Reddy is a small app that I’ve developped over the past few days, and I want to show it to you so you can give me your thoughts, advices and ideas for the app.

Reddy is a GTK Linux app that takes an image (PNG, JPEG, GIF) at random in a subreddit and allows you to repost it in any Lemmy community. I made it principally to share content easily on Lemmy, as Reddit becomes more and more abusive and I think having copies of some content of reddit here on Lemmy is not a bad idea.

The app comes with a few restriction to prevent abuse:

  • You cannot repost the image twice in the same community
  • The reddit post link will always be shown in the body of the post. To give credit where credit is due.

Also, the app fetch the title and NSFW status of the reddit post automatically, but you can change it as needed.

The app require a reddit API client id/secret (The free API seems to still be working as of now) and a Lemmy account.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about such app, if you have any concerns as an user or as an instance owner please share your thoughts!

EDIT: Reddy is out for everyone to try out on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/net.krafting.Reddy

  • @HarbingerOfTomb
    7•16 days ago

    I don’t understand most of this but we need this service. Looking forward to it.

    • KraftingOP
      3•16 days ago

      I really want Lemmy to be good to use and have good content.

      Thanks for you comment, and I totally agree, especially for Mysteries community, I wish we had some on here, some ARG communitys etc… not clone of reddit posts for these, because you wouldn’t be able to be part of it truly, I just wish those community would come over on Lemmy.

      • Cosmic ClericEnglish
        2•16 days ago

        not clone of reddit posts for these, because you wouldn’t be able to be part of it truly, I just wish those community would come over on Lemmy.

        It’s a little bit of a Catch-22 though. They’re not going to come over unless the content they’re used to is already here. That’s why you need the cloning.

        And just wishing for it ain’t going to be enough. Once the content is cloned here on Lemmy, Lemmy users can run with it from there, and they can actually contribute to the cloned content on the Lemmy side, so it’s still a win-win.

        Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

        • KraftingOP
          3•16 days ago

          Yes that’s true, every Fediverse platform is a more or less the same, poeple don’t want to come because there’s not enough content, so there is not enough content, and the cycle repeat itself…

          Wishing won’t ever help that’s true, but I’m doing my part in the best way I can! I believe there are already bots that can replicate reddit posts and answer, I’ve seen one of these around, I don’t remember which one tho…

          • Cosmic ClericEnglish
            1•16 days ago

            Wishing won’t ever help that’s true, but I’m doing my part in the best way I can!

            You’re doing good, TY for contributing.

            FYI, while I am responding to you directly, I’m also ‘Speaking to the Choir’ as in may, as there’s usually a negative pushback to cloning Reddit content onto Lemmy.

            I always just assume it’s Reddit bots trying not to lose the only advantage they have, the content they already hold/contain.

            But it also could just be Lemmy users who only want a ‘pure’ experience, and ‘larger population / market share’ and success be damned.

            Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

            • @[email protected]English
              1•15 days ago

              there’s usually a negative pushback to cloning Reddit content onto Lemmy.

              Bots have their utility, but should be treated with caution, as they have the risk of flooding small communities with posts which garner zero comments. It might be a good idea to aim for no more than 50% of posts (on average) being from bots.

              @[email protected], would there be a way to incorporate some form of rate-limiting based on the level of human activity in the community?

              • KraftingOP
                1•15 days ago

                See : https://lemmy.world/comment/9863709

                Also, rate limiting should be implemented at the lemmy server level (if someone wanted to flood/spam a community he could write a simple script that post 1000 post per seconds easily)

                Plus there are already real bot software that repost reddit content without human approbation, this app doesn’t repost automatically without the user input.

                But I totally understand this concern. And I’ll see if this app gets abused or anything that might deteriorate our Lemmy experience.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•14 days ago

    I think having copies of some content of reddit

    Speaking as someone who built a whole service to mirror content from Reddit to Lemmy communities (and got a lot of flak for it), I feel like we already have our share of repost bots and mirroring tools. It seems like a fun project, Reddit’s API is “generous” enough to let do this for free and is very quick to see the results. But in all honesty all of Lemmy is starting to feel like just a small crowd of people who have nothing really interesting to say, so all we can do is regurgitate content from Reddit. The dwindling number of active users support this, most of the niche communities are either dead or kept by stubborn people who don’t mind talking to themselves.

    So, apologies in advance for the negativity and for using your announcement as an excuse for a rant, but: do you think we can think of something better to do to help the ecosystem beyond yet-another repost tool?

    • KraftingOP
      1•14 days ago

      I totally understand your point here.

      However, this app is a bit different, because it’s not to automate reposting everything, I built it to repost only interesting stuff, I do have some niche communities where I’m the only one posting, but thanks to this app I can just fetch random reddit post, and if I find them funny/interesting, I can share it instantly to the fediverse.

      People on every social media will always repost stuff from other social media, this app is just to make this a bit easier!

      I don’t think number of user are dwindling, see https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, I think it is just stabilizing a bit after a “hype” start.

      Also, if you have any idea of an app that would help the eco system better than another reposting tool, please shoot your idea, if I can make that happen I’d be happy to help!

  • @ericjmoreyEnglish
    1•14 days ago

    You mean “arbitrary”, not “random” right?

    I don’t see how a randomly chose picture from reddit would be something the user would likely be interested in.

    • KraftingOP
      1•14 days ago

      Mhm, maybe?

      It fetches x amount of post (sorted by new, top, hot or rising, user choice) from a user specified subreddit, and from all of these results it takes one post at random and shows it to the user. So it’s random, kind of… it probably could use better wording for sure

      • @ericjmoreyEnglish
        1•14 days ago

        That makes more sense than my initial interpretation, but why the random aspect at all?

  • Prostetnic Jeltz
    1•15 days ago

    If possible, set a requirement for the lemmy account to be marked as a bot.

    • KraftingOP
      2•15 days ago

      It is possible, but I don’t think I’ll do that, because I also use this app on my main account for stuff that I find funny, cool, beautiful and more. And if it gets comment I’ll answer them and keep the community aspect of everything. At the end of the day, this comes down to what the use wants to do with the app.

      However, I could add a disclaimer that if the user only post with this app and nothing else, its account should be marked as bot, but I do not want to make that mandatory.

      We’ll see in the future if the app gets used and how it might affect content here!

      Thanks for your comment!