POLL: Should we allow content migration bots?

from a 'get as much content as possible' angle bots are good but i think there's a big risk of them drowning out actual posters which really takes away a lot of the fun of posting and making it feel like an archive rather than an active community.
- Totally agree. IMO they have a limited use to get initial content seeded and then it's over to actual members of the community to continue and develop. Other instances are focusing more on the "archive" aspect so we should let them do that.
- Agreed. I think organic growth is better than essentially being nothing better than an RSS feed that copies content from another site because otherwise what's the point when I might as well go to the original source in the first place. I want this community to be separate and grow into its niche on its own.
- For setup communities i agree, but for communities with few people right now it can be a very large undertaking to keep them alive manually, and the boost of content can really help growth for migrating communities

I think we should not have them or else Lemmy will only be known as the platform that copies from others. Also there could be legal issues when the platform the content is copied from has an ill-minded CEO who wants to shutdown others.
- I do you think there are grounds for attacking Lemmy or an instance for hosting all/some of reddit's user generated content?
  
  from a legal standpoint I can't see how there is, reddit doesn't own any of the content it serves. it's terms of service do require they give the right for them to display it, but not ownership of the content

Categorically no. The point of lemmy isn't to be a content farm. It's to be a community where people respect each other. How can you respect anything or anyone while stealing content?
In fact I would go the other way and start banning people that are posting content they don't explicitly have permission to post. In this day and age where more people are seeking to monetize sharing nudes, we need to protect the few free content creators we have left, whether on this platform or the former one.
Fuck people and bots that steal nudes.
- That's a fair point but what about artwork? For example hentai. Are we really expecting only OC content to appear on Lemmy? I don't think that's realistic at all..
  
  I would argue that we're no more entitled to post people's hentai artwork as we are their nudes. More so in fact, it can take days to create hentai, only for it to be posted here with no mechanism for the original author to request it taken down.
  If people really want to see other people's hentai posted here, why not link to it? I'm pretty sure the original authors would appreciate that. Plus if they see Lemmy generating traffic, maybe they'll join up and post stuff here directly.
- This. 100% this
- I don't agree that a bot would steal content. Content creators need exposure and they post for free on Reddit, so why wouldn't they want the same here?
- Wish there was gold to give you.

I don't like reposts in general and certainly not automated bots.
Lemmit is certainly useful for us who don't want to visit Reddit but don't want to miss on certain content, but that's what that instance is for. So keep the bots to instances like that, and the rest of Lemmy as free of bots as possible.

I think that would be super beneficial to help jumpstart this site. Maybe at some point communities can do it the other way around, so that the „main“ branch of the community is on lemmy and can port over the follower of reddit

I would prefer it if bots only reposted approximately 10-40% of the content that receives the most votes.

If something like that should be allowed, I think it should be marked with a tag/flag/flair (if that's a thing on Lemmy) so that you can easily filter them out if you want to.
- There is a setting on an account that says it's a bot account and I think I remember seeing it mentioned after the username in a similar way to how nsfw posts are flagged.

I voted no. My biggest concern is that Reddit's legal team would try to take the instance down and then we would have to start all over on a different instance.
- Reddit doesn't own that content, individual posters do. They do grant Reddit a license to display it to others (in the terms of service nobody reads) but they are still the legal owners of their posts (assuming we're talking about OC)
- An instance dedicated for NSFW replication off Reddit could be a workaround. Then at least if Reddit tries to sue it wouldn't effect this instance's native content.
  
  Totally agree, great idea.
  
  The problem that I see with that, is that these bots are mostly being used for kickstarting/seeding communities that want to turn the bots off and become a full user active sub later. Essentially it's a way to solve the chicken and egg problem of attracting users to generate content by having good content
  
  It is not as if an instance is a legally distinct entity.

I vote no, subscribing would be better

As others have said, I think it makes sense to have the top 40% of posts of all time, or something like that, reposted. As a mod for several subs here, those bots would help a lot when seeding content, and could even help me crank out posts of new, relevant content in the future.
I don't think it's unreasonable for the amount of posts a bot can make a day to be limited. Or maybe a time frame that we allow content migration en mass like x date to x date, theb bot posting is limited.

