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
    -2•1 year ago

    I’m all for constructive criticism and (I think) I understand your point of view, but I hope you understand mine: simply put, I think that is unethical to support Reddit and I don’t think it is a matter of “choice” between two different platforms. To me is less about “being on Lemmy” and more about “not being on Reddit”, if it makes any sense.

    I will spare you from a long essay about all the issues with the current landscape in social media platforms and how badly Surveillance Capitalism is. Instead, I will just say that I am putting a lot of effort into building a sustainable alternative to the current platforms owned by Big Tech.

    With this in mind, it makes no sense to me when someone says “people can just use Reddit”. It is a goal for me to get a sizeable chunk of the population out of these platforms and to help grow the intolerant minority that will flat out refuse to participate in the Big Tech platforms. To me this is the only way to disarm them and to stop them from doing all the damage they are doing to society at large.

    Have you a plan on how you are going to approach moderation and instance politics?

    I believe that the current issues with “instance politics” are solvable with the next generation of fediverse software, which will allow us to separate the user identities from the server that hosts them - which is already possible with systems like takahe. But anyway, first things first. Let’s not get overly anxious about fixable problems and focus on getting people out of the hands of this devil first.

    • SavvyWolfEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I broadly agree with you, and think that big tech companies are a problem and the fediverse is how social media should be run. However, it’s not me or anyone here you want to convince.

      Most people just don’t feel this strongly about megacorps owning social media. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think the thing holding back Mastodon and Lemmy isn’t the instance selection or lack of marketing or whatever. It’s the fact that people don’t agree with the values, philosophies and ideology of the project. Maybe that’s through lack of knowledge, maybe that’s through conscious choice, but the fediverse requires a level of “buy in” to the project’s ideology, at least at this point.

      If you send unsolicited DMs to people, I expect you’ll get one of three responses:

      • Indifference: “Oh, another spam email. I don’t really care”.
      • Interest: “Oh, there’s that Lemmy thing I’ve seen mentioned. I should look at it”.
      • Anger: “Really? They took my post and reposted it there? I didn’t agree to that, Lemmy is a terrible platform!”

      I expect that an “anger” response will probably be more likely than any other response, which will harm adoption. I agree with the sentiment about “getting people off Reddit”, but this feels like it’s pushing too hard and Redditors might not be as receptive.

      I guess it’s like going to people on the street and saying that they should stop eating a certain type of food. You just make your group look very pushy and presumptuous, even if you have very good reasons.

      IMO, work should be focused on spreading awareness in a non-assertive way about why moving from Reddit to Lemmy is the “correct” choice. Or, we can work on making Lemmy an attractive place (by fixing bugs and papercuts) so that people naturally head here the next time Reddit does an oopsie.

      Although, that’s all moot with the main practical problem to this approach: How are you going to convince Reddit to actually let you implement this system?

      I’m not sure the issue with “instance politics” will be solved by having dedicated identity servers; you’re just moving the problem of moderation from one person (running the instance) to another (running the identity servers).

      Takahe doesn’t really solve this problem (unless I understand what they are doing - their features page is really unclear). You can have multiple identities per user, but that doesn’t protect the user account itself from the reputation of the instance owner.

      • @rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
        0•1 year ago

        I expect that an “anger” response will probably be more likely than any other response, which will harm adoption.

        Only if you assume that the majority of people are on reddit because they have a strong connection to the platform instead of the network, which I really believe to be false.

        And also, not what I have experienced with the emacs community. The number of people that responded favorably to an invite was a lot higher than the number of people who showed lack of interest and non-respondents combined.

        IMO, work should be focused on spreading awareness in a non-assertive way about why moving from Reddit to Lemmy is the “correct” choice.

        Content is king, there is no way around it. Social networks can survive “fail whales” just fine. Bugs on Lemmy can be fixed. What can not be fixed without a major effort is the fact that Lemmy is losing active users and that people on reddit are already adapting to the “new normal” of crappy mobile apps, puppet mods and Surveillance Capitalism.