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/python 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.
(Also, the code is Python/Django so if anyone is interested in contributing just let me know!)
I will add a FAQ in the README, it seems a lot of people are missing the part where I say that this tool brings the comment as well and has a different purpose than Lemmit. Here is a short explanation of the differences
Personally, the value of the comments is to have a discussion with people, asking/answering questions, etc. If I know that replies to comments won’t be read by the author, why would I bother commenting at all?
You’re free to setup your own instance and sync the posts and comments. People who are interested in that can subscribe to your community on your instance. The mods might have issue if you crosspost posts with bot comments here, and I’ll defer to them on policing that.
They will. It’s already on the roadmap to have send have any reply on lemmy to trigger a DM to reddit user, and there is also the possibility of having the bot on reddit to respond with a link to the Lemmy discussion.
This is not how it works. The idea is that the bots will act on the “mapped” communities. So, if the admin of the fediverser instance sets it up in a way that their bots will mirror /r/python to here, then every post that is “mirrored” will have the conversation/comments directly submitted to this community. If the instance admins do not want this, they can simply defederate from the “mirror instance” and then none of their posts will reach it here.
I don’t have anything to add that others haven’t said to you already. To answer the question in the title, I would not want posts from reddit with their comments in this community.