eh, maybe wait until 0.18 rolls out across the fediverse before scraping reddit for content

Please don’t do this.

I’ve been beating this drum since I got on here.

Here’s the software you would need to put it in a special instance: https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter

I think the community is much more important than just having more content. I would worry that by flooding Lemmy with Reddit’s content without the community to support that content could drown everyone out.

If you wanna write code to do this … I’d say skip the bot, write a gateway instead.

Back in the early days of email, there were lots of different email systems, not just the SMTP Internet email we use today. There was UUCP email with “bang paths”, where your email address specified a list of servers that a message could be passed through to get to you. There were other networks like FidoNet and WWIVnet, that could send email to Internet email addresses through special “gateway” servers.

A gateway receives messages using one protocol or service, and retransmits or makes them available on another protocol or service.

For a little while in 1992, I had access to read Usenet posts only through a gateway that exported Usenet posts onto the Gopher system.

A gateway between Reddit and Lemmy would appear to Reddit as a web browser, scraping posts and comments; while appearing to Lemmy as a Lemmy instance that users could subscribe to, making each subreddit it scrapes available as a Lemmy community.

So a Lemmy user could subscribe to, say, [email protected] and see a fresh view of AskReddit. The server at reddittolemmy.com would not be a standard Lemmy server with users, but rather a custom gateway server that fetches data from Reddit and makes it available in the form of a Lemmy community.

(If Reddit were not being an asshole, a gateway could be an API client. But Reddit is being an asshole, so a gateway should probably be written as a scraper that accesses Reddit as if it were a normal user using a desktop Web browser.)

I think it could be great for some subs, that are very dependent on many users, because It’s the rare users that provide content. Subs like AITA or TIFU, where you can react and discuss inside the community, but get content from outside.

Ideally tho, they would just become self sustainable

I think there’s value to it. There’s a ton of really important and helpful documentation on there for all kinds of fields, in the past couple days I’ve noticed some references I’ve had for tech issues and guitar repair are no longer accessible, for example. There’s going to be a period where looking for help/answers online for certain issues is going to be a nightmare.

It’d certainly help grow Lemmy by helping with the migration (at least for me, as I don’t want to go back to Reddit, but there are subs there with interesting info for me that won’t migrate), but it shouldn’t contain any direct links to Reddit (just the content of the post), just giving credits to the OP.

Nah. This is a fresh start. It’s been less than a week and theres already so much more content. It’ll grow soon enough. Especially with spez fucking around over there. We want og content here, not all the shit reposts that already plague reddit

Thoughts: Content is good atm. If it’s spammy it’ll get blocked. Or the instance de-federated. Is going to Reddit boosting reddit or draining it by using the content. Reddit has a lot of bad content that Lemmy is free of.

I would rather have content posted by humans. Lemmy doesn’t need to be reddit anyway.

I’m not entirely against the idea, but also really don’t want to turn the fediverse into the flood of content that is reddit. Maybe some kind of relative upvote filter based bot. Only posts that get some certain percentage of above average number for a given sub, get scraped.

deleted by creator

It’d be kind of nice to play catch up a bit with the, what, 18 years of content on Reddit

I know it might feel soulless, but having a constant stream of “pre-approved” content isn’t the worst idea

Good question! I dont really know how I’d feel about this.

On the one hand, for me to be ok with it it needs to be CLEAR that its a bot reposting reddit content, maybe even if its limited to specific communities for the sake of archiving.

On the other, I do want lemmy to be distinct and I am curious to see where it will end up. I also feel like we shouldn’t be trying to emulate reddit exactly, as that would mean we also get the crappy parts as well. Also, that would be limiting. Who knows what lemmy can become? Why limit it to being reddit 2.0, you know?