I know that the fediverser project is quite a bit controversial due to the mirroring bots and how they were being used on alien.top, but today I’d like to talk about two other pieces of functionality which I believe have been ignored and eclipsed by the mirrors:

  • The ability for users to signup to the lemmy instance by connecting via their Reddit account.
  • The ability for instance admins to create a custom map of subreddit-to-lemmy communities, which can be used to auto-subscribe users who are registering via Reddit.

I think that these two pieces can really help solve the problem of user onboarding. Because it works as an extra service along with Lemmy, no changes in the core service are needed. For users, the possibility of starting an account on Lemmy and get a list of interesting content right away can reduce friction and would hopefully get more people to talk about it.

I’m particularly interested in hearing from the admins of the topic-focused instances, as (I believe) would have an easier way to reach out to the people that are closer to their interests. So, apologies in advance for the mass-tagging, here are the ones that I found on join-lemmy:

To reiterate, this has nothing to do with the bots or mirrors deployed on alien.top. I’m only asking who would be interested in adding the functionality to allow user registration via Reddit OAuth. In case of any questions, feel free to ask here or reach out via matrix.

  • rglullis@communick.newsOPMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Having OAuth integrated with Lemmy would be of course nice (to let an external system do the auto-subscription to Lemmy communities) and I even volunteered to work on SSO via LDAP but it does little in the way of helping with the goals of fediverser. The idea is to make migration of Reddit users as easy as possible and to do that we’d need to get the redditor’s subscribed subreddits, which AFAIK is not possible to do programatically without OAuth.