If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.

With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I'm realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.

I'd like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:

Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.

Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.

Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.
Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.

Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.

Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.
Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.

Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.

Cons: It's yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don't have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.

Please, let's avoid any "who cares about sports?" or "I only want organic content here" type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don't care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (4 children)

No. Account mirroring and bot posts go against the essential nature of social threaded link aggregation. I see sportsbots is already a Mastodon project which makes much more sense because microblogging has a follow-the-user rather than a follow-the-community model. Lemmy is follow-the-community. If there is interest in this content, users will create a Lemmy community and post content there. Maybe they will even link to the sportsbots mirror. But don’t just set up a script to do it for you, that’s just something people are going to block.

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[–] Cris_Color 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If you intend to create inorganic content like that maybe the best solution would be a dedicated community so that folks who are happy to have updates and be able to discuss with folks can go there, and other folks can avoid it

You might also be able to organize with certain communities and discuss what kinda stuff they'd appreciate you mirroing or posting automatically. But I wouldn't go doing it without talking with the folks running those comms personally.

I get that's not what you wanna discuss, but as I think you can see that's pretty important to the culture of this space for a lot of people, and anything you build will be more successful if you're mindful of that human aspect. It's at least as important as any technical choice, if not more

(Overlooking the human or social considerations for purely technical ones is a open source community pet-peeve of mine. Everything here is intrinsically collaborative and needs to be pro-social to truly succeed.)

Regardless, I hope you're able to support the sports discussions on Lemmy you wanna see thrive. Just remember, more content than people can engage with dilutes the engagement and makes it harder for folks to find themselves in the same space such that human interaction can happen. Ultimately that's the point of online social spaces :)

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

If you intend to create inorganic content like that maybe the best solution would be a dedicated community so that folks who are happy to have updates and be able to discuss with folks can go there, and other folks can avoid it

That is the exact reason why I ended up creating 15+ topic-specific instances, plus alien.top when I started mirroring reddit content. The idea was that the bots would live on alien.top (and could be taken over by their real owner, when they authenticated via Reddit) and all these instances and communities were to be the destination of the posts.

Turns out that even with this separation, some people would still complain about their feed being "taken over" by alien.top. So, people could simply avoid it by simply curating their own feeds and stop "browsing by all".

[–] Cris_Color 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Right, but browsing by all is nice to be able to do 😅 if you're posting so much all at the same time that it's flooding "c/all" or whatever, then I'm not surprised people would be unhappy

They had a way of engaging with the platform they were happy with, so if abnormal posting patterns of inorganic content kinda ruined that for them, of course they're gonna be unhappy about it 😅

Its not unreasonable for people to want the option to use c/all and/or their front page at their discretion, that's why both are there lol. I visit both regularly for different reasons. My feed is mostly small niche communities and then I like to go check out the larger global discussions

I don't think it's particularly fair to argue "well if everyone just engages with this platform in one narrow way (in spite of it having other options baked into it) they wouldn't have this problem"

Like... Sure, but they might not want to engage with it in that one very narrow way 😅 and that'd be entirely valid.

When chatting with the guy who curates a feed of loops to post I suggested maybe slowing down the rate of posts because it was drowning everything out for me, and he kindly obliged.

Curration and spacing things out a little bit might also be a good solution here :)

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

Yeah, sorry. I really don't want to rehash this discussion. Browsing by all only makes sense because the whole network is so small that people still believe that drinking from the firehose is the only way that can satiate they content consumption needs. And for the thousands of users here on Lemmy saying "this is too much content", there are tens of millions still locked on Reddit because no other place has the content they are looking for.

Until last year, users could not filter the instances themselves, so it was up to the admins to limit things at the federation level. Newer versions of Lemmy already give this tooling to end users, so if the bots bother them, I am just going to say "sorry, you have everything in your power to stop this from bothering you, go ahead and block it yourself".

[–] Cris_Color 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I mean... I used to browse r/all on reddit where there was absolutely no dearth of content. Some folks just like being able to scroll through the bigger global stuff too.

