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

    Sorry, I saw your message but only now I had the time to stop to try to answer it. First of all, I should apologize for the bot running on !elixir@programming.dev, that was my dev instance and should not be even connected to the public internet when I ran those test jobs. I’d actually kindly ask you to please defederate from fediverser.communick.dev to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

    I just to make it clear that is not my plan to flood any community and that the idea is to only submit content when it seems to be aligned with the overall posts in the community and I hope that I can do everything according to the guidelines for each community. I just to make my case for what I’d consider to be a reasonable approach and check if these guidelines can be revised/approved:

    • For a lot of the programming communities, the value is not in the link sharing but in the “self posts”: questions and discussions around some topic or event that has happened. Just copy-pasting a question feels worse than a bot, because my tool is built with the idea to get the original poster here as well. Perhaps this rule could be relaxed for “self posts”, and the tool could bring the post along with the top N threads (N=3). This way, the people already here would see a post with some of the content (which could be an incentive for them to join in a conversation) and my tool could also pick up the replies from here and notify the users on reddit.

    • The tool is not meant to be a simple cross-poster, but *to build an off-ramp from reddit into the fediverse". In this sense, it would be better if the communities already had some organic activity as to dilute the feeling that only bots are participating. IOW, a community where we have 4 “organic” posts and 2 bot posts seem better than one that is dominated by one bot posting only one message every day. Would you consider revising the rule so that so that the bot could post at most 25% of the total of “organic posts” from the previous day?

    • If you think in terms of “how well this community is going in relation to the reddit” instead of “how it is doing in relation to each other”, the numbers are pitiful. If we go to /r/rust right now, it shows about ~250k subscribers and 1000 active visitors, and this is even after the mods from /r/rust explicitly expressed their wishes to move to Lemmy. Even if it sounds a bit elitist, I agree with the people who do not want to bring all of reddit to Lemmy, but I think that a tool like mine could be used to bring the top 1% and focus on the best content creators.

    • AtegonM
      1•1 year ago

      Will respond to both of your message here

      Starting with the one at the top. GDPR encompases more than just PII. The messages themselves are mostly not covered but usernames are (as its a unique identifier that distinguishes one person from another (and if you want to go in terms of PII it can be used to easily identify a person as well)) as well as misc information that might be in the messages (e.g. if someone says they work for X company or says their actual name)

      If you can make it so none of the messages you post are affected by that (every message posted is done by the same user, messages are filtered to remove any with personal data) (and optimally also get approval of the OP) then I would be more inclined to accept it (but up to the discretion of the mods of the community, not a site wide approval). Sure I can revise it to the 25% rule, ill make it 25% with a max

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

        Sorry, I will challenge you on the notion of usernames as personal identifiers. Last time I had to go through legal advice for a system we were building, the final advice was that usernames are only treated as such if they can be correlated with other online data, such as cookies or authentication tokens. To give an absurd example, if you sign in to a website and claim the username “rglullis” you will not be in any way connected to me and therefore the username can not be used as an “online identifier”.

        • AtegonM
          2•1 year ago

          it still 99% of time can point you towards someone (or severely limit the options and you can track them down from that) assuming its not common enough of one and its still something that uniquely separates people even without that. (And from the username here people can look up the user on reddit and then look up their post history for info on them as well)

          ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person; (GDPR Art. 4)

          an online identifier

          Not a lawyer so I cant fully speak on it but I would rather err on the side of caution when dealing with this sort of thing until I get actual legal confirmation otherwise specific to our site and this

          Platforms like discord (and reddit) need to anonymize the messages when someone deletes their account by assigning it to a generic deleted user thats used for everyone