I’ve posted before about my fediverser project, and I am now looking to see who is interested in participating.
The short description is that it does the following:
- it runs a lemmy instance which will be the home of bots that mirror accounts on reddit.
- The admin of this instance can choose what subreddits are going to be monitored from this instance. Let’s say that these are the “source” communities.
- For these selected subreddits, the admin can define where the posts from these subreddits should be posted in the other lemmy instances. We can, e.g, map posts from /r/selfhosted to !main@selfhosted.forum or !selfhosted@lemmy.world .
- You can choose whether to mirror the posts only or the whole thread with comments from reddit. Each of these will be authored by the account that mirrors the original reddit user.
- (WIP, optional) responses to the reddit mirror accounts will create a comment on reddit with a link to original lemmy thread.
So, now I finally got to deploy the first lemmy fediversed instance, and I’d like to know the following:
- which subreddits you still follow but would like to bring to the fediverse?
- For instance admins and community mods, what communities you would like to be the destination of the mirror posts, and would you be interested in having the posts only or the whole thread?
Bear in mind that this is NOT advised to be done for the bigger subs. The idea here is not to create a huge army of bots and overwhelm the fediverse, but mostly to create a migration path to those who rely on the more niche subreddits.
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion. We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying, and they just flood the feed with posts that people won’t engage with.
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post. Nobody wants to have a discussion about a hackernews or slashdot post. If Lemmy just looks like a place to mirror Reddit content, people will see that and just go to Reddit and engage directly.
We need more people posting to Lemmy. If this is just a place for bots to have discussions with themselves, nobody will stay here very long.
Precisely, a lot of us left that horrible place to escape all the rampant transphobia and persecution they have over there. We don’t need their kind of “content” mirrored here. My first thing I’m going to do when they allow us to block instances is to immediately block those that have mostly repost bots.
I think Lemmy as a whole should forbid any links from Reddit just protect everyone here. Is it censorship? Yes, but it’s for a good cause.
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion.
This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.
We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post.
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper. First, this is not the goal of this tool. The idea is eventually to have mirror accounts ends to work as proxys to allow for two-way bridges. Second, a lot of people know that they are not with reddit, but when they have come to lemmy they bounced back because they couldn’t find the content they were used to.
We need more people posting to Lemmy.
Agree, but If we follow the rule of 90/9/1 for lurkers/commenters/posters, this means that we can bring 90% of reddit’s userbase to the fediverse just by bringing the content here. The posters and commenters will eventually follow.
The logic is simple: unless I start breaking into people’s phones and computers, I can not force people them to post to Lemmy, but I can get their content here. A tool like this can help the intolerant minority to drive the behavior of the majority.
If we’re interacting with Reddit anyway what’s the point of using Lemmy
You won’t be interacting with Reddit. It’s the opposite. This tool is to make sure that those on the fediverse do not need Reddit, but those on Reddit start getting exposure to the Fediverse.
you’re literally building a bridge though, isn’t that interacting with reddit?
It’s one-way. You personally don’t interact with anything on Reddit.
Hey I have a question because this actually interests me and contrary to popular opinionn on this sub I think this idea would work!
Since migrating I’ve found myself wanting to search Reddit dozens of times for content I needed but was too damned pissed to provide them with any traffic.
My input is: it seems that the main beef of most people here is the lack of engagement, making Lemmy seem like a ghost town. Would we be able to comment on the mirrored posts (on Lemmy) thus solving the engagement problem? I’m no techspert but feel like allowing comments underneath mirrored posts for Lemmy, not Reddit would be possible I guess? Or at least some equivalent?
I’m also interested in this because I have my own little feed I’m setting up, and it would be cool to be able to add more content very easily. I don’t really want it to be from Reddit but, just anything different I could do would be nice, and hey if there is something important I’d like to add from there or even just to take notes that’d be nice so I for one would use it.
A bridge that allows us access to reddits content, driving up their traffic (and server costs) - the whole reason for the API changes WHILE refusing them any engagement? Sounds like a win-win to me.
Okay not precisely, but we have a bot (I think it’s the one at smeargle.fans) that reposts Reddit threads and replicates all of their comments, which nobody engages with
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper.
Well that term just doesn’t apply. I’m not saying “Real Lemmy users avoid anything to do with Reddit” or anything along those lines. You asked for feedback, and I gave you my honest criticism of it.
