Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here?
Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here?
Arguments to support the idea:
- According to browse.feddit.de, this is the largest community for showcasing electronics projects, the last post is almost one month old.
- People that signup to alien.top via the fediverserver portal will have this community as the recommended alternative to /r/electronics, but they will pretty much never see it if the community does not have any fresh content and will be more likely to lose interest.
- Despite the usual criticism of mirroring bots, the way that the fediverser tool works is showing to actually help interaction. In the past two weeks, I'm seeing an above average increase of subscriber and (more importantly) user count on communities like !main@selfhosted.forum, !homelab@selfhosted.forum and !emacs@communick.news
Mirroring reddit posts is so incredibly annoying
The point is not just to mirror posts, it's also to create a clear migration path for people who are still using reddit because the niche communities have not achieved critical mass here.
Besides, those who are on lemmy.world have nothing to worry about because the LW admins have defederated from alien.top.
Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.
Imagine signing up and finding that all the posts are just cross-posts from reddit with barely any engagement.
One of the main things I despise about this concept is that it provides an implication that lemmy is some kind of budget-reddit. As though, all the good content is on reddit but we're all camped out here on lemmy.
The way to build a community is to simply post more.
To respond to your other comment here also:
I’m working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.
Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?
the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy
That's not my experience. I've only ever seen dozens of cross posts with no comments.
I think mirroring questions and requests for help is a terrible idea, no one is going to want to answer a question here if most of them are mirrored and the original asker is not here to get the answer.
It's frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.
Your points are valid, but turns out that the practice is showing different results:
the original asker is not here to get the answer.
I'm working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.
It’s frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.
This is not what is happening at the selfhosted communities. Turns out that a lot of the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy already.
A manually curated mirror of interesting Reddit posts that are self-contained, would be useful. But a bot just mindlessly copying and pasting everything would push us away
If you see something interesting on reddit... just post it here, problem solved.
It's not just about the links, it's also the discussion threads from "self" posts.
In support of jet> as a person not currently a member, encountering it on my /all lemmy feed, I'll repeat what I've said about other communities I find interesting in the past that suddenly become spammy:
Just block it. The moment I start seeing 10+ posts from a bot from the same community, I just block the community. Blocking the bot is of course an option, but I tend to be of the opinion that communities that allow that kind of spam into the fediverse don't belong in my feed.
The Reddit activity vs Lemmy activity is a real problem though. OP's two-way mirror option is definitely a way to overcome that, but sounds like it would be real spammy. I'm not sure what a good solution for Lemmy's activity problem is though; it may just be accepting smaller less active, but more tight knit communities than Reddit had, or fewer communities existing unless they reach a certain critical mass.
if its a real two way bridge, then its at least real human conversations, even if they are not lemmies. If they can read and respond to your comments, I think its a win.
it wouldn't make sense for World News, we have enough fighting there by ourselves. But VLSI design.... sure, why not?
See point #3 of my list. The particular clever thing about the tool is that it is not using one single bot account to mirror the content, but it actually creates a mirror account for every poster and commenter who participates in the discussion. This is showing some interesting advantages:
- The conversation "feels" organic.
- It makes it possible for the reddit user to "take over" the mirror account, which helps conversion.
- (WIP) It allows two-way conversation between lemmy and reddit, which for the niche communities will tend to favor lemmy (As in, conversations started in Lemmy happen only in Lemmy, but conversations started on reddit will be both on Lemmy and reddit)
How about we give this a go for a couple of weeks? This community in particular is pretty much inactive anyway. If people feel annoyed by the mirrored posts or think that is detrimental to the community, I can disable them again.
Rather than mirror reddit posts here, you can set up a dedicated community for that so people that want that kind of thing can get it. No need to kill an existing community further.
That's exactly what I am doing for lots of communities that have no reddit equivalent, and what I did for !main@selfhosted.forum when it was clear that !selfhosted@lemmy.world was already somewhat active. Regarding these, go take a look at the usage numbers for both, tell me which is going up and which is going down...
If there's more activity on Reddit then here, then Reddit repost bots make it feel like all the community action is happening on Reddit. They push people back to Reddit because that's where all the new posts are coming from, so why engage here if the active discussion is already in progress over there?
Communities with >50% repost content are unsubscribed by me. If I have communities spamming my timeline with reposts, I just block em. Having to open at least two link and read the content on both sites just to get the info and understand the discussion/context is generally a huge waste of my time.
Interesting comments all round. Let's run with the discussion for a week to allow infrequent visitors a chance to comment and then see if there's a strong trend towards a specific opinion.
After 9 days, the upvotes and downvotes are tied so nothing changes for now, but we can revisit later.
Personally, I'd prefer organic growth rather than reposting stuff from Reddit.
Spread the word about the sub!
I greatly prefer the occasional original post with actuall engagement to a flood of reposts. If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit (and also get comments and things like that). On a more meta level, the only way a community can gain and retain users is by offering unique content. If 99% of content is just content from Reddit (with missing comments), why should anyone bother to use Lemmy?
Subscribing to a comunity does not cost anything, very few people will leave a community because it is dead, but people will leave a community that spams their feed.
Sorry, your comment is just rehashing all the arguments that I had in many other discussions:
If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit
The idea is to not give more traffic to reddit and to help people get out of it. By having the content mirrored here, not only we have a method to consume the content from there, we also ensure that the majority of people (a.k.a, the 90% of lurkers) can find on Lemmy the content they are used to consume from Reddit, thus facilitating the migration and fueling network effects.
with missing comments
My system also mirrors the comments, so you won't be missing anything.
but people will leave a community that spams their feed.
I'm not talking about mirroring posts from communities that are super popular. The idea is to get the content from the long tail of niche communities. There won't be a "flood" of spam because we are talking about communities that have a handful of posts and comments per day.