Lots of people did that on reddit. I don't mean to come across as rude or confrontational, but I do kinda feel you might be making assumptions about how people want to engage with link aggregator sites like reddit or lemmy based on how you like to engage with them. People don't just browse the "all" feed if there's not enough in their subscriptions. Sometimes it's nice to see what people are discussing across the broader social space here

If that's flooded with inorganic posts, it changes the experience and takes away someone's ability to do something they wanted to be able to do, and when that happens people generally find it frustrating, even if they can fix it by going around and blocking the communities flooding the all feed. And that frustration is even bigger if they feel like inorganic content doesn't belong on Lemmy, which isn't exactly an uncommon sentiment. I don't mind inorganic posts personally, but I do think the way you go about it matters.

That's just my two cents. Like I said, I'm not trying to be overly argumentative, I apologise if it feels like I'm turning things into a debate. I just felt there's a perspective missing in this discussion and wanted to contribute

I hope you can support sports discussion on Lemmy in a way you and other Lemmy users can enjoy. Hope you have a good one :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

r/all is not the same as drinking from the firehouse. Reddit has other selection algorithms beyond the vote count to build the front page.

[–] Cris_Color 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't think that really changes my point 😅

People like having both. People browse browse either all feed for similar reasons, or at least I do. I much preferred when r/all wasn't personalized at all.

I like it for discovery and seeing what else folks are chatting about. You get to see what's worth talking about in so many different communities, big and small. So many subcultures and communities, ones you're loosely familiar with, and ones you straight up didn't know exist, and everything in between. Big communities you want to check in on like the politics stuff but that you don't want to dominate your feed. And novel things you'd have never found otherwise. And when it's flooded with automated posts I can see why people would be frustrated that they can't interact with part of the user experience in the way they want

I switched off .ee when there were a ton of subs being mirrored from reddit that .ee was federated with (it seems to have died down now?), and c/all was just a neverending stream of posts with no one talking or engaging. Just empty posts taking up like half of c/all. It meant I couldn't engage with the platform in the way I wanted, so I changed instance back to my previous .world account so I could use c/all again, I really missed it.

I wanna talk to folks, and see new things. Making sure communities keep going and can sustain themselves is important but the point of social media is usually to socialize, or at least lurk and observe other people socializing, even on a more anonymous site like reddit or lemmy 😅 I think balance is important

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I could argue that there l was never a time when r/all was free from filters, but I there is another conversation I think we should be having: if you are switching instances because one has bot accounts listed and the other doesn't, you are still "manually curating your feeds", albeit in a very complicated way.

You think bots are bad, so you moved to LW. I've heard people glad about being on .ee because they like what the bots can bring.

At the end of the day, the deeper issue seems to be that people not only want to feel like they are in control of what they do, they also want to feel validated in their choices. And we keep searching for justifications to back those up, even when it's completely irrelevant.

[–] Cris_Color 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I don't mind bots, it's the details of how they can impact the user experience in some cases that causes issues for me. On several occasions I've defended bots being on lemmy and the Fedivers. And I switched instances because curating my feed by moving back to .world was easier than chasing down all the mirrored comms and slowly blocking all of them, and I'm not opposed to those comms existing, but I can absolutely empathize with why so many on lemmy don't like them. I'm not at all opposed to curating my feed, I also have a couple comms blocked.

My point was really just that it's understandable people would be frustrated if you're impeding their ability to do something they expect they should be able to do. Sure it's fixable, but no one expects to have to filter out a torrent of empty bot posts, because why would they? And most folks here are opposed to that kind of traffic. When you create a new problem that people hadn't even anticipated could be an issue, people will find that frustrating, and they'll view it as a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place

I can empathize with your desire to supplement content with automation, but I'm not getting the impression you're able to empathize with anyone else's perspective. There's probably a way of going about this that wouldn't cause any realy issue for folks, but you're definitely not going to find it if you just refuse any opportunity to learn from the perspectives being voiced to you.

You're now more or less trying to psychoanalyze the people telling you they don't like what you want to do instead of trying to understand why and find a path that's more pro-social.

