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.

  • AtegonM
    1•1 year ago

    Will respond to both of your message here

    Starting with the one at the top. GDPR encompases more than just PII. The messages themselves are mostly not covered but usernames are (as its a unique identifier that distinguishes one person from another (and if you want to go in terms of PII it can be used to easily identify a person as well)) as well as misc information that might be in the messages (e.g. if someone says they work for X company or says their actual name)

    If you can make it so none of the messages you post are affected by that (every message posted is done by the same user, messages are filtered to remove any with personal data) (and optimally also get approval of the OP) then I would be more inclined to accept it (but up to the discretion of the mods of the community, not a site wide approval). Sure I can revise it to the 25% rule, ill make it 25% with a max

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

      Sorry, I will challenge you on the notion of usernames as personal identifiers. Last time I had to go through legal advice for a system we were building, the final advice was that usernames are only treated as such if they can be correlated with other online data, such as cookies or authentication tokens. To give an absurd example, if you sign in to a website and claim the username “rglullis” you will not be in any way connected to me and therefore the username can not be used as an “online identifier”.

      • AtegonM
        2•1 year ago

        it still 99% of time can point you towards someone (or severely limit the options and you can track them down from that) assuming its not common enough of one and its still something that uniquely separates people even without that. (And from the username here people can look up the user on reddit and then look up their post history for info on them as well)

        ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person; (GDPR Art. 4)

        an online identifier

        Not a lawyer so I cant fully speak on it but I would rather err on the side of caution when dealing with this sort of thing until I get actual legal confirmation otherwise specific to our site and this

        Platforms like discord (and reddit) need to anonymize the messages when someone deletes their account by assigning it to a generic deleted user thats used for everyone