I feel like it would be better to have a dedicated Reddit-mirror instance that instances can choose to federate with.
The issue is mirror posts are not organic which is not conducive to high quality discussion. If a community only gets 10 original posts a day but a mirror bot is dumping well over 1000 posts a day, that's a problem because the organic content will get drowned out and further disincentivize people from posting and actually growing the community.
That's what https://lemmit.online is.
I think it is a great idea to have a bot mirroring Reddit's content onto a lemmy instance. But I agree, we don't need those bots mucking up actual lemmy communities.
As someone who owns their own instance, it is hard to get your instance recognized. You don't have much content because of the lack of people, and it's hard to get content if you don't have people join. It's a chicken and the egg scenario. Because of this some people choose to re-post content from Reddit to attract people over to their instance. It's great to see the Lemmy community grow, but everyone joining a few huge Lemmy servers kind of defeats the purpose of the fediverse.
Then they can either use teddit, libreddit, or spin up their own instance to clog up. This is a solved problem already. Heck if they just want the headlines all they need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed from reddit.
I requested one for r/soccer.
The community here is small and I don't have the time to spend all day on Twitter looking for the latest news to post it while it grows. So this bot fetches latest posts from there and I crosspost to a Lemmy community of real users on the rare occasion that it's interesting to me. The bot lives in its own instance so it isn't spamming any real user community.
Honestly, I personally don't like it. But mostly because they are always completely ignored, so there are all this zombie bot posts with no interaction.
I suppose it's a bit more sensible for news related subs. The reddits ines sre likley using bots to find the news and post it, though such bots may not exist for lemmy yet and its just easier to scrape from reddit.
But then I see somthing like the ask reddit sub on Lemmy. It's just all of the questions none of the answers and no engagement at all. Some of the content is years old.Why does that need to exist? I can understand the idea of a reddit archive but why use lemmy for it?
I'm also wondering about the ethicacy of it. I'm annoyed at Reddit for not allowing me to delete my old content. There's a lot of folks threating legal action and such over reddit denying people the right to remove that content. Now we are copying that content. I assume without consent of those who'd posted it, and adding it to our own platform.
Though perfectly legal, is that really a good idea? Is that what we as lemmy users actually want? does this actually improve the platform?
The whole "Reddit won't delete my stuff" thing is stupid anyway. There are 3rd party sites that archive Reddit and can restore deleted content. Once you post something on the internet you should just assume it's there forever.
I do know what you mean and agree in those cases. Some of it is effectively spam. Probably created as a middle finger to reddit rather than desperately wanting to contribute something on lemmy