re: Fediverser Network - We should immediately turn off the automatic posts, and keep it off until the bidirectionality is implemented

I think it's a cool idea, and it could be the best way to help users on Reddit learn about Lemmy and migrate over.

I have some concerns though

What I like:

If you go to communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, you can see what I mean. Lemmy commenters are generally more helpful, more detailed, and get to the posts a lot faster than Reddit users.

If I understand correctly, once the network is implemented:

Reddit user signs up on Fediverser
Reddit user posts on a subreddit that has a Lemmy equivalent
Post is crossposted to Lemmy
When a Lemmy user replies to the post, that comment is reposted by a bot on Reddit

Users on the Reddit post will:

learn about Lemmy
see the good quality reply (if the reply is good, Reddit mods won't ban the bot)
get a direct link to a community/instance relevant to them

Users in the Lemmy community will

get more content from people that are already curious about Lemmy

That would be really cool!

HOWEVER

Right now, the network isn't fully implemented. Instead, in communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, there is a flood of ALL content that is posted in the respective subreddit.

This is bad because:

Lemmy users don't know that no human will see their replies, and the helpful Lemmy users are just talking to a wall. This will make them... less helpful in the future
Because ALL content is being mirrored, this spams out the actual Lemmy posts
Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored. I only noticed on the datahoarder community, but there are more sensitive subreddits where I would want control over where it is posted. I would also need a way to delete the content from Lemmy, and right now the users can't do that.

Proposed fixes

Don't mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up. There is already an incentive for signing up (more replies, better replies, better reach). If a user doesn't sign up, their post will not be mirrored, and they will not get the benefit.
If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly (ex. from Modmail). Encourage them to talk to their communities before deciding
Any automated post NEEDS a note saying so
- Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an "about" page for Fediverser
- Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an "about" page for Fediverser, and a link to some "what is lemmy"/"new to lemmy" article.
If it's not being implemented like the above, maybe change it up to consider the points about user control

As it is, reposting everything is damaging to Lemmy and potentially harmful to Reddit users that don't know their stuff is being mirrored.

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44 comments

I'm really glad to see that people are a lot more accepting of the project compared to when I first announced it, and believe me when I say that I am taking a lot of everyone's feedback in consideration. Initially I was set on having this a simple tool to get users from reddit into Lemmy, so I was thinking that having bi-directional communication would actually be counter to the project's goals and I thought that it would be better to simply send a DM to the users on reddit with a link to the Lemmy post and promoting the join-lemmy website. I changed my mind on this regard and now I see it this hard-nosed approach would likely just be treated as spam by Reddit users and would turn them away or flagging the bot.
However, I am still not convinced that the automated posts are a bad thing. To support my argument:
Having the content from niche communities on Lemmy means that most people can leave Reddit right away. I keep reminding people about the 90/9/1 rule of social media because it's important to keep in mind that the majority of any social network is made of lurkers, not of active participants, and at the same time a good part of these active participants go where their audience is.
Lots of people are saying "once people realize they are talking with bots, they will stop posting". The data I am seeing suggests that not to be the case. Participation in the mirrored communities is growing in relation to some (relatively big for Lemmy standards) communities on lemmy.world. The important thing to realize is (again) the 90/9/1 rule. A community that has 100 organic subscribers and zero bots will see maybe 1 post per day and 10 comments. A community with 100 organic subscribers and 1000 bots will see 10-20 posts per days and hundreds of comments, some of which will be happening between organic users who would never had interacted if the mirrored post was not there in the first place.
Content is king. Having the content mirrored on the Lemmy instances increases the chances of making it visible on the search engines. Even if the mirrored communities were nothing but "absolute ghost towns" as some of the critics have called it, the fact that I can search for something directly on Lemmy without having to go to Reddit is a huge plus, for me.
Related to the point above: having the mirrors running now are also a hedge against the possibility of Reddit further closing down their API.
There really isn't a difference in behavior from "users on Reddit" and "users on Lemmy". While I certainly agree that really large communities will have a different user base compared to the niche ones, I find it hard to believe that the average subscriber of /r/datahoarder will behave differently from the average !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum Lemmy "organic" subscriber. And even if these differences exist they will disappear as Lemmy (hopefully) grows.
Regarding "Reddit users have no control over the mirror". I'd argue that they do have a way to delete the content from Lemmy and it's quite simple. Any user that has been mirrored by alien.top needs to do the following:
Sign up via the portal to take over the bot account.
Login to the instance using the password provided.
Delete all their posts.
Re: "proposed fixes".
Don’t mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up.
This is actually impossible to do. Once a user signs up to the mirror instance, they take over the bot account and I can no longer post on their behalf.
If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly.
For all intents and purposes, we should assume that mods on Reddit are aligned with Reddit. The last thing I want to do is to ask for their permission to do anything.
Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an “about” page for Fediverser
There is a reason that I am not going to alter the content of any Reddit post, because I am working with the assumption that any bot user will eventually become a organic account. I am planning though to make the user profile page be more informative, though.
Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an “about” page for Fediverser, and a link to some “what is lemmy”/“new to lemmy” article.
Yes, this is my plan, but the hardest part (UX-wise) is figuring out a way to post the content on reddit in a way that seems natural without a bunch of "spammy" content around it.
- Regarding “Reddit users have no control over the mirror”. I’d argue that they do have a way to delete the content from Lemmy and it’s quite simple. Any user that has been mirrored by alien.top needs to do the following:
  When Google and company do "opt-out" features that people are forced into using unless they manually opt-out (usually with long and convoluted procedures that aren't front and centre in the docs), they are (rightly) excoriated for it.
  Thankfully you don't have long and convoluted procedures to opt out…
  Sign up via the portal to take over the bot account.
  Login to the instance using the password provided.
  Delete all their posts.
  … Oops.
  Rethink this if you don't want really serious backlash. This is almost the textbook case of how not to do features.
  
