Thoughts on (semi-)automated tool to import content from /r/rust to this community?
Thoughts on (semi-)automated tool to import content from /r/rust to this community?
I'm working on a tool that aims to do two things:
-
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.
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I'm against this for a number of reasons. To the point that honestly I think you should have a think about if this is something you want to actually persue.
Firstly, we are not Reddit, we are Lemmy. We don't really need to just mindlessly copy content over just for the sake of content. If this community were just a mirror of Reddit, then what's the point of being on Lemmy anyways?
Lemmy and Reddit are link aggregators anyway. If there's something that's good enough to crosspost, then someone who browses both can just manually copy it over. There's not really much OC on Reddit, especially for something like a programming language.
And if someone really wants to look at Reddit posts, they'd follow the lemmit mirror. Or just use Reddit.
Anyway, that out of the way, I really don't think you should be trying to force/convince people to join Lemmy. Especially using automated tools.
Your roadmap shows a bot that would pm Reddit users any responses to posts from other platforms. I know if I got a message like that, then I'd just mark it as spam. It reads like a scam and would not make me want to join the platform.
I actually have a random bot email me saying I have unread messages on a git repo that was cloned by a random Chinese site. I mark it as spam and ignore it.
Anyway, let's imagine people take you up on the offer and convert their accounts, will they have access to the whole fediverse? The big instance ( lemmy.world ) iirc blocks lemmit, and I can imagine would block your instance as well. Defederation is a pain point for people wanting to join the fediverse, and this will exacerbate things.
But let's assume you get all that sorted, and you manage to recruit, let's say a few tens of thousands of people. Have you a plan on how you are going to approach moderation and instance politics? Not saying you haven't, but something to consider if you've not.
Anyway, that's my thoughts. Sorry if I'm a bit negative. I think the way for Lemmy to grow is organically by providing a good value alternative to Reddit. Not by laser focusing on getting as much people and content as possible.
I agree with most of what you said, except this:
There's not really much OC on Reddit
Most of the subreddits I used were largely OC, such as:
- /r/buyitforlife
- /r/scifiwriting
- /r/books
I did like the link aggregation, which initially attracted me (mostly wanted something better than Google News), but I stayed for the OC.
So if there was a tool that would aggregate the OC from Reddit, I'd love it! Most of the content I still use from Reddit is older OC, like headphone advice (just bought another last week) and other stuff I use Reddit for as part of the purchasing process.
However, most of the value from Reddit is the searchability, I just can't find anything on Lemmy, so having that content here wouldn't solve anything. So if OP wants to solve the problems I have with Lemmy, work on full text search on lemmy itself, and if that's good, maybe pulling in content from Reddit would be useful.
I don't want users for the sake of users, and they will come once the platform solves their problems. I'm here because I'm ticked at Reddit and Lemmy is just good enough, but I'm sure others have their pain points as well.
That's fair; I was probably thinking a bit too much about links to blog posts and the like.
Honestly, I think that might be better served by a nice searchable web interface to the Reddit data that the data hoarders people managed to collect.
I firmly believe that the main thing to overcome is not technical, but the network effects. I can not think of any single social media network that has failed because of technical issues and too many users.
Orkut's was a huge success in Brazil and India despite the constant outages. The fail whale being shown repeatedly in 2010 was not a problem for Twitter. I also lost count of how many times I saw the "You broke reddit" banner or cursed at how bad their search results are, but that didn't stop me from coming back.
So, yes, I am also very interested in improving things and I am even trying to get involved with Lemmy development directly, but if we want the Fediverse to succeed we need users and we need them fast. The numbers are not looking good and there are even claims that Reddit has already won.
I disagree, I think Lemmy has a number of technical issues that limit adoption, which limits the network effect. For example:
- poor discoverability - even if someone gives me a community name, I still need to know the instance
- no mod tools - popular communities can be poorly moderated
- instance does matter in some cases, and that's a cognitive load
So that means it's hard to get started, disappointing to keep using, and unappealing to keep using. If you try to dump a bunch of users on that, they'll mostly bounce off.
I personally think a lot of this is architectural. Mod tools can be added later, but the other two are just how the system works.