If we leave the reposting to lemmit, people can easily opt out from it showing up on their All feeds by blocking the singular bot that does all the posts, whereas if we allow it here people would need to individually block each bot.
However, Lemmit only reposts Reddit, there is at least one bot here that reposts one of the rule34 boorus, and I'm sure other sites are to follow. Those seem to be the real issues here.
- Absolutely. I'm on side of not allowing or at least bot only communities. If we mix bots and real users content with each other, we fucked up. With bot only communities, we still going to have a chance to block those communities.
  Not easy as blocking one user but better than never.

For what it's worth, as the creator of lemmit.online, I totally understand people not wanting to see automated content bots. I, for one, wouldn't want to see them mixed with regular content. That is why I made sure to put it on its own instance, and not allow any users - so there would be minimal harm if a server would decide to defederate.
And yes, NSFW content is allowed on my server :). For more answers, see this FAQ post. For more questions, please post them in that comment thread there.
- Hi. Can you reach me via matrix? We can do a collaboration. My address is @xaeg:matrix.org

Thanks for the notification of this post @yay@lemmynsfw.com.
I have created a script that would take the top (user-selectable) 0-1000 posts of a subreddit and post them to a Lemmy community. My plan was then to implement a vote threshold so that posts older than 48 hours and above a user-defined karma limit would be pulled in each time it was run - however the account login no longer works so I assume it and its posts were purged, so I'm here instead!
I do think that in order to get people engaged, we need content to draw them in. I noticed that once I'd posted 50 items across I immediately started getting subscribers to the community.
What I don't think is right is using bots to just replicate all the content on Reddit. As a moderator of several subs, a lot of content gets removed through moderation (hence the 48 hour limit), and a lot of junk gets through but just doesn't get upvoted (resulting in the karma threshold). Avoiding the "rubbish" would be good.
My view is that using bots/scripts to seed communities means we can kick start them into life much more quickly, and then when a critical mass of users is reached they become irrelevant and can be disabled. I don't think we're here to just copy and paste from Reddit - otherwise surely you'd just go there instead.
Edit: Just to comment on the poll itself. I don't think "bot only" communities make sense - we're not here to just copy Reddit... lemmit.online can do that. I believe we should allow bots to seed, and then let actual users take over. Unfortunately there isn't an explicit option for that so I just went with "Yes".

How tf sum of 69, 64, 33 can be 120? Am I missing something?
- Yeah, and the whole thing add up to 138.33% on yours. I see something more sane:

I think it's scummy to rip off other peoples content so your site has more content. It also invites legal copyright issues. Strongly against.
Right now it's not even possible to let you guys know of a copyright violation. Like at least an email address... regardless of botted content you really should look out for that.

I am voting a no, and have been blocking bots whenever I see them.
I understand trying to jumpstart communities, however I feel bots should be limited to 1 post every 6-12 hours if allowed at all. And honestly, I think bots reduce the quality of a community regardless, especially if you are basing it off metrics on Reddit, where the top posts in many subreddits aren't necessarily the the nicest pictures, just the ones with the most professional setup and money to burn on bots upvoting them for exposure.

Sorry i wanted to add one more thing: it would be really nice if there was a way to do this without flooding new... as i think the people doing this dont really want to impact other communities (I just realized this is an issue, as i started porting content before realizing)
One way we could try to minimize impact ( which is what im going to do for now) is ask anyone porting content to do it in off hours (like midnight EST would cover all of US and most of europe ?)

Does lemmit.online support NSFW communities and subreddits?
- I guess yes. Even if it doesn't, supporting ones will show up soon probably.
  
  Even as NSFW subs become unavailable via API at the end of the month?

So long as it doesn't overload and weigh down the instance, communities should be allowed to allow migration bots.
That poll seems kind of biased to only have 1 NO, but 2 YESs. The yes votes are split.
- I was worried about it splitting the votes too, but I think they are just using it as info gathering not necessarily a whichever wins goes

I think content import should be a thing across Lemmy, most users moving over have tons of content they've posted on Reddit, and having an easy way to bring that here would be great. But Lemmy isn't really built to handle bulk imports yet, if you simply hit the API of your instance it will flood /New on every instance that's indexed whatever sublemmy is being imported, and it will severely disrupt the use of the sub for a while. If content could be backfilled directly to the database with earlier timestamps it could be done smoothly, though.

I feel a little yes, but mostly no. I'd LOVE a bot that'd scrape r/SpaceX content for example, because I want to be cold turkey on reddit, but I miss that community so much. But ultimately it's counter productive to organic growth.

