I’m working on a tool that aims to do two things:
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bootstrap Lemmy communities with content from their “equivalent” subreddit
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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 !rust@programming.dev ? 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 !emacs@communick.news, 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.
Go look at other communities with those bots and see how well they perform and if people actually discuss the content.
Is there anything with this type of bots? The only similar project I’ve seen is lemmit.online, and even that is a lot more limited in scope. They have only one bot pulling posts, no comments and all posts are done on their instances
Have you checked out https://lemmit.online?
I don’t know how i feel about a bot posting content from Reddit. Your project legit looks cool, but I personally block lemmit because these posts give me the feeling of abandoned cities. I was on reddit for the discussions. Same for lemmy. Posts without comments are boring.
Oh! I missed that. This sounds much nicer. Probably not for /c/rust though. Like someone else said, this community already has good engagement. I think you should target large non-technical subreddits like AITA. Those will take time to pick up on Lemmy.
I’ve seen similar things done on other communities on Lemmy, and it always drives me nuts. Every single post on c/Technology is like this, making the whole community feel soulless and inactive.
Also, the amount of low quality questions or posts thinking they’re in r/PlayRust that would be posted would drive me up the wall. I’ve been glad to be away from that.
Let me repeat: the idea is not have a fully automated system that would mirror every and single post from there to here, but mostly to have a set of tools that streamline the process that I’ve been doing already in plenty of places - e.g, https://communick.news/c/emacs, https://soccer.forum/c/main, https://programming.dev/c/elixir, and yes, even here.
The main practical difference of this is that it would require less time because I won’t have to be copy-pasting stuff around, not that I would be pushing more stuff.
Ok, there is the aspect of the comments, but these are mostly thought of as a way to nudge the people that participate on reddit and get them to look into the alternatives.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !emacs@communick.news, !main@soccer.forum, !elixir@programming.dev
Reposting from the python post you did just to make sure you see it
Just wanted to let you know that we dont allow reposting of comments made on other platforms in this instance (both for spam reasons and tends to be a mess with gdpr). Link posts with no text are fine as long as you get approval from a moderator of a community or by one of the admins for site wide usage (and then allow moderators to opt out), and follow our bot guidelines that you can find in the sidebar on our site. Id be willing to greenlight the bot for sitewide usage as long as you remove the comments, make posts links only (links to the content, not the reddit post) and limit it to maximum 10 posts a day across the instance (max 2 in a specific community) (and also make sure you dont repost stuff already posted in the community). We have another bot called reddit x-poster that its been working fairly well with but they hang out in a couple communities like haskell
In terms of this community itself it doesnt really need help with posting. Its got more than 200 monthly active users already and around 4 posts every day
Sorry, I saw your message but only now I had the time to stop to try to answer it. First of all, I should apologize for the bot running on !elixir@programming.dev, that was my dev instance and should not be even connected to the public internet when I ran those test jobs. I’d actually kindly ask you to please defederate from
fediverser.communick.devto ensure that this doesn’t happen again.I just to make it clear that is not my plan to flood any community and that the idea is to only submit content when it seems to be aligned with the overall posts in the community and I hope that I can do everything according to the guidelines for each community. I just to make my case for what I’d consider to be a reasonable approach and check if these guidelines can be revised/approved:
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For a lot of the programming communities, the value is not in the link sharing but in the “self posts”: questions and discussions around some topic or event that has happened. Just copy-pasting a question feels worse than a bot, because my tool is built with the idea to get the original poster here as well. Perhaps this rule could be relaxed for “self posts”, and the tool could bring the post along with the top N threads (N=3). This way, the people already here would see a post with some of the content (which could be an incentive for them to join in a conversation) and my tool could also pick up the replies from here and notify the users on reddit.
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The tool is not meant to be a simple cross-poster, but *to build an off-ramp from reddit into the fediverse". In this sense, it would be better if the communities already had some organic activity as to dilute the feeling that only bots are participating. IOW, a community where we have 4 “organic” posts and 2 bot posts seem better than one that is dominated by one bot posting only one message every day. Would you consider revising the rule so that so that the bot could post at most 25% of the total of “organic posts” from the previous day?
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If you think in terms of “how well this community is going in relation to the reddit” instead of “how it is doing in relation to each other”, the numbers are pitiful. If we go to /r/rust right now, it shows about ~250k subscribers and 1000 active visitors, and this is even after the mods from /r/rust explicitly expressed their wishes to move to Lemmy. Even if it sounds a bit elitist, I agree with the people who do not want to bring all of reddit to Lemmy, but I think that a tool like mine could be used to bring the top 1% and focus on the best content creators.
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
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”.
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
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Oh, and not really a contention point, but a pet peeve of mine… “GDPR” is often thrown around but it should not be used as an excuse to prevent bots. Speaking as someone who had to deal with a lot of privacy-sensitive businesses and as an European: GDPR is mostly about PII, and posts on the internet along with usernames do not constitute as such. A bot taking content from reddit and posting anywhere else does not fall under any provision of personal data processing and no special consent is required from the users to collect it.
I think something like this can work, if you bring humans fully into the loop. Posts should be made by people, so that someone’s responsible for the thread that gets made.
What about a ‘repost queue’ of Reddit that Lemmy users can sign up for? Having signed up to this queue, e.g. for /r/rust, I’d be presented with a list of the posts on /r/rust that do not yet exist on .dev/c/rust. Every hour or so I could opt to do a repost to Lemmy, from my own account.
In other words you’re just facilitating a manual action that’s already taking place.
That could work well for posts with links, but what about the self posts? The people that I managed to bring over from /r/emacs to !emacs@communick.news have mentioned that the main “problem” is that just posting the links make the community feel like a simple “planet emacs” aggregator and that they wished to have the self posts with questions as well.
One solution at a time I guess :)
But if your emacs community is in favor of the comments replication approach then that’d be a good testbed that might lead to even better approaches deemed acceptable elsewhere.
Ok. I will setup a fediverser instance and make the changes needed.
It seems to be a lot of work but could also be a good idea.
Something that I would like would also be a statement on the Rust blog to say that lemmy instance X is the main Rust lemmy instance and discussion should mostly be done here, so that the migration path is clear for reddit users.
It is a bit of work (not a lot), but that is fine by me because I am really invested in making the fediverse something accessible and more than just a niche.
