this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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General Discussion

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Edit: It seems like there's enough people that would prefer this didn't happen for some pretty good reasons. For that reason, I'm not going to move forward with this idea.

I was thinking it'd be nice to have a bot pull top posts from Reddit, and repost them to their corresponding Lemmy analogs to help bolster the content available on Lemmy while it's growing. I'm not sure if this kind of functionality would be desired by other users, or legal under Reddit ToS. I was thinking that if this was desired, it could be done for cheap under Reddit's new API costs. An effort would also be made to prevent reposts as well. I would definitely like to hear everyone's opinions on this.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

I feel like the new communities are budding just fine. I say let nature take its course.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Legal, probably. Bad taste? Yeah, definitely. I get the idea, but the people who are still posting over there having their shit just get copied over here is going to give people a bad impression of the fediverse. If the fediverse is strong enough to replace reddit, then it can stand on its own and make it's own unique stuff.

[–] Jessica 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you been paying attention to Reddit content for the past I don’t even know how many years? It’s all TikTok and twitter reposts, and before that it was 9gag and 4chan reposts. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what op is asking if the past is anything to go off of

[–] rayquetzalcoatl 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But do we want Lemmy to be reposts of Reddit which is reposts of TikTok, Twitter, 9gag, and 4chan? I'd say fresh content here would be the best foot forward to start with!

[–] Jessica 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean the beauty of the fediverse is you can have your cake and eat it too in this scenario. If someone wants to spin up an instance that’s just reposts that duplicate communities elsewhere, you could selectively subscribe to both or only the one without reposts.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl 2 points 1 year ago

True, I guess it's an "if you don't like it, don't look at it" sorta thing

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

Its a link aggregator. If the content is good then post it here. Including links to interesting reddit threads.

[–] danc4498 14 points 1 year ago

Reddit didnt create any of its content. WE did. So, ethically, I see no problem.

I know their API has rules against doing stuff like that. So you may get your API key blocked if you did it.

Also, for a long time I had a ITTT bot copying the top videos content to a Google sheets doc. I only did it for science, but it ran until they stopped supporting that.

[–] zipdog 13 points 1 year ago

I'd say if someone is planning to do this just create a new lemmy explicitly for this purpose. I don't think it would be healthy for existing communities if too many posts are just copied from reddit with no OP to engage with.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl 13 points 1 year ago

I don't love the idea, although I understand why it might seem like a good one.

I left Reddit because of the decisions they made. I'm sure plenty of the people here did the same. We didn't like Reddit, so let's do something different, rather than just trying to make Reddit again here.

New content, new community, new infrastructure - a different setup might lead to a different, hopefully better, outcome!

Just my opinion though, and I do totally understand why more content would be a good idea!

[–] Brunbrun6766 12 points 1 year ago

Nah fuckem, raid their meme stores for all they are worth

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The content wasn’t made by reddit; it was made by the community. It would be good to credit the author though.

[–] taigaman 3 points 1 year ago

I'm definitely for crediting the user that originally posted the content. I'd want to be very transparent about the fact that this was a bot reposting content. I'm thinking about doing this mostly for links. I'm not sure if this bot would even try and handle pics/videos/text.

[–] rarkgrames 8 points 1 year ago

Personally I don’t like the idea.

I honestly think Lemmy should not just be a clone of Reddit (either in terms of trying to match functionality exactly or filling it up with content from Reddit).

I get where you’re coming from in terms of trying to bolster the amount of content but truly I think Lemmy will do just fine with original content.

Apart from anything else, imho the quality of posts here on Lemmy that I’ve seen so far are, generally, quite good. Reddit seems to have been going downhill and I wouldn’t be surprised if the quality on Reddit gets worse following the current issues.

As someone else mentioned, maybe an instance or community could host that content but I think it would be important that users would be able to block it if they don’t want to see it.

