit’ convention on Reddit itself that resurfaces such content from time to time?

      • Wait, you're intending to use multiple bots, so users have to block multiple spammers?

        • You are fixated on the bots. Don't worry about them. The bot accounts are only needed to have a way to get people on reddit to migrate.

          The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances. It's the admin that sets:

          • which subreddits to pull data from
          • which lemmy communities to push data to
          • what posts from what subreddits to push to.

          What people are failing to understand: the last point is not automated. The idea is not to get the firehose from reddit and unleash it on Lemmy. The idea is mostly to bring some automation to the process that I've been doing on all the different lemmy communities already where I was (a) browsing reddit just to seed content here and (b) sending DMs to people on reddit to let them know about the lemmy alternative.

          Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any "fediverser" instance.

          • The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances.

            I agree that technically the person using the bots is to blame, while I only ever see the bots, and never a person behind them. I don't see what that changes about their behaviour though. You clarified the bots are not acting autonomously, a human decides how much they spam. I still have a problem with too much spam.

            Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any “fediverser” instance.

            How can you be so sure? We have precedent of bots making 800k posts per month. Apparently, bot admins exist who use these tools indiscriminately. Numbers go up, I guess.

            What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?

            • What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?

              It's free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it. But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit's API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests and (b) all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.

              • It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it.

                Ok, so your previous assurances were completely unfounded. Maybe even worse, your reluctance to see how your tool could be misused gives little hope you would take steps to prevent that.

                all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.

                It's still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot, or one instance. And some will not know how to, and leave Lemmy instead, which is exactly the opposite from your intent. Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse. Make the newsletter opt-in. Don't force people to opt-out. Even more so since for each user who might enjoy that service, many more will suffer from it.

                Also, since you just clarified it's free software and you have no power to prevent abuse, "all the bots are in the same instance" is nothing but a hope. From my point of view, it does not matter so much anyways. More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.

                But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests

                Since we already have a solid problem with spam bots, this does not seem to deter effectively. It's strange but apparently it's what people do with these bots.

                • It’s still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot,

                  No, it's an action that an instance admin can take quite easily.

                  Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse.

                  No. That completely destroys the intent of having a tool that is meant to bootstrap communities.

                  More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.

                  You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is "spam". We have bots like @L4s@lemmy.world that take RSS feeds from tech sites and post them to relevant communities and they seem to be well received. The posts are interesting get upvoted, the ones that are not get downvoted. Do you think that these bots should be considered "spammers"?

                  Let's leave at this: if you ever see any flood of content coming from alien.top, then I'll have no qualms in revising the policies and making adjustments to the system. But for now your arguments are inching closer and closer to concern trolling.

125 comments