  Does the archive team ask permission from users before crawling data?
  If you put a website and don't set up a robots.txt file, does it still get indexed by Google? IOW, isn't it "opt-out"?
  If you ever posted a question on StackOverflow, did you have to give explicit permission to have your data pushed to their data exports? Can you ask to have it removed?
  Google gets (rightfully) a ton of shit when they violate users privacy. What "privacy" is being violated here, when the data is on a public network and it can be crawled even without access to the API?
  
  "Other people do this obnoxious thing so it's OK if we do this obnoxious thing" isn't the moral killing point you seem to think it is.
  
  What is exactly "obnoxious" about search engines crawling public data?
  
  (Incidentally, my issue is the other direction. I don't want my content over on Reddit. I don't have a Reddit account. I've never had a Reddit account. I don't ever want to have a Reddit account. And, get this, I don't want my stuff showing up on Reddit.)
  
  Oh, no worries about that! The only part that is opt-out is on the reddit -> lemmy mirror. I will only be able to do two-way communication if there is a proper authorization from the user. :)
  
  Then perhaps make the opt-out process better and easier? Requiring people who want to opt out to sign into a completely different service and then manually delete messages fully qualifies as "obnoxious".
  
  The biggest problem I see right now is with deleted and removed content.
  Generally there is a reason for why someone would want to delete/remove something on Reddit.
  If someone posts something that should be removed (spam, illegal content, hateful content), it shouldn't stay mirrored here. If someone deletes a post/comment on Reddit (they're getting harassed, they accidentally shared personal info, stalkers), it shouldn't stay mirrored here.
  A chunk of my moderation experience is from a university subreddit where stuff like that DOES happen, putting a real person at risk.
  I like this idea and want it to succeed, and this is a concern for me. I don't know about the legality/liability, but I think even Google updates their caches when stuff is deleted and tools like ceddit/removeddit/reveddit don't let you see stuff that's deleted by the user.
  
  This is a different problem than requiring opt-in to have the mirror started and I fully sympathize. The technical challenge for this is mostly the lack of bandwidth to periodically check for all the posts that ended up being mirrored. To illustrate, alien.top alone already has pushed over 1M comments since it started running a couple of months ago.
  It's not an insurmountable problem, and I think that it's one that could be solved client-side - e.g, a modified Lemmy client could identify mirror posts and comments and check the original reddit link - or worst-case scenario we could check every day for changes in some percentage of past comments every day to see if there is anything that needs to be updated.
- Hi. With the utmost courtesy and respect: please look at the vote counts and feedback here.
  At the least, in anything like its current form, we fediverse people don't want this.
  If people want to be on reddit, they can be. If they want their niche community on that site, they're allowed. Trying to bridge content between sites that are potentially even antagonistic toward one another is not a good plan, no matter how virtuous your intentions.
  
  Not that vote count is a good measure of feedback, but the votes are more favorable for my comments than the ones saying "I don't want this" or "I don't like this", so...
  In any case, one of the greatest things about the fediverse is that the "fediverse people" can decide for themselves. Don't like mirrored content? Don't follow it. Don't like mirrored instances, block them. There is absolutely nothing being forced on you, and those that are complaining about "flooding content" are usually browsing through "all", to which there isn't much to say besides "I can not fix stupid."

44 comments