All the content, none of the Spez? Or, is it better if Lemmy stays distinct?
Please don’t do this.
If I wanted to lurk Reddit, I would just do that. Better to stay your separate thing. It is nice to sometimes get news about the other side of the fence.
As Reddit turns into a trash, the moderation and content quality will drop. Import the content may seem interesting at first, but in the long run it won’t worth the effort.
I think reposting content from reddit is fine, but we don’t need a bot for it. I’d rather see individuals bring over specific posts they think are notable as opposed to automatically copying everything they’ve got.
I think it’s like breaking up with someone and then dedicating yourself to building a weird, soulless android version of your ex.
It’d certainly help grow Lemmy by helping with the migration (at least for me, as I don’t want to go back to Reddit, but there are subs there with interesting info for me that won’t migrate), but it shouldn’t contain any direct links to Reddit (just the content of the post), just giving credits to the OP.
Thoughts: Content is good atm. If it’s spammy it’ll get blocked. Or the instance de-federated. Is going to Reddit boosting reddit or draining it by using the content. Reddit has a lot of bad content that Lemmy is free of.
But I also liked the…(whispers) cosplay…
That’s something I don’t miss. Not that I don’t admire it, I just keep thinking “wow that’s cool but christ what I could do with the money they spent on that”.
Nah. This is a fresh start. It’s been less than a week and theres already so much more content. It’ll grow soon enough. Especially with spez fucking around over there. We want og content here, not all the shit reposts that already plague reddit
Time to get to work.
Cracks knuckles
deleted by creator
It’s inconvenient, but not impossible. The content could be scraped instead of handed over directly via the API.
An explanation, if you’re interested:
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It is a way for two software applications to communicate with each other. APIs are often used to access data from websites. When you use an API, you are essentially asking the website for the data you need. The website will then provide the data to you in a format that your software can understand.
Web scraping is a process of extracting data from websites using automated tools. Web scrapers can be used to extract data from any website, regardless of whether the website has an API. However, web scraping can be more difficult and time-consuming than using an API.
In general, APIs are the preferred method for accessing data from websites. They are easier to use, more legal, and less likely to interfere with the website. However, web scraping can be used in cases where there is no API or where the API is not sufficient.
I would rather have content posted by humans. Lemmy doesn’t need to be reddit anyway.
In general, I really do not like this idea. Lemmy is Lemmy and should not, directly or indirectly, turn into Reddit.
I’ve been beating this drum since I got on here.
Here’s the software you would need to put it in a special instance: https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter
A few comments, some of which have been touched on by others:
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One of the reasons Reddit went to the new pricing was to prevent LLMs from scraping their content and using it for free. I don’t think a bot like this would work for the same reason.
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I personally don’t want a duplicate of Reddit. I’d prefer this to be a new community that can do better.
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One of the things that drove me away from Reddit (besides their horrible handling of 3PAs) was all the bot posts. If there were a way to make sure that bot accounts were identified as such, that would be perfect. Hell, I’d rather have zero bot posts than the current state of Reddit.
TLDR: I vote no.
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If you wanna write code to do this … I’d say skip the bot, write a gateway instead.
Back in the early days of email, there were lots of different email systems, not just the SMTP Internet email we use today. There was UUCP email with “bang paths”, where your email address specified a list of servers that a message could be passed through to get to you. There were other networks like FidoNet and WWIVnet, that could send email to Internet email addresses through special “gateway” servers.
A gateway receives messages using one protocol or service, and retransmits or makes them available on another protocol or service.
For a little while in 1992, I had access to read Usenet posts only through a gateway that exported Usenet posts onto the Gopher system.
A gateway between Reddit and Lemmy would appear to Reddit as a web browser, scraping posts and comments; while appearing to Lemmy as a Lemmy instance that users could subscribe to, making each subreddit it scrapes available as a Lemmy community.
So a Lemmy user could subscribe to, say, !askreddit@reddittolemmy.com and see a fresh view of AskReddit. The server at reddittolemmy.com would not be a standard Lemmy server with users, but rather a custom gateway server that fetches data from Reddit and makes it available in the form of a Lemmy community.
(If Reddit were not being an asshole, a gateway could be an API client. But Reddit is being an asshole, so a gateway should probably be written as a scraper that accesses Reddit as if it were a normal user using a desktop Web browser.)
I’m not entirely against the idea, but also really don’t want to turn the fediverse into the flood of content that is reddit. Maybe some kind of relative upvote filter based bot. Only posts that get some certain percentage of above average number for a given sub, get scraped.
