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.

  • SavvyWolfEnglish
    2•10 months ago

    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.

    • @rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      0•10 months ago

      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.