Thoughts on (semi-)automated tool to import content from /r/rust to this community? - eviltoast

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.

  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I firmly believe that the main thing to overcome is not technical, but the network effects. I can not think of any single social media network that has failed because of technical issues and too many users.

    Orkut’s was a huge success in Brazil and India despite the constant outages. The fail whale being shown repeatedly in 2010 was not a problem for Twitter. I also lost count of how many times I saw the “You broke reddit” banner or cursed at how bad their search results are, but that didn’t stop me from coming back.

    So, yes, I am also very interested in improving things and I am even trying to get involved with Lemmy development directly, but if we want the Fediverse to succeed we need users and we need them fast. The numbers are not looking good and there are even claims that Reddit has already won.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      1 year ago

      I disagree, I think Lemmy has a number of technical issues that limit adoption, which limits the network effect. For example:

      • poor discoverability - even if someone gives me a community name, I still need to know the instance
      • no mod tools - popular communities can be poorly moderated
      • instance does matter in some cases, and that’s a cognitive load

      So that means it’s hard to get started, disappointing to keep using, and unappealing to keep using. If you try to dump a bunch of users on that, they’ll mostly bounce off.

      I personally think a lot of this is architectural. Mod tools can be added later, but the other two are just how the system works.

      I’d prefer to build it in a decentralized manner, which means:

      • you keep a single namespace, just like Reddit
      • remove need for separate instances, so no differences between which instance you pick (and it’s okay if one or more go down)
      • search would work with the same mechanism as loading content, just with different parameters, so you’d contend with it early in the process

      Basically, have it look more like Matrix and less like Mastodon. I think it would be pretty easy to phase it in too, since you could build in a lemmy-compatible server to access this new network, so that way it would look like another instance to other users but it would be a separate thing entirely to native users.

      I think lemmy is great, but I don’t think it’ll overtake Reddit, even if everyone switched today from Reddit to lemmy. It just has too many technical issues that people will bounce off.