Rust @programming.dev rglullis @communick.news 1 yr. ago

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
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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37 comments

So, I've posted a negative comment below. But since I've slept on this and thought about it a bit more, I am starting to think something like this could work... But with some caveats.

The idea is to create a fediverse "client" of sorts that mirrors content to and from Reddit. A "bridge" like in Matrix, I guess.

Some challenges and prerequisites:

On the Reddit end, this needs to be in an automod autopost and/or pinned post, saying there's an experimental bot crossposting to Lemmy (And you need to convince the mods on the subreddit end to allow you to do this).

It should be a separate community. The rust community here is growing organically with a distinct culture, and it'd be a shame to destroy all that culture with a firehose of comment. The Lemmy community could also have unique content, and some users could also just prefer a small, cosy community.

That separate community should have an obvious name so that people don't confuse it with the real Lemmy community (instance names don't count). Maybe like bridge_r_rust.

You need to convince Reddit itself to let you do this. I don't know how you'd do that.

I don't think it's a good idea to pm responses; just have the bot respond to messages directly on Reddit. It gives more visibility anyway. Making it public removes a lot of my concerns with harassing people.

Honestly, I feel giving people the ability to convert these bot accounts to real accounts feels like scope creep, and brings up a lot of technical challenges. Maybe just leave that be for now.

I think you'd need to speak to the people that run the big instances to see if you can avoid getting defederated. Perhaps the bridge community could be hidden by default in the all feed.

There needs to be a way to get people off the bridged community and into the "real" Lemmy community... It'd be a shame to do all this work and just end up with an alternate front-end for Reddit that ends up killing Lemmy.

I think bridged communities could actually work if you can solve the challenges above and provide a way for people to get from them to Lemmy itself.
- Thank you for not dismissing my work right away and giving some more time and thought into it, I really appreciate it. I think that there is a lot in your feedback that makes a lot of sense:
  
  Having an automod post certainly would help. It would give a strong signal that the community on reddit is trying to migrate away from it. I think this could be achieved on the communities that were more vocal during the protests, but on the other hand I already had the experience on /r/emacs and there was a strong rejection from (some of) their moderators.
  
  I was initially against the idea of making a two-way bridge to post Lemmy comments there, but I'm starting to accept it. I'm still not sure how that would work in terms of API usage and if this would incur costs for those running the fediverser servers (on top of the costs of running Lemmy) but I'm willing to try it out.
  
  Speaking with the people in the big instances is something I'm already doing (or at least I'm trying to by posting about the tool in different communities before unleashing it) :)
  
  The idea is not to automate everything and create a "firehose of reddit bots" here. I was talking with the admin of programming.dev yesterday and we seem to agree to cap "fediversed" posts to a maximum of 25% of "organic" posts that the community had in the previous day. We can also agree that link posts should not have the comments, and that "self posts" with questions or topical discussions can bring some of the comment threads. This means that the very small communities would be seeing only one post a day, and the ones that are growing or more established would never be suddenly taken over by the bot army.
  
  Some of the other things though, I think will be harder to change or compromise, and if the admins or mods reject the proposal I will flat out not use the tool there:
  
  I do not see the point in creating a separate community. I am fully aware that the bots and their automated posts should never become a sizable part of the community, but I feel like that if keep them separate them it ends up being as toothless as lemmit.online.
  
  I do not want to ask permission from Reddit to do this. They've already been quite hostile to the third-party devs that were willing to work together, I can only imagine that they would never be welcoming to someone who's is clearly aiming at getting their most valuable individuals in their userbase.
  
  The idea to let reddit users register and take over their bot accounts is fundamental to this project. I want to make it very clear that this whole thing is a strategy to get people into the fediverse and put strong focus on the content creators of small-to-medium communities. I am trying to bootstrap a business around it and this is my attempt at increasing the TAM. The more people on the fediverse/threadiverse, the more SMB segment will look into establishing their media presence on the fediverse as well, and then I can start to actually have a sustainable operation.
  
  Thanks for listening to my feedback; I know I can be a bit forceful and dismissive at times.
  
  If you are going to go through with this, please get permission from the subreddits you are trying to bridge beforehand. If some drama breaks out (which it will, because people online love drama), you'd rather them be on your side than against you. If someone takes issue with anything, then that's something the subreddit mods can deal with, not you. They can also manage announcements of what is happening, and give you an air of legitimacy.
  
  I do not want to ask permission from Reddit to do this.
  
  You need Reddit's permission. They have complete control over their platform and have the final say on what people do on it. They can ban anyone at any time for any reason. If you try to do something without their permission, they'll just start banning your bots and send you takedown requests. I know it sucks, but they hold all the power here, and have made it clear that they want to stomp out competition.
  
  I completely agree with talking with the mods in the subreddits, but I can not possibly see how Reddit Inc will ever greenlight something like this. In a way, I'm actually hoping they will try to ban it because it would create some type of Streisand Effect.
  
  They can try to ban the first or the second fediverser API key used by the fediverser app that I bring online, but if tens/hundreds of people start doing it, this would mean effectively that we will grow an army of independent crawlers and evangelizers for Lemmy and the fediverse in general.

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