If what you personally wanna do makes half the site unhappy, it's worth considering whether all of the people replying are wrong, or if you, the person who's trying to figure out how to do a thing lots of people are telling you would make them unhappy, are in the wrong

I won't be replying further, I don't get the impression you care what my perspective, or anyone else's is, so I'm not going to spend more time voicing it. I hope you have a good day, take care.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

If what you personally wanna do makes half the site unhappy (...)

You are looking at half of the people on the site (~25k) What about the the other 99.96% (75 million) of people still on Reddit who won't leave because Reddit has kept a choke-hold on the communities and monopolized the content?

You are treating this as a static system. There are second-order effects.

but I’m not getting the impression you’re able to empathize with anyone else’s perspective.

I don’t get the impression you care what my perspective,

It's not a matter of caring/not caring. It's about accepting that this is an issue with conflicting interests. I am asking about how we can do this in a way that minimizes these conflicts while increasing/keep the upside (for the many) and minimizing the downside (for the few), but you are appealing to thought-terminating accusations ("you are not showing empathy") instead of looking for a compromise that can make everyone happy.

[–] Cris_Color 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I literally made suggestions in my first comment along side explaining why I thought it was important to find compromises, and you argued with my reasoning for suggesting compromise so I don't think it was unreasonable for me to assume you were opposed to my position that considering people's dislike of bots and non organic traffic in your approach

There's no conflict of interest if we both want compromise, so I'm not sure why youd argue with my reasons and tell me you "don't care" about the reasons I'd want compromise on this issue, while also saying you want compromise... I'm sincerely confused by that

It sounds like we agree...?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

"don't mirror all the posts, but only those that have a threshold of interest" is a compromise.

"Don't post to communities unless the admins/moderators gave strict permission" is a compromise.

"Don't post at all, because some people want to be able to drink from the firehouse and not filter the content themselves" is not a compromise, it is a mandate.

[–] Cris_Color 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't want you to not post at all...? My suggestions were to organize with the sports comms (collaborate to make sure it works for them), or potentially create a dedicated comm for all the mirrored stuff. I think picking and choosing what to mirror would also be a great idea.

Mostly I just wanted to express that I thought thinking about the human aspect of how your plan will be recieved is important...

I don't think I said not to post at all at any point, did I..? (I'm falling alseep, I'll look back at my comments when I'm more awake) I don't want that at all.

When I said I hoped you were able to support the discussion you wanted to I meant via post mirroring, though looking at my wording I'm realizing I could have been more specific. I just wanted you to be mindful of folks who are here for organic traffic and would be frustrated if you aren't intentional about what you wanna build and how.

I think theres maybe been a breakdown in communication

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

My suggestions were to organize with the sports comms (collaborate to make sure it works for them), or potentially create a dedicated comm for all the mirrored stuff. I think picking and choosing what to mirror would also be a great idea.

All of that was done already when I was mirroring the alien.top accounts, and people still complained, and we were here spending a good hour arguing over that whether their complaints are legitimate or not.

[–] Cris_Color 2 points 16 hours ago

Sorry I was still making changes to my comment to try and convey what I mean, its a bit different now. I'll read this I'm the morning

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Good comment from your side, as usual, thanks 😄

[–] Cris_Color 2 points 17 hours ago

Thank you, that's very kind of you :)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think there has to be some level of curation. I set up a queue to post loops to [email protected], but I didn't just write a script that posts everything. I use Loops myself and add things I think are interesting to the queue to be posted. It's a lot of manual work, but I'm happy to do it for now to help grow the Fediverse, and I enjoy watching the loops anyways.

You could accomplish this with more automatic curation, such as automatically reposting stuff that's highly upvoted or has some other signal that it's interesting. I didn't do that for Loops because there's a lot of stuff that's highly-upvoted and is just stuff scraped from TikTok and I don't care for those. I would probably use this approach if I didn't want to wade through myself to find signal.

[–] glimse 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You're one of the big posters I don't mind seeing and now it makes sense why. The way so many of the other top posters (well, two in particular but I won't name them) post feels so....soulless. Either spamming 20 memes they saved off Instagram that day in 10 minutes or posting Reddit's Greatest Hits.

