Community cleanup - eviltoast

Since its inception, the Lemmit instance has been controversial. That might be an understatement, but let’s roll with it for now. One of the major issues people have with the bot, is the cross-posting of “interactive” Reddit posts, ie posts where the value lies in interacting with the OP, like AskMen, AskWomen, and AmITheAsshole. Personally, I fully agree with that viewpoint, but I didn’t feel like interfering with supply and demand - in the sense that AmITheAsshole, for some reason, is the most subscribed community on this server.

That might change though. Earlier this week, I disabled the posibility to request new subreddits. This weekend I will follow that up by disabling the scraping of so-called interactive communities. So in order to facilitate that, I created a list of all the communities on this server (posted separately in !about@lemmit.online), and I will check each of them to see if they should be disabled. The goal is to keep a list of “content only” (or at least “content mostly”) communities, where the value lies in the link that’s provided or in the body of the self-post - not in the comment section. I’m sure this is going to be a disappointment to some people, but I do agree with the sentiment that this is better for Lemmy as a whole.

Edit: It is done. All 816 communities have been checked and and 110 of those have been purged from updates. I am sure some mistakes were made - that some communities have been disabled or left intact when they shouldn’t have. If that’s the case, reach out to me, and I’ll fix it.

  • Gamera8ID@kaijus.us
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I realize that lemmit.online is reviled for creating noise with high traffic subreddit reposts, but I want to supply another perspective. My city subreddit is one of the communities you’ve disabled already. It’s a small city, with few subscribers on Reddit. There is no Lemmy community for my city, and no one even posts to the Lemmy community which exists for my state. So, no, I’m not going to create a Lemmy community to talk to myself. The loss of the lemmit.online community for my city means that I’ll need to use Reddit, and if I’m going to be there anyway then I might as well just give up on Lemmy rather than have to use both.

    • admin@lemmit.onlineOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      No problem, as far as I’m concerned, all suspensions are negotiable. Which one was it? I’ll re-enable it straight away.

      • Gamera8ID@kaijus.us
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Thanks. It’s https://lemmit.online/c/Boise. IMHO The tiny subreddits with very few posts that don’t cause front page Lemmy noise are the most important to retain, because Lemmy does not yet have the userbase to support its own niche communities.

        • admin@lemmit.onlineOPM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Voila:

          2023-10-07 17:23:54,906 - root - INFO - Community Boise is ENABLED, has 67 subscribers and 0 posts per day.
          

          I understand your argument, and fully agree. There’s over 800 communities that I have to check though, so mistakes will be made.

          • Gamera8ID@kaijus.us
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            1 year ago

            Totally understand, and thank you. I’m frustrated with the folks attacking lemmit.online, not you for providing the service. Much appreciated.

  • Ilflish@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Will you be opening up requests in the future and will you be re-evaluating curring communities of are you happy with the communities being used currently?

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    While I personally liked having the bot, and wasn’t bothered by it since I only browse subscribed communities, I understand the change :)

    I had a question that I never got around to asking: Would it be possible to be added as a moderator of a Lemmit community?

    I’m still involved with my university subreddit, and it’s a fairly large one (/r/UBC). It would be great to have that content here so that users wouldn’t have to go to Reddit for it. However, one worry I had was about removing content. It doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes users do post personally identifying information or photos of other students (bullying / harassment), or link to harmful materials, etc. So the worry was that the bot would post the content here, and it would stick around even after being removed from Reddit.

    Being added as a moderator to the lemmit community seemed like the easy solution. In the off chance that we need to remove content (ex. harmful, or when the original user requests the deletion), we could remove it directly. For communities that request something like that, it should be possible to verify that the request is valid through modmail or something.

    Alternatively, the bot could be set up to check and remove content that has been removed from Reddit, but that might go against the archival principle and also consume significantly more resoures

    • admin@lemmit.onlineOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Funnily enough, it initially was the intention to have the bot check up on everything it posted, to see if it got deleted. In that way, it would outsource moderation to Reddit. I never got around to that, and am not sure I ever will.

      So for now, handing out moderation to others is a good workaround. In order for me to make you a mod, you’ll need to leave a comment in the community, and mention me @admin@lemmit.online.

      Actually, checking out the subreddit in question, that’s exactly the kind of content I want to avoid on here. Most of the posts on there are to invoke discussion, either with the OP or other members. You’d be better off starting a new community on your own instance.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Yes that’s fair, so far we do have a community here and most users are likely using both Lemmy and Reddit. So I won’t request /r/UBC unless there’s a justifiable reason for it in the future. In the meantime we can probably repost the relevant content to the community.

        Still that’s good to know for other subreddits that would be more appropriate to have here

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        That makes sense, and it’s totally understandable thank you :)

        I’ll check with the other mods, and I’ll request / mention you if we decide to go for it :)