If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.
With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I’m realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.
I’d like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:
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Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.
Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.
Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.
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Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.
Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.
Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.
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Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.
Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.
Cons: It’s yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don’t have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.
Please, let’s avoid any “who cares about sports?” or “I only want organic content here” type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don’t care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.
Sorry, this is a bit condescending.
Go take a look at my profile. I have almost 2000 posts already. I’ve been posting 10-20 posts every day to all the different sport communities. Do you think that dedicating a good half-hour every day to read a bunch of feeds and sharing them is not already enough effort?
I’m not saying that we should rely only on mirror accounts, but I’m saying that it makes no sense to ignore them. I’m not proposing to take just a random army of AI slop and put it here. I’m saying that we can look at the places where the content curation already has been made and replicate it here.
FYI, I see indeed 1.43k posts on your https://communick.news/u/rglullis, but https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/[email protected] only shows 597. SJW shows 617: https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected]
So not sure where you posted the missing ones, but it seems like it was on communities that large instances do not follow.
Ok, I have 1.92k comments, not posts.
I think Blaze’s point still is relevant: if you are posting a lot on communities that large instances dont even know about, then your efforts will be harder. Ideally one could change something about that, for example use a user account on such a big instance to pull in those communities into federation.
I’m already dealing with more than 15 topic-specific instances, some of them with multiple communities, plus Communick. If I try to keep track of “who-is-following-what”, I will go insane. I’d rather believe that eventually more people get to learn about these instances and start contributing as well.
Seems a lot. I already feel like I stretch myself too thin sometimes, and I’m just a poster, not an admin of 15 instances.
Running the topic-specific instances is not the hard part. The hard part would be to manually find content, posting and then ensuring that it is replicated across the whole Fediverse.