Oh great, more reddit bots.
Look, Tiktok didn't beat the accusatiob of being a shitter version of Vine by copypasting content from Vine. They copied the ideas and put a new spin on it. Lemmy communities have to learn from Reddit, and Digg, and 4chan, and all the mistakes that came with the implementation of these technologies.
This is not to try to improve the "product", this is just a set of tools to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem and eventually give an easy way for people to migrate away from Reddit.
One of the things that I am hoping to add soon is a keybase-style system to authenticate users on reddit by sending a DM with a secret. This would let any user to take control of their "mirror bot" and effectively give them an account on the fediverse with the communities and content they already are used to follow.
Your goals are beyond my understanding.
In simple terms: my goal is to build a system that can help people jump off from reddit by making it as frictionless as possible. We can have a system where we transport their accounts, history, communities and conversations to the fediverse all while we smooth out the issues with the existing software.
Pretty sure this is not legal
Questionable legality aside, who wants this? I thought we created these federated platforms to get away from all that garbage. The last thing I want is more bots spamming content here (not to mention a lot of the content on the sites it'd be pulling from are spam/bot content in the first place).
Anyone who still has to regularly visit Reddit because of all the niche subreddits that have great communities there but 1 post per month here.
I agree that bots shouldn't spam content, but help people on command, like the TL;DR bot. But why was Reddit garbage? Was it for its bots, or was it for its toxic environment? Because, in my own opinion and experience, bots weren't a big deal over there. Instead, who was the brave enough person able to comment and face all kind of shit just because his/her comment?
Don't ignore the whole garbage hiding under the carpet half of it and expose the other half to the people claiming "I don't want this filth."
This is just my personal take on it: Way too much of reddit is thought-free, just kind of spending time making in-jokes, or posting charming or funny one-off pictures, just kind of farting around. That is a fine activity, but it's very far removed from what the potential could be of this type of communication network, and what the original goal of reddit was, back in the Aaron Swartz days.
I actually didn't really notice how far in that direction it had gone until I tried out Lemmy a few months ago, and I found it refreshingly free of the exact same types of vacuous content, and now I've been watching as all that stuff migrates onto Lemmy. I've been progressively unsubscribing from a lot of communities as the average worthwhileness of their posts progressively drops. I actually don't agree at all with the need to "win" by absorbing into Lemmy the user base of Reddit -- I think the goal is to have a high quality network where good discussion happens, which sometimes means more users, but more vitally should mean a good culture with worthwhile content.
This is just kind of a side note, but the other thing I've observed is that the "you're not allowed to say certain things" mentality of reddit is now here on Lemmy as well. I actually tried out having a couple of heated debates with some tankies in Lemmy tankie forums, early on, curious about whether I would get banned or anything. They downvoted and yelled at me to no end, but no one deleted anything or said I wasn't allowed to have my opinion. Twice in the last couple of days I've had some thread I'm participating in get deleted because mods found it to be a discussion that people weren't allowed to have.
I do think there's some valuable stuff on reddit, or basically anywhere -- people are great sometimes, and if you give them a place they can talk, sometimes they'll use it to say great stuff. But I do agree 100% with the reluctance to import reddit as it is and instead to try to make a distinct culture that's, for lack of a better word, better.
This is less about the people who are already here (though it can be helpful to them as well) and more about the people who are still there because they claim they stick to reddit because they can't find their content here.
The last thing I want is more bots spamming content here.
What is "here"? This system works by making a mapping between subreddits and specific lemmy communities. So if I am running this tool and all I want to mirror the content of /r/python into !python@programming.dev, this all it's going to do. I hope that no one will be trying to run this with the largest subreddits, because if they went on to do it would be inviting themselves to be blocked/defederated.
I would put money on the fact that the mods of that python community would not want that bot to be run. As others have mentioned, we want to have our lemmy community garner a community and culture organically, completely detached from any sort of roots in a different social media site. I obviously cannot stop you from running this bot in your own community, but I, personally, am blocking any sort of reddit bots or other connector bots.
I really don't believe rapid growth/engagement injection is a priority for Lemmy. I'd rather focus on cultivating small communities that can engage in thoughtful and meaningful debates on posts that wanted to be shared by posters, and not generated by bots.
The conversation is not "generated by bots". The conversation happened by actual people just on a different place, and this tool is a way to try to bring some of these people here, where the environment is less toxic and gives power back to the people.
I disagree here. The original poster and conversation was started on another platform without any regard or consideration for a platform like Lemmy. They posted it on Reddit, for Reddit, and for Reddit's culture. Not us. Any replies made on Lemmy would not go to the OP on Reddit. Thus, as far as I care, it's a post made by a bot. Any emotion or care towards the intended destination community has been detached the moment it was taken by a bot and put somewhere else.
If someone asks a question on /r/python, and it gets posted here on Lemmy, why would I bother replying? It's not directed towards us, and the OP wouldn't ever see it, so it's just spam at that point.
Not us.
I do agree that there is some truth to "The Medium is the Message", but I honestly don't see that much of a difference in medium between social media networks that are very similar in their design.
It’s not directed towards us, and the OP wouldn’t ever see it.
I have more than a handful of people already that signed up to !emacs@communick.news after I saw a question they posted on /r/emacs and I sent them a DM asking them to post their question here as well. There is nothing stopping this tool (it's actually my next item to work on) to streamline this process.
It's virtually impossible to prevent people from doing it, yes. It's extremely easy to punish people who are doing it. Do you know what charges Aaron Swartz was facing, and what he was aiming to do that got him those charges?
Edit: Actually, these people are a little bit better example, since Aaron Swartz did commit additional crimes in support of the original goal of distributing material from a web site.
Would you mind explaining why nothing of substance was thrown against the developer of bird.makeup and/or the admins of the numerous Twitter-to-Mastodon bridges?
Fair question. There are lots of things which happen which are technically illegal which no one cares enough to prosecute. That doesn't mean those things are safe or a good idea. A person I know told me the story of his company deciding "Well if the government doesn't feel like prosecuting our employee for doing X, and they know about it, then probably it's fine" and then the dude got federally indicted a really hilariously short time later. These things do happen; that's why I bring up Aaron Swartz and the people the RIAA sued.
Reddit is a different company from Twitter with different leadership. Twitter seems to be going in the direction of "interoperate with the fediverse and try to steer it" while reddit is still stuck in the mode of "keep stubbornly fucking up and search for people to blame and punish." (Twitter's doing that also, just as part of the fediverse now while they're doing it.) I think the risk of legal action from reddit is a lot more realistic.
It'd be different if I thought that mirroring reddit was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and they were going to try to prosecute people but that was wrong and so distributing reddit's contents to unrelated people's instances was involving them in something noble. My personal feeling is I don't think that though. I feel like if reddit wants to keep their content off the fediverse they should be allowed to do so, and so you're putting other instance operators at genuine legal risk to accomplish something which shouldn't be done in the first place. Just my personal moral / ethical opinion on it, which colors the way I look at the legal side.
The approach that I am taking here is to have all the user accounts on the mirror instance(s). The idea would be that the people running this should at least get an okay from the "mapped" communities, and any admin that is concerned about the legal aspects of this can simply defederate from the mirrors. I will add that to the docs.
The use of "legacy" here is curious? Is the implication Reddit is "legacy"?
If that's the intent, this comes across as phony as Microsoft stamping "Modern" on all their bullshit lately.
I'd rather not having more targeted advertising crawling through my Mastodon
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