this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I noticed there's a lot of " This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot." Post. And I am wondering why?

I dont really understand why these are popular. The bots are only copying the OP Post and not the comments.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A few huge ones is still better than a single massive one.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Absolutely.

[โ€“] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The bots are only copying the OP Post and not the comments.

So, you're saying we need another bot to copy the comments too?

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Also to copy the upvotes and downvotes

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm working on that one! Fork of lemmit.online, so it doesn't need API access.

Don't worry about it spamming instances. This bot posts so much that it will be automatically blocked from any instance that uses the default Lemmy rate limits, so all bot deployments will have to run on an instance that is specifically for them.

Source code for the bot will be released on July 1st if Reddit doesn't introduce a breaking change on that day and if I don't receive a good argument as to why this bot will destroy the Fediverse.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But why? We can't interact with it at all? It's like copy pasting a book.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Would work better if it's both way. Bot bridging all the content from reddit to lemmy and vice versa. It might work for some smaller subreddits at least.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not OP, but one benefit I can see (at least, some will think it a benefit, others will freak) is to let Lemmy have the glut of data that Reddit has. This way Reddit refugees will see Lemmy as empty in comparison

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I don't use Reddit for the interaction, average Redditors are annoying to interact with. Reddit's value to me is the amount of information it contains. It's supposed to be like copy pasting a book that has DRM, so you can make use of the content without worrying that the book's copyright holder will use it to screw you over eventually.

[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

You should be able to block the lemmit bot. That's what I did and no more Reddit "archive" posts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some people want to follow Reddit content without opening it. You can block the bot posting these if it's annoying. I did that and never saw it again.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That is good advice. I hadn't considered that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For news-oriented communities, I understand using a bot, at least until you build a userbase.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems fine to me. The news ones I'm subsrcibed to means I don't actually miss anything that I found reddit was useful for

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Haven't seen it once. Probably gets downvoted and never appear on top posts.

[โ€“] Mininux 1 points 1 year ago

I think i read on lemmit.online that pulling aaalll the comments is harder, and the bot would have to update them as they are edited too

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Isn't there comment bots as well?

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