So I created an open-source Lemmy bot to reply to posts/comments with YouTube links with converted Piped links to preserve your privacy.
Piped is an open-source alternative privacy-friendly frontend to YouTube. You can watch the same content from YouTube without connecting to Google's servers.
You can just change the hostname, for example, youtube.com to piped.video. Alternatively, you could just use something like Libredirect to automatically do it on your browser.
I don't think the current Lemmy clients allow hiding bots, but if they really bother you/people that much, it should possible to add options to hide bots altogether.
Currently, it scans all posts that are federated with my Lemmy instance (feddit.rocks), however, there are very few communities that it is scanning currently as there are very few users who have subscribed to communities on my instance.
If more people register on my Lemmy instance and subscribe to more communities, it will scan those communities as well.
I hope more users register on my instance so it can be listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances too :) I currently lack the 5 active users requirement for that, unfortunately.
Alternatively, I could maybe add a way for people to get the bot to subscribe to a community, so people from other instances can add communities to be scanned. 🤔
You can now try sending it a message mentioning communities in the format !community@instance.tld and it will try joining it :)
Got it, yes, I think having the bot subscribe to communities is a good way to solve this, and how I've seen it done. Basically users can message the bot with "subscribe <community url>", the bot periodically checks its DMs, subscribes to the Communities and starts monitoring/processing them.
You can add a small footnote to each message, telling them about your instance, so you also get "free publicity" 😉
Maybe this makes me a dummy, but I don't understand the point of the bot? Like is it supposed to replace links that people post here from YouTube, with Piped instead?
Yes, that's somewhat the point. You can see it in action in this comment. Rather than replace, it allows people to see a Piped link too instead of YouTube one.
Thanks for making this! I usually don't post Piped or Invidious links, because most people don't know what they are. But now the bot will do it for me and explain what it is!
Piped is awesome too! Is integration with PeerTube planned? I don't know how it would work exactly, but it would be nice if people gradually started switching to a decentralized platform. Maybe Piped could help make that easier somehow?
If the Peertube developers find a way to make a way to find the same content there through some metadata, we could support it easily, but currently, there isn't anything.