I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
They don’t exist yet. Each bot on alien.top represents a real account on reddit. If you think that their question is legit and worthy of a response, but you don’t want to give Reddit even more data, the best thing you can do is respond on Lemmy and send a message to the origjnal asker to tell them about Lemmy and help them migrate.
Please, do not feel discouraged to participate. The idea of the bots is not to be a simple mirror, but to bootstrap real conversation. The next step of Fediverser is to allow two-way communication so that Reddit users can see the Lemmy content and migrate.
The reason that alien.top content seems so overwhelming now is more to Lemmy"s losing its activity than a real “flood” of bots. My hope is that people will join in to the point of balancing out, but if this is leading to the opposite effect I will have to turn off, and that will be a shame because there are hundreds of people already using it “as intended”
it’s sort of wasting people’s effort on lemmy and not creating true engagement
Even if we don’t have two-way communication, having the content mirrored has two purposes:
it allows lurkers to move away from reddit and browse here.
it works as a prompt for conversation between “organic” subscribers.
I will add a comment to every post though (similar to how AutoModerator does) to indicate that is a mirrored comment and with general instructions on how to interact with the bots and some links to describe the project.
Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.
The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be. The goal is to get the majority to switch and re-center in a place that is determined by the intolerant minority.
As though, all the good content is on reddit but we’re all camped out here on lemmy.
Which is true, if we are being honest. And if we are being even more honest with ourselves, most of the people that came to Lemmy are going back to Reddit because there is no content for the niche communities here. I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?
We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.
Our problem should not be with the people on reddit, but reddit itself. Instead of pretending that we don’t care about the people there, we should try to find ways to bring them here.
Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?
The comment would not be coming from a bot account, it would come from the redditor who have used the “Fediverser portal” to connect the accounts (and given permission to send comments) so it would also be “organic”.
completely drop reddit without losing access to its content and the communities that are there.
create a migration path for the people who are on reddit and don’t want to give it away because there is no real alternative.
I’m also one that comments, I just don’t want to do that on reddit anymore. I want to be able to do that on Lemmy, and have the two-way bridge until the community here is self-sustainable. This is how I think this tool can be helpful.
An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum.
Agree, 100%.
The thing is, you can’t force it.
Agree, 100%.
The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.
That’s where we disagree. Not because I don’t think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I don’t think this is enough.
The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of “1/9/90” of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.
I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldn’t get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should “go read some books so I can ask questions”?
No, I’m sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.
The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It won’t be “forced”, but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say “it’s fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmy”.
That’s exactly what I am doing for lots of communities that have no reddit equivalent, and what I did for !main when it was clear that !selfhosted was already somewhat active. Regarding these, go take a look at the usage numbers for both, tell me which is going up and which is going down…
Sorry, your comment is just rehashing all the arguments that I had in many other discussions:
If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit
The idea is to not give more traffic to reddit and to help people get out of it. By having the content mirrored here, not only we have a method to consume the content from there, we also ensure that the majority of people (a.k.a, the 90% of lurkers) can find on Lemmy the content they are used to consume from Reddit, thus facilitating the migration and fueling network effects.
with missing comments
My system also mirrors the comments, so you won’t be missing anything.
but people will leave a community that spams their feed.
I’m not talking about mirroring posts from communities that are super popular. The idea is to get the content from the long tail of niche communities. There won’t be a “flood” of spam because we are talking about communities that have a handful of posts and comments per day.
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here?
Arguments to support the idea:...