I understand that you found a project that sounds fun to make, and it probably will be. This is what we engineers do, we get excited to build things that seem to have clever technical answers. However in my past few months on Lemmy, I have seen these ideas, and have seen the way they tend to work out so far.
The logic may be simple, but human psychology is rarely as simple as engineers wish it could be.
Feel free to build your project. All aspiring engineers should make things that they want to make. But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong. Not all solutions end up working out the way you hope, and that’s part of the engineering life. And based on prior experience, this one is likely to get the same treatment that the other repost bots get.
But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong
Sorry for the bluntness, but I did not ask for any feedback at all. I am asking very specific questions and this post is mostly to collect information from those who can be interested in using it.
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
lemmit.online did this and was recently defederated, partially because the one admin wasn’t able to prevent the volume of posts being generated from ending up filled with spam.
There’s a few HN bots too, but unfortunately the posts never get much engagement here, so I have to go through to HN to read some discussion about it (which I will do, but a much bigger proportion of people just don’t appear to engage with mirrored content here)
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Ahead of you: one of the planned items to be worked on is a spam filter. ;)
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the idea is simply to reply to the comment by replying to the comment, not by notifying the user or sending a DM
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This is not implemented yet.
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it is an open source project. Instead of playing armchair software architect, feel free to contribute if you worry so much about the implementation.
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Honestly the fist thing i did after join Lemmy was to block any bot in the setting and filter off all “Reddit something” groups. Just my preference ofk.
Fair enough. One of the design reasons that I am working from a separate instance for the bots is that it makes it easy for admins to block in case they are worried about being flooded.
If anything, this is just going to make Lemmy look more dead.
Folks browsing All to get a sense of what content exists on the instance they’re using are going to be flooded with mirrored Reddit content that they can’t really interact with.
It’s an interesting idea, but I think it’s also a bad idea.
they’re using are going to be flooded with mirrored Reddit
Only if someone set this up to mirror some large subreddit, which would be frankly stupid: the service still requires a reddit API key and they would quickly go over the limits of the free tier if they pulled data from the larger subs, also instances that would be flooding other communities would quickly be banned.
This is why I am being very careful about setting this up. I am not going to set these bots to any community unless I get explicit approval from the admins and mods, and I am not going to create mirrors from any subreddit with more than 250k subscribers.
You missed my point.
It’s going to make Lemmy seem dead because the ghost-comments aren’t something someone can really reply to and get a response, like you can with Lemmy today. At best people would be commenting to the void.
Honestly, I like this idea, just because it means I could block your instance in my app and instantly filter out that kind of content, just like how someone can block lemmynsfw to get rid of almost all porn.
That’s the spirit!
There’s an entire instance for that already - lemmit.online and it sucks. There’s no engagement, no interaction. Nobody wants it. Everyone hates it.
Why isn’t the focus aimed at creating more communities over here, that actually add to engagement & interaction…if I want to see what’s happening over there, I’ll go and take a look… I’m one of those that has bots blocked anyway, so makes little difference to me really…
Why isn’t the focus aimed at creating more communities over here, that actually add to engagement & interaction…i
Because it’s not mutually exclusive and we can do both.
if I want to see what’s happening over there, I’ll go and take a look…
Yeah, but what about those who do not want to go over there out of principle. I know I am not the only one in this case, and I’d also like to have a way those who want to migrate.
If you are doing this PLEASE do it on your own instance, so we can just block the instance if we want to and you don’t waste someone else’s bandwidth
Yes, all bots will be running on the same instance, and I will only send mirrored posts to communities if I get explicit approval from the mods.
thank you
I’m not a fan of mirroring Reddit, but I can’t stop you. Make sure it is easy to block (such as one bot user posting all posts but not comments) if you don’t want to be defedded from a bunch of instances.
Actually, the idea is to have all bots users on the same instance precisely to make it easy for unwelcoming admins to block or defederate it.
I think it took me less than a minute to block the lemnit bot.
We want to grow beyond just being a Reddit clone/replacement - mirroring active discussions here just feels like stalking an ex on Facebook.
That said, in a previous discussion about about archiving good answers from Reddit, I did suggest that this would be a great use for a wiki that was integrated into Lemmy. Being about to semi-automate the retrieval and formatting would be useful. I think starting new threads for them isn’t the way to go.
mirroring active discussions here just feels like stalking an ex on Facebook.