As much as I'd love if everything was OC, I MUCH prefer the curated approach to making Lemmy yet another bucket to archive everything from every other site

[–] Cris_Color 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I always enjoy seeing pug Jesus posts cause he posts little context blurbs for his history memes so I get to learn about stuff, and sometimes I've asked him stuff and he's taught me all about certain parts of history ☺️

His memes come with story time lol.

[–] glimse 2 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

I feel guilty about my last comment and at the risk of narrowing down who I mean, I want to be clear that Pug is ABSOLUTELY NOT who I was referring to. I love their thoughtful posting habits.

[–] Cris_Color 1 points 6 hours ago

Lol, you're fine, it just made me remember I appreciate them and it seemed as good an opportunity as any to share :)

Have a good one!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Pug is ABSOLUTELY NOT who I was referring to

That's the risk when you don't explitely tell who you have in mind 😄

[–] glimse 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Well it ain't Blaze either lol

The two I had in mind rarely comment so I doubt I'll ever see this. They might as well be bots.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

Ah, I think I know the ones, especially if they rarely comment

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

Thanks, I appreciate hearing it!

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

Reposting based on a signal sounds like the best idea.

Because we kinda have the alternative in place: lemmit chose the way of replicating reddit posts onto a committed instance. That means that someone still has to manually go, look at - for example the F1 - lemmit, choose an interesting post there and cross-post it to the relevant lemmy community.

If the repost into a relevant lemmy community happened automatically based on a signal, that would take off work from users.

Could that signal be the number of interactions in activitypub for a sportsbots post? Or would it be the Twitter interactions?

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

I'm old enough to remember when Reddit had a built-in RSS feed reader. You could add the RSS feeds you'd like to follow and it would present it to you on a separate page. But the cool thing is that you could up/downvote it like any other link. This meant that every blog entry could become a submission on its own, and all the user had to do was upvote it.

I tried to build something similar on the Fediverser page, but to this there is still too much friction. People need to:

Sign up to the Fediverser site
Become a community ambassador
Add different RSS feeds as content sources
Get in the habit of visiting the site to repost the contents they think it's interesting.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's no lack of dead sports communities around. Turning them into dead sport bot communities doesn't sound like it would help. Sports fans aren't going to show up for that.

Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.

Sorry, this is a bit condescending.

Go take a look at my profile. I have almost 2000 posts already. I've been posting 10-20 posts every day to all the different sport communities. Do you think that dedicating a good half-hour every day to read a bunch of feeds and sharing them is not already enough effort?

I'm not saying that we should rely only on mirror accounts, but I'm saying that it makes no sense to ignore them. I'm not proposing to take just a random army of AI slop and put it here. I'm saying that we can look at the places where the content curation already has been made and replicate it here.

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[–] baronvonj 8 points 1 day ago

As the mod of a couple of sports communities it would be nice to have some more automated content being posted (like game-day match threads, player trades, etc). However, I have yet to receive a response from sportsbots to any of my requests for adding league and team accounts to be mirrored. I don't think I'd want every one of their microblog post to show up in the communities, though.

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

Why is the burden on the other users to block your Twitter bots?

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

Because it's their responsibility to curate their own feeds. You don't see me asking for people to stop posting stupid memes and the outrage bait of the US news cycle, I just avoid these communities.

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

Yes but those are a part of social media.
Content you dont like posted by people here on social media is not equivalent to botspam.

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[–] slazer2au 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Sports and bot accounts are 2 things I don't want in Lemmy. More so if the data source is from a Nazi owned platform.

If the bridge happens between Twatter (at some point we should just start calling it swastter) and mstd then use the existing integration with hashtags to bridge the content to Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Why would you "not want sports in Lemmy"? Like, how is a sports community (like those that already exist on here) hurting you?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (9 children)

How would it work, in terms of number of bots? Would it be one bot per mirrored account?

If they only post to relevant communities (such as [email protected] or [email protected] ), that could help to have more activity.

There would probably need to be some fine-tuning about the number of posts. Some reporters post a lot, that could potentially flood those communities.

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

That sounds handy for Mastodon and annoying for Lemmy.

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