1d ago

Are there any bots that we can use to mirror posts from subreddits?

Seems like it would be a good way to funnel content into more niche communities by tying their posts to whatever is posted on a subreddit until they can take off on their own.

Does such a thing exist? If not, making it shouldn't be too difficult. I could probably whip something up real quick and toss it up on a software sharing platform.

Would anyone be interested in something like this? It could actually work really well with Lemmy's option to show/hide bot posts because people could choose if they want to see it at all.

30 comments

There were a lot more during one of the big Reddit migrations but they don’t work.
Communities need engagement and you don’t get that with bot cross posts.
- Yeah I remember when people were "backing up" subreddits here and mostly just created a shitload of dead posts that the original OP had no idea existed
No one engages in bot content and many completely block it.
- That's not true. There's one bot that routinely posts to news communities called "MicroWave" and there are consistently people engaging with its posts.
  Most people don't even recognize it's a bot.
  
  Microwave is not a bot
  https://lemmy.world/post/34751749/18910079
  
  Yeah, it is true. Check out the lemm.it instance it tried to do exactly what you're talking about about
A huge thing that real posts have but bot posts do not have: comments notify the OP and thus have a good chance of getting a response. The bot communities almost never get comments, and even if they do it's extra rare for them to get a reply.
If I didn't care about human-to-human comments then I wouldn't be here or on Reddit, I would just use RSS feeds, or the Google news feed.
There are whole instances dedicated to mirroring Reddit. However a lot of people on the fediverse oppose such features, on my home instance eg. lemmit is filtered out of /all stream. https://lemmit.online/
- Thanks. This is interesting, but it looks like all of the communities are locked and only the bot gets to post.
  I'm also referring to something that just copies the posts, but doesn't include the comments for either side.
  
  If you want comments on such posts pick one and crosspost it to the relevant real community.
  Nobody wants to comment on pure bot posts because you cannot get any replies from OP.
  
  You are right, this is a 1:1 mirror of Reddit without any Lemmy user interactions. Since it is a one way mirror, any comments would not reach Reddit, I assume this is why it was decided to keep the communities closed down in such a way.
Yes, it exists, but that practice is generally frowned upon and discouraged (at least by me)
- And me.
  
  And my axe?
- It could even get you into legal trouble, since they consider content on their platform as their property (at least their ToS does).
They exist. In some communities they may work but IMO a lot of times they hurt community engagement, since no one really wants to reply to an autogenerated OP or join a community that's a wall of empty bot posts.
This already exists, I have seen it used before, don't know any exact repositories though. The reason it's not really used is because it's pointless. What are you trying to achieve with it? Your community won't look more active if it has more posts with zero upvotes and zero comments all made by the same user.
Hiding posts from bots will also hide posts from this bot.
Keep in mind that not everyone here uses Lemmy, so a Lemmy feature isn't a good defense in a federated world like this.
- I think it was lemm.it
There are rss bots that post stuff on lemmy, like for hackernews. And then as another user mentioned there are some servers like 50501 that mirror reddit and cross post to lemmy.
I think the general problem with such things is.... they post a lot of shit. Sure the top content within a community -might- be interesting but you're also going to get pointless junk that just fills up the fediverse. Not to mention the other issues with lack of interaction. I think the unfortunate reality is that the long term best thing for the community is hand curating content and posting it yourself. I say unfortunate because that's more work than a bot, but you'll be better able to grow a community. Plus some people like me will just block any bot i see because they generally are a waste of my time
- Yeah they post a lot of shit. We have too few commenters/voters spread across too many posts, which is a real great way to kill a community. We need the opposite, we already have enough posts, we need more people commenting/voting.
Reddit is astroturfed to hell, I prefer my posts to come from humans rather than companies trying to game system for financial benefit.
It's easy to make one. But why would you want that?
As time goes by and more and more people join the Fediverse, I'm sure some niche comms will start taking off. I don't like bots mirroring content from somewhere else, even as a help. In fact, I will immediately unsubscribe from any comm that starts doing that. And I'm sure many people also would.
- As I've said before, these communities already have nobody engaging in them. Hiding posts from bots will also hide posts from this bot.
  
  these communities already have nobody engaging in them.
  Inactive communities should be locked down and redirect to more generalist active communities.
  If your specific JRPG game community is inactive, lock the community and redirect to !jrpg@lemmy.zip
https://fediverser.io/ is the project. https://alien.top/ and https://fediverser.network/ are the instances running it, but only alien.top is doing (some) mirroring.

30 comments