I have created some software that is capable of synchronising posts from Reddit to Lemmy. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it works as a such:
People can request new subreddits to be mirrored on [email protected]. A bot (open source) will monitor the threads there, and if it finds a new request for a subreddit, it will make a new community on the Lemmit server, and add it to its monitored list. It will then make periodic checks to see if any new posts (it doesn’t copy any comments) have been posted on reddit, and copy those over.
Users can then subscribe to those communities from their own lemmy instance, and from there federation will pick it up. Or at least, that’s the theory. At the moment, federation is not working awesomely, and that is where my lack of fediverse knowledge comes in. Maybe it needs more time, or something is not so properly - I don’t know.
Furthermore: registrations on this server are closed. The point of this service is not to become a community on its own, but to deliver, ehh, “original” content to all the rest of the Fediverse while it’s going through a ramp-up phase. Besides, the instance is running on a pretty small vps, and I rather have this thing manage itself. There is a [email protected] community for further questions about the project itself though, in case people want to discuss it further.
So ehm… Let me know what you think :)
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It was just a matter of time before something like this showed up.
I’m sure there will be a number of people that won’t be a fan of this but I think it’s a pretty innovative way to help the chicken-and-egg problem of early adoption. (No users because there’s no content, no content because there’s no users).
Very smart to have it limited to one bot on one instance to make it easy to block (or de-federate) for those that don’t like it, but I do.
Is there a possibility to release just an RSS bot? I’d love to have certain RSS feeds from various sources auto post to my community. I’m finding it difficult to find options for lemmy atm
I think @[email protected] wrote something to that effect (I’m still a mess with making proper links on here :/)
And I also found something else that was written in java (not javascript).
The downside from using the RSS feed is that it doesn’t contain the whole body, which my scraper does fetch.
I’m interested in having Reddit content show up in my feed when I use Jerboa, but for the life of me, I can not figure out how. Can anyone help? You’d have to explain it to me like you’re talking to either a 3 year old, or a 93 year old.
This rases a question, if a bot creates a new community to replace subreddits, who will mod those communities to ensure that there’s no bigotry, trolls, transphobia, homophobia etc… running wild in the comments? Who will manage these?
Okay, just tried it out. Added /r/bestof and it’s working. Very cool!
I’m guessing this scrapes? Otherwise it’ll stop working when the API changes happen on July 1.
Yups. Combination of scraping and rss. With a bit of client-side throttling thrown in to stay under the radar.
Looks great so far. I like how the posts that are pulled over have both the link to the content from the original Reddit post as well as a link to the Reddit post itself.
One thing that would be nice: The links in the messages saying:
I’ll get right on that. Check out /c/…
Would be nice if the link for /c/… was for lemmit.online. If not on there already, they don’t work since they go to the current server’s community with the given name.
Edit: This is open source… Here’s a merge request that I think fixes it: https://gitlab.com/sab_from_earth/lemmit/-/merge_requests/6/diffs
Thanks, I was gonna do this tonight, but are you sure about that format? (I’m still relative newbie to the Fediverse)
Just to test: /c/about.
edit: Looks good, I’ll merge it :)
edit2: Deployed :)
Thanks!
So posts from reddit are going to flood the All feed on lemmy?
Yups. It’s all done by one bot though, so you’ll just have to block that to get rid of them.
oh good! thank you so much for the reply. It’s beilliant dev work on your end, and certainly nothing I’d be able to pull off aas I dont have the beain capacity, but I’m just over Reddit at this point and dont want to watch them spiral. Thank you for maaking sure there’s a way to opt out!
I’m absolutely with you on that on. If anything, part of the reason I wanted this was to have some fresh content that I knew I was going to miss once after July 1st. Stuff like [email protected] for example. There’s a bit too much reddit-circlejerk going on right now, even here imho.
That sounds like a quick way to get defederated from everywhere
If that’s what happens, that’s what happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m just here to offer a service for people who Do like it.
I kinda get what you’re saying, but not really. Why would adding more content such as this lead to an instance wanting to defederate from that instance? There’s no users there to troll, spam, or break the rules. It just adds posts.
Defederation isn’t a bad thing, it’s just curation. Especially in this case where you’re not breaking any human<->human connections.
I’d still prefer something along the lines of Masto’s silencing, which would get rid of instances from global feeds yet still allow follows and interactions, but upstream already has too much on their plate and I’m sure given the time something similar would be implemented.
