this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Copying posts from Reddit to Lemmy? (lemmy.nz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The biggest problem people seem to have with Lemmy at the moment is the lack of content.

If and when r/newzealand comes back online, it would be possible to set up a bot that copied new posts from there to lemmy.nz (and possibly from other NZ related subreddits). That would help get the content we need to get people to stay here.

There are downsides to this. Most content here would be from Reddit, rather than this community - at least for the time being. And there would be posts asking for advice, etc. that don't make much sense without OP here.

The second issue would be helped a lot by filtering out posts with Advice, Discussion, Meta or AMA flairs. We could also use the other r/newzealand flairs to repost to the appropriate communities here.

So what do people think? Is that something we want to do?

EDIT: What do people think of @[email protected]'s idea of posting into its own community, so people could opt out in or out?

EDIT 2: It doesn't seem like this is popular. People seem happy for content to be copied over by hand, but not by a bot. To be clear, I'm not talking about bot-generated content, I'm talking about grabbing human-generated content with a bot. Some people seem to have got that confused. It would be doing a kind of manual federation of r/newzealand - especially if the content was kept within it's own community.

But it's kind of a relief. It would have been a lot of work to set it up. On the other hand, I'm not at all keen on going back to Reddit to look for stuff to manually copy over here either. I don't know if others are. I'm just worried that people will feel like they're missing out on so much here that they go back. If there was a Reddit cross-post community, people would have the option to get everything from here and stay off Reddit altogether.

If we loose enough members to a lack of content, the community will die. That would be a real pity.

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[–] Noedel 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Content is made by members, not bots. Let's just all put tje work in!

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

This would be ideal. I'd really prefer we made enough of our own content here. Personally, I'm trying my best when I can.

But at the moment, the vast majority of content here is posted by just a handful of users. I'm worried that when r/newzealand comes back, the abundance of content there vs here would be too big of a draw card for most users. We could lose many of our users, and it might be severe enough to destroy this community.

Do remember that this content would be being created by people, not bots. It would just be a bot migrating it here.

I expect the bit would only operate for a while, until we reach a critical mass of content, then it could slowly taper off.

I'm very much in two minds about this though, so it's good to hear what others have to say.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah I’m happy with the trickle of content being made by meaty humans rather than bots.

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

I'm not talking about bots generating content, but a bot doing a kind of manual federation of meaty-generated content on Reddit.

It doesn't seem popular though, which is a relief in some ways. It would have been a fair amount of work.

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

There's definitely nothing wrong with posting/crossposting interesting things from Reddit that you think would be a good talking point for the people here but I don't like the idea of a bot just automatically regurgitating everything from one place to another. So far this instance has been very welcoming and I've been participating a lot more than I did on reddit because there's more of a sense of being seen, while over on Reddit I'd lurk more and let louder people do all the shouting. Turning into a clone of r/nz would be a real shame IMO.

I subbed to two different book communities here to see which fit me better and there was a lot of crossposting but it all went off in different directions in each instance. I like that idea, we'd just have to make a bit more an effort to participate to keep the place alive instead of creating a shadow reddit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's actually quite a bit of content on the Threadiverse at the moment, I think it's about discovery now! Kbin is pretty good at finding new threads/topics and suggesting random communities. https://programming.dev/ has heaps of software communities.

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

It's getting noticeably better each day. And it seems to be growing at a faster rate.

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

I have considered this, grabbing posts that hit a certain threshold. You'd want it in it's own community so people could choose to subscribe. However, I haven't actually seen a ready to go bot for this.

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

Putting it in its own community is a good idea.

I found this bot linked to in the Lemmy repo. No idea how well it works. I'm reasonably confident I could get it up and going, but I'd be in a bit over my head. If I can find someone to answer questions when I need help I'd be OK.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can help! Any issues just dm me.

I'm looking at something similar, to create a bot to post daily posts.

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

Thanks! I'll definitely get in touch if I end up going ahead with it.

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

Where are you thinking of posting it out of interest?

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

On a stopdrinking community I've been appointed moderator of.

https://lemmy.world/c/stopdrinking

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

Good on you for doing that. Communities like that change lives.

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

Yep, it helped me stop drinking alcohol. It was a massive help. I created a very rudimentary bot and managed to post something, yeah! See: https://lemmy.world/post/276715

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

Nice, I had searched but hadn't found that. Give it a test, and if you have questions try in the lemmy.nz chat. There are some pretty technical people hanging out there.

