this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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All the content, none of the Spez? Or, is it better if Lemmy stays distinct?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Please don't do this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

If I wanted to lurk Reddit, I would just do that. Better to stay your separate thing. It is nice to sometimes get news about the other side of the fence.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nah. This is a fresh start. It's been less than a week and theres already so much more content. It'll grow soon enough. Especially with spez fucking around over there. We want og content here, not all the shit reposts that already plague reddit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Everyday the experience gets better. It's great to see, and I'm glad I'm here for it. I've never known social media to bring me actual joy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Time to get to work.

Cracks knuckles

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I would rather have content posted by humans. Lemmy doesn't need to be reddit anyway.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it’s like breaking up with someone and then dedicating yourself to building a weird, soulless android version of your ex.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the community is much more important than just having more content. I would worry that by flooding Lemmy with Reddit's content without the community to support that content could drown everyone out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I agree. I think being able to tweak a personalised scraper as an opt in service per community could work. Some subs just won't work for this, like askreddit and Eli5, but niche communities, news communities and information communities. I would be happy just seeing the top 2 or 3 posts of the day for some, and for world news for example, only the posts that pass a certain threshold of upvotes in a certain time or against the subs size, to make sure the real news pops up quick.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Use what fediverse is good at. Make an instance where these bots reside and anyone who doesn't want them can just defederate.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I think reposting content from reddit is fine, but we don't need a bot for it. I'd rather see individuals bring over specific posts they think are notable as opposed to automatically copying everything they've got.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thoughts: Content is good atm. If it's spammy it'll get blocked. Or the instance de-federated. Is going to Reddit boosting reddit or draining it by using the content. Reddit has a lot of bad content that Lemmy is free of.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But I also liked the...(whispers) cosplay...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's something I don't miss. Not that I don't admire it, I just keep thinking "wow that's cool but christ what I could do with the money they spent on that".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I say keep it distinct.

Reddit has had its day.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not entirely against the idea, but also really don't want to turn the fediverse into the flood of content that is reddit. Maybe some kind of relative upvote filter based bot. Only posts that get some certain percentage of above average number for a given sub, get scraped.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

eh, maybe wait until 0.18 rolls out across the fediverse before scraping reddit for content

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh? What's that going to do? I'm out of the loop.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

0.17.4 is what is used now and it has a number of issues - included the new/scrolling bug. 0.18 is supposed to fix that & other issues as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

In general, I really do not like this idea. Lemmy is Lemmy and should not, directly or indirectly, turn into Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Nah. If you see something interesting just post the direct link to it instead of going through reddit. Lemmy is a content aggregator after all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Bots in general suck.

But if you as a human want to sift and repost reddit content, please do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you wanna write code to do this ... I'd say skip the bot, write a gateway instead.

Back in the early days of email, there were lots of different email systems, not just the SMTP Internet email we use today. There was UUCP email with "bang paths", where your email address specified a list of servers that a message could be passed through to get to you. There were other networks like FidoNet and WWIVnet, that could send email to Internet email addresses through special "gateway" servers.

A gateway receives messages using one protocol or service, and retransmits or makes them available on another protocol or service.

For a little while in 1992, I had access to read Usenet posts only through a gateway that exported Usenet posts onto the Gopher system.

A gateway between Reddit and Lemmy would appear to Reddit as a web browser, scraping posts and comments; while appearing to Lemmy as a Lemmy instance that users could subscribe to, making each subreddit it scrapes available as a Lemmy community.

So a Lemmy user could subscribe to, say, [email protected] and see a fresh view of AskReddit. The server at reddittolemmy.com would not be a standard Lemmy server with users, but rather a custom gateway server that fetches data from Reddit and makes it available in the form of a Lemmy community.

(If Reddit were not being an asshole, a gateway could be an API client. But Reddit is being an asshole, so a gateway should probably be written as a scraper that accesses Reddit as if it were a normal user using a desktop Web browser.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It'd be a good idea to create an instance with different communities as someone said here for the kind of posts that people could contribute, no matter if reposts are made by people or by bots (in this case, posts need to be filtered by upvotes or upvotes ratio or manually selected), for example some posts I was referring to with my first comment were about some guides or wikis for certain apps, etc. Some important or interesting knowledge that won't be here and that would make people like me forced to rely on Reddit.

That's why I said just get the content of those posts and just give credits to the OP without just copying a link to redirect people to Reddit.

In fact, I wouldn't want this to be filled with Reddit spam posts as most of them are useless.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

A few comments, some of which have been touched on by others:

  • One of the reasons Reddit went to the new pricing was to prevent LLMs from scraping their content and using it for free. I don't think a bot like this would work for the same reason.

  • I personally don't want a duplicate of Reddit. I'd prefer this to be a new community that can do better.

  • One of the things that drove me away from Reddit (besides their horrible handling of 3PAs) was all the bot posts. If there were a way to make sure that bot accounts were identified as such, that would be perfect. Hell, I'd rather have zero bot posts than the current state of Reddit.

TLDR: I vote no.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You could dedicate a community to reddit reposts easy enough. If people want to see the stuff from reddit they can sub, if they would rather wash their hands of reddit they can ignore it or block it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It'd be kind of nice to play catch up a bit with the, what, 18 years of content on Reddit

I know it might feel soulless, but having a constant stream of "pre-approved" content isn't the worst idea

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, any bot you spin up is going to go away at the end of the month when they kill API access, right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think many would be more interested in a migration tool. A way of porting a subreddit's worth of content to lemmy and start off strong, as well as preserve what might be several subreddits getting nuked as damage control.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think there's value to it. There's a ton of really important and helpful documentation on there for all kinds of fields, in the past couple days I've noticed some references I've had for tech issues and guitar repair are no longer accessible, for example. There's going to be a period where looking for help/answers online for certain issues is going to be a nightmare.

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