I am not sure if that is the best analogy. We didn’t break up with the communities in the subreddits, we broke up with Reddit, Inc.
Interesting initiative!
FYI, there is already https://lemmit.online/
Yeah, I know of lemmit but AFAIK it has the opposite ideas in many cases:
- It seems to be archiving the most popular instances, not so much the niche ones
- It is going to mirror posts only, not the discussion.
- All posts are created by the same bot account, so we lose information about the original content.
I wonder if the dev from lemmit would be interested in being the host of some of the “fediversed” communities, so that we can have comments as well.
Something a bit similar to what lemmit is already doing, but more powerful with your addition of comments: read-only, best-of archives of really old content from popular subs.
10-5 year old askreddit posts for instance would be interesting blasts from the past to read today. Isn’t there already a ‘best of Reddit’ convention on Reddit itself that resurfaces such content from time to time?
I see what you’re trying to accomplish and congratulate you for trying to make Lemmy a better place, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. As many people here I’ve blocked @bot@lemmit.online precisely because it just posts Reddit content and floods my feed, with what is basically spam. Also many people came here just to avoid Reddit and to try and make something better. Sure, when 0.19.0 comes out and people will be able to block instances, lemmings will have a choice if they want to see that instance, but what about new users, or people just checking Lemmy out? Do we really want them to see reposted reddit content? Because they can already do this on reddit. What we need is to stop being so invested in “our ex” and just grow as a community, in a natural way.
The argument can be made that bots measuring the content are no better than some random dude on the Internet reposting shit they like. Situation becomes worse when that same “bot” doesn’t credit the author proper.
Memes are meant to be shared, and it’s a great way to grow small communities. Karma removed is not that big here since reputation points are not shown (at least in the webUI). So a person will post a few memes and could start a conversation, something a bot can’t do.
Whether the meme is meant to be shared in some other context or not, I think, is the decision that should be based on the sum of copyright liberation and how generalistic the contents are. Today, I can’t bear a thought of reposting some stranger’s niche meme on social media without at least attaching a source or creator, because I’m most likely making one more point where engagement with the same meme ends - and reposting full works doesn’t qualify as commentary/criticism/research, so it’s not a fair use, to begin with.
That’s why we are correct of assuming the worst from the bots: programming any fair use considerations is left to gather dust, as it’s ultimately something that human has to decide.
it just posts Reddit content and floods my feed
Wait, how come does it flood “your” feed if the lemmit bot only posts to their own instance/communities? If you are browsing with the “all” view, it’s not really your feed.
Apologies for the “you’re holding it wrong” response, but maybe it would be better if you just start browsing the specific communities that you want to follow?
It’s seems like you ignored my point entirely just to argue on a technicality. As I asked, should Reddit content reposted by bots be something a new user should see?
Also browsing /all is a great way to discover new communities, but even if you don’t browse it bot communities find their way into the discover communities tab, which makes it more difficult for people find the communities that they want to follow.
Okay, I am starting to realize that most people are looking at the word “bot” and stop reading the rest of the description.
The point of fediverser is not about creating an army of bots or a fully automated content firehose. The point of fediverser is to have a tool that gives a way for humans to bring content that they want to have on the fediverse. The mirrored instance and the bot accounts are just a mechanism to (1) facilitate the curating process, (2) automate the posting of content that has been curated and (3) to keep a bridge with Reddit which can help redditors to signup to Lemmy in a frictionless-way.
All this work started because I spent almost 3 months bootstraping !emacs@communick.news by doing the following:
- checking /r/emacs.
- Manually posting one or two links that I found there to the lemmy community
- Realizing that the majority of content on the community is from “self posts” with questions
- sending DMs to the authors of these self-posts, telling them about the community and inviting them to join my instance.
- Having about 10% of successful positive rate.
- The people who joined start asking “ok, now what? I can post here, but if the majority of people are still on reddit, what is the point? How about we have the reddit comments as well, so that we can start the conversation from here?”
At no point the idea is to:
- pull content automatically from reddit to lemmy
- use bots to flood the lemmy communities
- ignore the people that already joined lemmy.
I’ve repeated multiple times in this thread and in the original announcement, but I can do it yet again: the main usage of fediverser is for people that do not want to use reddit but still are interested in interacting with niche communities.