[–] s38b35M5 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My thinking on the topic is that if a reddit sub/community decides to make the complete transition to lemmy, the mod team should be free to pull their content in if they choose.

I don't really see the purpose of porting old content though, unless it has historical value.

That said, anyone can definitely spin up their own instance and grab the full text dump of reddit from before PushShift was disallowed. You'd need to build some tools to do that I suspect.

Edit: clarity

[–] taigaman 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FWIW, I wasn't looking to pull in anything historical. Just thought it could be handy to pull in current topics from the top of a subreddit for that day. I'm not sure at what frequency it would be pull/post exactly, and it wouldn't even be repeating everything from a given subreddit. I was also thinking I'd do it all from one user so if someone didn't like it, they could just block it.

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

The problem with automatically pulling stuff from reddit is that it dominates the feed because reddit is more popular than lemmy. If you get a post or two a day from reddit that would be fine.

[–] miked 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm planning on raiding the FAQ from one group. There is info added by many users including myself.

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

That's what I've been doing. Copying over all my saved posts and useful wikis

[–] Pat12 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i hope not, i don't know how else to start building up the communities i recreated

if someone recognizes a meme they made i will 100% give them credit in the post

[–] narrowscoped 2 points 1 year ago

People copy their tiktoks and post to YouTube and insta, this is no different (except not being mind numbing content lol)

[–] flynnguy 6 points 1 year ago

I don't think I'd automate it, especially because going forward that content is something that whoever posted, intended the post to go to reddit, not lemmy. Especially if it's someone asking for advice or something personal like that.

However, if it's a link to a youtube video or a tiktok or a news article or something, I see no reason why you couldn't essentially cross post that. But again, I don't think I'd automate it because then if they added some sort of commentary around it, you'd be just copying them. But copy the link and add your own commentary, I think that's fine.

[–] Dick_Justice 5 points 1 year ago

I dunno... Just my personal yhoughts of course but i kind of like the current situation that requires a bit of savviness and curiosity to get going with fediverse. It acts as a bit of a filter for low effort posters and commentary.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'd be pretty keen on an automated bot that pulls in top content. Most of these posts usually link back to an article, image or video anyway so the value would be creating the post here and generating the conversation (I'd argue the real value we want to focus on here are the comments)

[–] Duchess 4 points 1 year ago

if it was someone manually moving their content over here but a bot sounds like a really bad idea.

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

I think it's a great idea for the short term growth of the fediverse

[–] taigaman 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I wouldn't make this with the intent of it being a forever solution. I just want to make sure there's sufficient content for new users to see so they'll stick around.

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

I’ve been blocking every bot that does that. All the discussion on those posts takes place on Reddit, and I’d prefer my feed to be filled with posts that I can actually view the discussion on without feeding a shitty corporation more traffic.

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

Given the precedent that search engines frequently return results from other search engines, then this would seem to be legal. But since Reddit actually hosts the data, they would most likely use legal means/DCMA to take down the bot. The real question is, can you afford as many lawyers as Reddit? Probably not. But maybe if the strategy is just to pull people over in the short term, it could work. I'm not going to do it, not worth the risk to myself.

I think like other posters said, it's best to keep the content separate. I feel a lot more positivity coming from Kbin/Lemmy. It's as if a million trolls cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I'm appreciating this for what it is, let's hope it stays that way.

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

I was thinking of doing something similar and think for any of the news type subs it would be a good way to fill them with useful content, but being new to the fediverse I don’t know etiquette wise whether that’s ok.

I’d like to start transferring my own content over here too.

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

If your not can properly pull the content of the post and post it to Lemmy as a Lemmy post, and not as a link to a reddit post, do it. Who gives a shit how Reddit feels about it. But if its just going to be a link to a reddit post witg a description in it, don't even bother, theres plenty of that going on and it's all devoid of interaction because that interaction is happening on reddit, you'd essentially just be building a funnel to move activity off Lemmy back to reddit.