The issue I have is various communities on reddit are disrupting that platform ( with good reason ) . We could end up mirror a bunch of just crap if that happens with one of the communities we are mirroring. We would then be using up server resources to host garbage. It might just be better to sub to those communities that are mirroring.
- I'm seeing a lot of bots archiving imgur links, too. The content was removed ages ago, it's just a dead link.
  
  right and do we want just a bunch of dead links? I think not.
  
  Honestly I think that's some botters being a bit lazy... like anyone whose been in these communities should know that all imgur links are dead now, there should just be a line exlucing those from their pool of links to pull from

Can't vote. There's a recurring error that says: "Timeout, please try again."

I the past few days have been working on a quick c# app to simply pull the last 24 hour posts on a subreddit, and allow me to click a button to upload them individually here to kickstart a community to replace the subreddit. I think like what alot of people are saying these tools can help seed communities and boost engagement. i think in the long term we should start to block these tools, but i dont think the time is yet. This is still a new group, and while some communities on this instance are sizable, others are way to small to be sustainable yet :/
Also If we could hopefully prevent the massive amount of content on reddit from disapearing, and give a place to preserve that that would definitly be amazing. although thats easy for me to say as the one who isnt hosting the files :/ (although for some communities the actual data for that isnt that significant, and since lemmy doesnt support galleries yet, galleries are still hosted offsite)
Anyway thanks so much for the work you all are doing, I appreciate that you all went out of your way to enable communities and users to migrate off of reddit and hopefully to help form a better platform.
- Hmm I was thinking of making the same. Some communities are just dead till they get bootstrapped with some little spam and then ppl feel encouraged to participate.
  
  Someone else here had a smarter idea honestly of haveing a 48 hour buffer and using the reddit apis up vote ratio, and total karma to filter out alot of the spam. Honestly when I built this I had missed that part of the api, so I'm probably going to rework it in a bit

As for different communities, people who don't want to see bots can disable them in the user settings, so the communities wouldn't change for them. I don't see the point in having bot communities.
- I'm assuming you're not thinking about the moderation side.
  
  No, I assume that the bots would only repost the most highly voted content. If a bot were to post everything, including low-quality content, the moderators could simply ban it.

As for having the bots in another instance, people are going to go to the instance with the most content, and that would be the bot instance. Do we really want to drive the users away?

On grounds of NSFW communities, we have to get the bots. People don't come to this page to look at 14 posts on each board. They come to them for the same reason they come to the reddit versions of these subs.
Aren't we trying to compete here? Aren't we trying to show the refugees a good time? We ought bot.

I voted for bot-specific communities, but I honestly think subscribing to them on other instances is better. It's what I've been doing already.
Also, that other comment's idea about banning anything but OC, that's the worst idea I've ever read. At that point, you may as well just declare this an anti-2D instance, because adult art communities will never survive under such draconian rules. Even on Reddit, my sub only got about one OC post a month, and I doubt that one regular user has moved here.

Absolutely yes, of course.

to moderate a community bots are helpfull and this would be great. There also should be a posting limit per hour / day so we don't flood everything.
Automatic "sync" a subreddit to lemmy is okay, but depends on the content. There are enough user who don't want to see their content on other platforms. And we don't want to anger these user. Also mark / link the original poster would be great to appriciate him. Or ask if we can post the content here too or ask if they wanna join and post their stuff directly here
User will also follow the community with most posts. If there are 10 same communities on different lemmy instances I would also follow only the two most actives.

I'm trying to make an account on this instance, been trying for days now but it never works, has anyone been able to create an account? It just forever spins after pressing sign up. I've tried on multiple devices and browsers, same deal.
- There should be a captcha. Check is it there. Also filling by password manager is not working for me. Try writing by hand. Be sure your password is strong enough also.
  There could be many errors. We can't know because Lemmy server doesn't returns those. Hopefully these errors will be fixed in new version.
  
  Passwort manager worked after the third try. But I noticed that not ticking the show nsfw worked.
  You can change it later
  
  captcha was always done, password is strong too
- I had some issues initially on mobile, try on desktop, or hitting the hamburger menu in the top right, and change to desktop mode
  
  tried both mobile and desktop and both chrome and firefox

I voted no, although I nearly voted for the "only in certain comms" option. I've got the beginnings of a tool that will make it easy for people to select content from the reddit backups, but I didn't intend to make it automatic, just something that helped people find content.