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.
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" 😉