I’m working on a tool that aims to do two things:

  • bootstrap Lemmy communities with content from their “equivalent” subreddit

  • help people migrate away from Reddit, by setting up a bot account on Lemmy that can be later taken over by their legitimate reddit owner. The idea is that the bot account would follow the equivalent lemmy communities and “registration” could be as easy as having the reddit user sending a DM to a bot to authenticate themselves.

I’m wondering how the people here would feel about me trying out this tool by mapping /r/rust to [email protected] ? My plan would be to set up a Lemmy instance that could exclusively be the home for the bot accounts, and then I would handpick a few posts every day to get them mirrored here, comments included. I also have in the roadmap to have responses to let users on Reddit to be notified of the conversations/replies received on the Lemmy post.

My view of pros/cons:

Pros:

  • Those who are already on Lemmy but stay on Reddit because of specific, niche communities will be able to ditch Reddit entirely.
  • More content in the instance, which would help mitigate the common “I want to move to Lemmy, but the content is not there” complaints.
  • A clearer path to migration and less time discussing “where to go if we are leaving reddit?”
  • Admins who object to this can simply deferate from the mirror instance(s).

Cons:

  • If abused, Lemmy communities might start looking like they are filled with bots only. Not really my intention, this is why I am not planning to fully automate this, but also not a big issue given that admins can easily protect themselves for instances that spam too much.
  • It’s a legal grey area (though there are so many repost bots out there and I don’t see how anyone would try to enforce copyright claims) whose support is mostly on the hands of reddit users.
  • If people look at it as a tool to help them migrate, we can win them over. If this feels too forced, they will more likely side with Reddit and refuse to migrate.

Anyway, please let me know your thoughts.

  • @[email protected]English
    13•1 year ago

    No, just look at the rust community on Lemmy that imports stuff like this. It is flooded with a lot of content, but that makes it impossible to follow and interact with. Also, if you know it is a bot that posted, you don’t have any reason to interact with that post. Automatic imports tend to feel like spam, so please don’t do this…

    I’d rather see that people keep an eye open for suitable news, or ask genuine questions and write other interesting posts by hand. It may be a bit slow early on like it is now, but that is somewhat in proportion to the engagement so it all fits together.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•1 year ago

      Also, this community is coming along nicely. We are in the top tree communities on programming.dev if you look at the list of communities. We are the highest ranked programming language community, ahead of Python. So, I don’t see any need for artificially inflating this community.

      Edit: Link to the community page https://programming.dev/communities

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      -1•1 year ago

      It is not my plan to “flood” any community, I hope to make that very clear.

      Also:

      if you know it is a bot that posted, you don’t have any reason to interact with that post.

      But there is even less reason for people to interact if there is no comment at all. Plus if you look at the roadmap, my plan is to make a notification system that will send a DM to the reddit user with a link to the responses they get on Lemmy.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        Well, bringing over comments by a bot feels totally wrong. I’m not sure we want to have reddit comments here, since it sometimes differ quite a lot in culture. Bringing over posts only, could be done by bot if it is determined by a human, but then on the other hand I don’t see the point in involving the bot. Then you just look at the list in the bot instead of in /r/rust , and it is not that hard to just manually post if you find something there that would fit here. I like what you are trying to achieve, but I’m not a big fan of bots… it is so easy to get them wrong and then they can cause a lot of harm.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          Bringing over posts only, could be done by bot if it is determined by a human.

          Yeah, this whole experiment started exactly like that. I wanted to have an easier way to bring content from /r/emacs to [email protected], but I realized that I was missing out on a lot of the “self” posts and these are kind of meaningless without comments/responses.

          I’m not a big fan of bots

          To be quite honest, me neither. This is why my main goal is to make a system that can let the reddit users take control over the bot account quickly, even if it’s just to claim it and say “please stop mirroring my comments”. But we have to start somewhere.