Love the idea for subreddits I can’t find a Lemmy sub for. But I don’t want all the rest. I specifically went out of my way to block seeing bots on Lemmy. I don’t think there is a way to opt in to seeing just one and even if there was I don’t see how I would transition that into only seeing bots for the subs on reddit I’d still want to engage with. I don’t understand how you’re planning to manage this?
I am not sure what you mean by “this” that I am supposed to manage. If you don’t want to follow bots, you won’t see the mirrored account.
Right. But what I am saying is that even if I turned the setting off and was seeing the bots how would I only see the bits and pieces I wanted from reddit and not the whole of the reddit website mirrored?
You are never going to see all of reddit mirrored. Please read the description again. There is already a mechanism that lets admins create a mapping between specific subreddits and Lemmy communities, and only those subreddits gets pulled.
So, correct me if I’m wrong. But does that mean there has to be a Lemmy community that is synchronous to the subreddit in order to be mirrored?
Exactly. The main purpose is to help bootstrap the niche communities here who still don’t have enough people to make it sustainable by bringing the content and eventually the redditors as well.
Ah. Then it’s basically not as useful as the use case I was expecting. Sorry about that. I misunderstood.
I think the use case you have in mind (creating mirror instances of niche sub) can be achived with this system, but then you’d have to run your own lemmy instance - or at least use one where you can create communities and the instance admins are welcoming to bots…
Does this include past posts or just new posts being mirrored from reddit to Lemmy?
At the moment it’s only going to pull posts from the last 12 hours but it can be changed to get farther into the past. The problem to do this is that it will require a lot of API requests, which means having to pay reddit.
What if I don’t want the content I post to Reddit mirrored on Lemmy? How can individual users opt out?
The plan is to let users authenticate to the mirror instance with the mirrored account, which would cause the bot to be disabled. But that is not implemented yet.
What an interesting idea. As this project scales, how would you think of getting around the Reddit API limit problem? This sounds pretty API intensive. I also wonder if Reddit might see this as a TOS violation (particularly when the bot was posting comments) and killing it without even reaching an API limit.
That said, I applauded you for trying to think of creative ways to increase content on Lemmy. One thing in particular that I miss are the questions on niche subreddits, particularly hobby subreddits. You can learn so much just by reading others’ questions. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base and reach to support stuff like that yet, so I like that you’re trying to think of ways to increase that content here.
As this project scales, how would you think of getting around the Reddit API limit problem?
The first idea is to scale horizontally. More instances run by different people, each of them running for different communities.
The second idea is a bit crazy but I would only be able to do it with some serious financial support and the help of a mobile app developer. Basically it would require a mobile app that could work as a client of both reddit and lemmy.
I also wonder if Reddit might see this as a TOS violation.
I do worry about it, but if it gets to this point, it would mean that this project would have started to make some noise. If it has started to get their attention, it would mean that the fediverse would be already reaching some critical mass.
I miss are the questions on niche subreddits, particularly hobby subreddits.
That’s exactly the type of community that I want to bring via alien.top. I started !makers@communick.news, but it didn’t catch on. Can you give me a list of specific subreddits you want?
Are you going to foot the bill for the Reddit API fees?
Have you considered what you will do if Reddit cuts you off? IANAL, but it’s fairly clear from the TOS that they will likely shut you down.
Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement:
license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content;
modify, prepare derivative works of, disassemble, decompile, or reverse engineer any part of the Services or Content; or
access the Services or Content in order to build a similar or competitive website, product, or service, except as permitted under any Additional Terms (as defined below).
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2023
I am not mirroring all of reddit, and the idea is that each “fediverser” instance pulls only enough data to stay under the 600 requests/ 10 minutes, which is free.
If they decide to go after these fediverser instances, they will have to play whack-a-mole, because anyone can get new keys and start anew.
It’ll be easy enough for them to block
fediverser/0.1.0user-agents, so perhaps that’s not a safe default value since it’s an easy target.I’ll be honest, I saw a previous post of yours and was sceptical, but I think based on the idea, you’ve taken the best steps to make this a reality. Having the communities be part of instances where they fit in and can be maintained by moderators who care about the subjects is a challenge, but it does set it up for longer success.