I'd prefer to build it in a decentralized manner, which means:
- you keep a single namespace, just like Reddit
- remove need for separate instances, so no differences between which instance you pick (and it's okay if one or more go down)
- search would work with the same mechanism as loading content, just with different parameters, so you'd contend with it early in the process
Basically, have it look more like Matrix and less like Mastodon. I think it would be pretty easy to phase it in too, since you could build in a lemmy-compatible server to access this new network, so that way it would look like another instance to other users but it would be a separate thing entirely to native users.
I think lemmy is great, but I don't think it'll overtake Reddit, even if everyone switched today from Reddit to lemmy. It just has too many technical issues that people will bounce off.
I'm all for constructive criticism and (I think) I understand your point of view, but I hope you understand mine: simply put, I think that is unethical to support Reddit and I don't think it is a matter of "choice" between two different platforms. To me is less about "being on Lemmy" and more about "not being on Reddit", if it makes any sense.
I will spare you from a long essay about all the issues with the current landscape in social media platforms and how badly Surveillance Capitalism is. Instead, I will just say that I am putting a lot of effort into building a sustainable alternative to the current platforms owned by Big Tech.
With this in mind, it makes no sense to me when someone says "people can just use Reddit". It is a goal for me to get a sizeable chunk of the population out of these platforms and to help grow the intolerant minority that will flat out refuse to participate in the Big Tech platforms. To me this is the only way to disarm them and to stop them from doing all the damage they are doing to society at large.
Have you a plan on how you are going to approach moderation and instance politics?
I believe that the current issues with "instance politics" are solvable with the next generation of fediverse software, which will allow us to separate the user identities from the server that hosts them - which is already possible with systems like takahe. But anyway, first things first. Let's not get overly anxious about fixable problems and focus on getting people out of the hands of this devil first.
I broadly agree with you, and think that big tech companies are a problem and the fediverse is how social media should be run. However, it's not me or anyone here you want to convince.
Most people just don't feel this strongly about megacorps owning social media. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think the thing holding back Mastodon and Lemmy isn't the instance selection or lack of marketing or whatever. It's the fact that people don't agree with the values, philosophies and ideology of the project. Maybe that's through lack of knowledge, maybe that's through conscious choice, but the fediverse requires a level of "buy in" to the project's ideology, at least at this point.
If you send unsolicited DMs to people, I expect you'll get one of three responses:
- Indifference: "Oh, another spam email. I don't really care".
- Interest: "Oh, there's that Lemmy thing I've seen mentioned. I should look at it".
- Anger: "Really? They took my post and reposted it there? I didn't agree to that, Lemmy is a terrible platform!"
I expect that an "anger" response will probably be more likely than any other response, which will harm adoption. I agree with the sentiment about "getting people off Reddit", but this feels like it's pushing too hard and Redditors might not be as receptive.
I guess it's like going to people on the street and saying that they should stop eating a certain type of food. You just make your group look very pushy and presumptuous, even if you have very good reasons.
IMO, work should be focused on spreading awareness in a non-assertive way about why moving from Reddit to Lemmy is the "correct" choice. Or, we can work on making Lemmy an attractive place (by fixing bugs and papercuts) so that people naturally head here the next time Reddit does an oopsie.
Although, that's all moot with the main practical problem to this approach: How are you going to convince Reddit to actually let you implement this system?
I'm not sure the issue with "instance politics" will be solved by having dedicated identity servers; you're just moving the problem of moderation from one person (running the instance) to another (running the identity servers).
Takahe doesn't really solve this problem (unless I understand what they are doing - their features page is really unclear). You can have multiple identities per user, but that doesn't protect the user account itself from the reputation of the instance owner.
I expect that an “anger” response will probably be more likely than any other response, which will harm adoption.
Only if you assume that the majority of people are on reddit because they have a strong connection to the platform instead of the network, which I really believe to be false.
And also, not what I have experienced with the emacs community. The number of people that responded favorably to an invite was a lot higher than the number of people who showed lack of interest and non-respondents combined.
IMO, work should be focused on spreading awareness in a non-assertive way about why moving from Reddit to Lemmy is the “correct” choice.
Content is king, there is no way around it. Social networks can survive "fail whales" just fine. Bugs on Lemmy can be fixed. What can not be fixed without a major effort is the fact that Lemmy is losing active users and that people on reddit are already adapting to the "new normal" of crappy mobile apps, puppet mods and Surveillance Capitalism.