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

People seem pretty opposed to it, but I think that relates to it being posted in the main communities here. I haven't had anyone directly answer about a separate community, which seems like the way to go if we were going to do it at all.

To me, it seems essentially the same as federating from other lemmy sites, with technical differences. And no cross-commenting.

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

A separate community may still pollute the "Local" feed. But there's no reason it couldn't be it's own instance. You could take the top posts from various subs on reddit and post them in a matching community on the instance.

In fact, this bot exists, there's no reason for this to be NZ specific, are we sure such an instance doesn't already exist?

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

I was wondering that myself. There would probably needed to be a fair number of bots working together if it covered heaps of subreddits (because of Reddit's API's free limits). It depends how much and how often they scrape.

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

Yeah, I'd think you could get pretty good coverage though. Reddit has millions of subreddits, so I think you'd add the ones you want manually. But if you're just looking for top posts, you probably don't need to check too frequently. Every 30 mins or hour seems like plenty often enough.

I'm not familiar with reddit's API, but I would expect requesting one page of the top posts for a subreddit to be one API call. You could do 3,000 subreddits refreshing once every 30 minutes.

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

That's a good point.

I think it could be quite useful. I wonder if others have thought about setting one up too. It would probably needed quite a powerful server.

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

Probably not as powerful as you'd think. When you check the top page of posts, you'd have most of them duplicated from last time you checked. And you could set an even tighter threshold, so say only the top 5 posts.

You'd start with a smaller number of subreddits (3,000 is a lot to add manually!), and even if you're adding 1,000 posts a day, the big instances are doing that too so it's probably not an issue.

You could totally try setting it up in a test instance and see how you go!

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

Hmm... It's something I'll look at doing. I'm sure I'll need some help in various places.

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

Haha sorry I know you said you were relieved people were opposed! There is probably a lot of learning involved but if you need help there will be places you can ask, like I've mentioned there are a bunch of technical people on the lemmy.nz matrix chat so you can ask there and get pointed to other places if needed.

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

I see the appeal in doing that but I also think it’d be a mistake. The thing that makes a lot of reddit content worthwhile is the user engagement, without the actual users it feels hollow doesn’t it?

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

Are you after the sort of content that regurgitates headlines from media outlets and encourages comments on the headline, or the sort of content where someone posts to ask a question, or to rant?

If it's the first then I wonder if a bot to simply bring the headlines+links straight from the media feeds might be more effective. If it's the second then what are the implications for things like copyright, etc? Also is there much point in cross-posting stuff like that to a place where the author won't see and interact with it anyway?

Part of me wonders that if having more posts will magicly drum up participation then it might make more sense for someone who cares just to spend a few days manually creating posts more aggressively, and see if it actually happens.

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

I'm thinking headlines, pics, videos, etc. It would try to avoid questions and rants, because that's unlikely to make sense without the OP here. It would probably set it up so that if there wasn't a link or media, it wouldn't be posted.

Copyright is an interesting point. I'm so used to copyright being ignored on Reddit that it didn't occur to me. Essentially it would be like a cross-post, with a link to the original. But that's still an issue.

Edit: Reddit regularly violates the copyright of users from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. And users on those sites do the same to Reddit and each other. I don't see this as being much different.

Part of me wonders that if having more posts will magicly drum up participation then it might make more sense for someone who cares just to spend a few days manually creating posts more aggressively, and see if it actually happens.

I'm not expecting it to magically drum up participation as such. It's more about making sure there's enough content here to retain users until they start posting their own content. If there's not much to see here, and heaps they're missing out from Reddit, many will just go back.

But it might be a good idea to do it manually at the start. I'd be inclined to restrict it to the top rising and/or hot posts too.

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

If it's the title and a link to the reddit post then it's just the title. Given titles are not all that long, it's very unlikely to meet the threshold required for copyright.

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

Wouldn't reddit need an API for this to work?

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

Reddit will still have an API, and they've said it will allow up to 100 free queries per minute from 1 July. That would be more than enough for this.

It's the charges beyond the free limit that are killing the 3rd party apps.

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

Most reddit content is content taken from another source like a news arctile or a photo of another website. I think its fine if we post those here because they are interesting and not unique to reddit. however reddit discussion questions are probably best to stay on reddit unless its really good.

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