As others have pointed out, there’s still an imbalance where people don’t realize they’re replying to shadow accounts (like this for example). Maybe a good solution would be to DM someone who replies to a comment by one of the bot accounts explaining what’s going on. Maybe asking the person who commented to reach out to the user on Reddit directly, and asking them to join the Fediverse would be a good solution and would bring in the human element to the process. This would avoid you having to build that feature (and likely appear to be a spammer) which might have a higher conversion ratio.
I’m not sure if you have a plan for it, but somehow allowing the Reddit user to take over the shadow account would probably achieve your goal of getting more people to convert, and would be a benefit to niche instances looking to grow their organic members. However you do this, it should be seamless to the new member, with the minimal number of hurdles.
Good luck!
Thank you! I really like the idea of getting the people already on Lemmy involved in the process of “fediversing” the people. I will definitely try to find a way to work this into the tool.
Let’s say I have a favorite sport and there exists a sub_ named: r/.
Let’s also say there already exits a Lemmy community and that community is struggling to get off the ground: !@lemmy.world
I can see a value add if your project directly helps !@lemmy.world get started; but I don’t see how it does. If anything wouldn’t your project compete with !@lemmy.world and therefore hinder it?
It might be different if your project directly tied r/ to !@lemmy.world but it doesn’t.
Yeah, check !main@soccer.forum, I am using the tool to post some content that I find on /r/soccer. I am working to do similar things with /r/NBA and /r/NFL.
Did you check with the admins on lemmy first or are you bot posting without permission?
So, like /r/soccer and !main@soccer.forum?
Checking out !main@soccer.forum I saw very few posts by bots. Mainly saw posts by you. I saw one post coming from alien.top .
What’s interesting is that only posts by bots have any comments. So maybe this could be a good way to get communities started.
Therefore, if it’s okay with the admins at the following community, I’d nominate !tennis@lemmy.world
There’s almost nothing happening there.
Do keep in mind that the comments on the soccer threads are also likely to be from bot accounts, but I’d expect that as more people start subbing to the community, there will be more “organic” participation.
As for the inclusion on the bot on a lemmy.world community. Please get in contact with the community mod, but I really doubt that the instance admins would be interested. If they don’t go with it, I might set up a Lemmy instance specific for tennis (matchpoint.zone was available for cheap. ;)
Yes
Isn’t this like stealing, guys? No, not from Reddit - from authors. Ask for a consent before mirroring anything, for the love of Fediverse. Cheers!
The better question would be whether this constitutes fair-use. Because it’s certainly not stealing.
TINLA: factors for fair use don’t seem to align, though.
- Such use does not characterize commentary, parody, etc. and is not transformative.
- Post may prove to be substantial on its own, especially if it’s an art piece.
- Most of the work (individual post) or crucial parts being used.
- Since there is most likely no thorough link to the author’s website or profile, they lose the audience - nobody will go to look up the same post twice, not through Google and Google Images, especially.
About that last point: solvable by manually gathering authors’ links or making a hyperlink to respective Reddit profiles.
Adding a link to the original profile is quite easy and it would help alleviate the issue.
Also, keeping in mind that one of the goals of such a tool is to get people on reddit to be aware of the alternatives… the easiest way to let people on reddit to file a claim and/or to remove copy they don’t want copyrighted would be to let simply let they taking over their mirrored instance by proving they own their reddit account. And if this tools becomes popular enough to the point that redditors start signing up to the fediverse because the copied instance is getting significant viewership, then mission. fucking. accomplished.
It does not merit a verification of the author, when you hold their content encaged somewhere they did not approve yet. You say it’s to increase registrations on Fediverse and for the brighter future, but please remember to deal with this ethically. Creator deserves to know first that your mirror (or whatever ends up being) intends to seek engagement with their piece.
Linking to original, as we both proposed, is an aftermath. Top three factors also need to be addressed if you claim fair use.
As an alternative, asking for consent and delaying repost is not a rocket science.
you hold their content encaged somewhere they did not approve yet.
I’m failing to see how their content is “encaged” anywhere, and I’m failing to see how this would be any different from what, e.g, the Internet Archive does.
You only need to recall where it took the Internet Archive, no matter the intent it has. But let’s presume for a minute that a lot of it is educational: does unsolicited art reposting constitute an educational purpose, commentary, criticism, news, or a parody? If all that fails to meet, at least work with the portions that you’re taking.
