I’ll consider your opinion.

Looks like it’s working. Time for a beer!

It’s done: !theyknew@lemmit.online.

Ah, I guess I must have overlooked that part. There are several reasons for not wanting to allow signups.

One is quite simple, cost. Right now this is running on a small, single core instance. It often stutters (especially when handling video updates), and that is not an issue, since that just means it’s going to take small while before updates are sent out. But you wouldn’t want to have that delay for actual users. Right now the costs are quite manageable, if I have to scale up in order to provide a fluent experience for its users, not so much.

Most of the other reasons come down to the responsibility of having to provide a home to any outside users that sign up. I don’t have the interest or time to maintain a community of people, nor to guarantee the uptime that such a server would require. It also wouldn’t work. The largest Lemmy instance in existence, lemmy.world, has defederated from this instance. So any users that sign up here, would be devoid from content on there. And as you said, any other instance can decide to do so at any time (in fact, I very much suggest they do so in the FAQ).

I could go on, but I think you get my drift.

Thanks for your feedback. Let me assure you that I’m actually a giant asshole in real life ;) I do want to respectfully disagree with some of the points you make though.

If no bots cross posted things from reddit, actual users would post them, they would get updoots, feel great about themselves, and search out more content.

I don’t think that’s the case. There is no reason for people to not make a post, just because it already exists on Lemmit. In fact, I feel the opposite is the case: it’s making it easier to do so by cross-posting. People scour Lemmit news communities for potential useful links, and easily send them to the relevant “native” Lemmy communities.

Cross posting bots implies that lemmy is some kind of second class reddit. As though reddit is where the content is but we’re hanging out here in protest. Lemmy’s own culture and community needs to coalesce in it’s own time.

I would challenge you to really carefully consider what the objectives of lemmit.online are - they seem to have changed since your original “about” post (now removed ?)

I kinda get what you’re saying with this, but I don’t agree. Reddit and Lemmy are roughly the same product - communities where texts/links can be posted and discussed. The simple fact is that Lemmy is nowhere near the scale of Reddit, and so there is less users and less content to go around. That doesn’t make one better than the other - one is more rich in content and the other more tightly knit. Some of the communities rely very much on discussions, others less so. I had always intended Lemmit to boost the second group of content/communities. Communities centered around memes/jokes/nsfw content/etc - I value those because I click on the link, read the article, and move on. I still stand by that design choice, it’s just that it is now enforced - communities like AskReddit/AmITheAsshole/AskBla are no longer archived, and requests for new communities need to be manually approved.

Not sure which About post you mean, but the most info is still here in the FAQ: https://lemmit.online/post/14692

Yes, users can ban bots - but we’ve all heard of the 90 / 9 / 1 rule - 90% of the people that will visit Lemmy will not log in and therefore will not curate their feeds in that way.

Instances are reluctant to defederate from lemmit.online because doing so has the whiff of censorship - even though there’s no actual content here to censor.

I’m not convinced of this. The largest instance, lemmy.world (where most of the “inactive” users will end up) has done this, so that takes care of them. As for the latter - I explicitly give permission to instance owners to ban the bot or defederate in the FAQ, so I don’t think the defederation stigma makes any sense here.

Heya,

I still need to create some tools to make to easily add new subreddits to the bot. I’ll probably get around to that this weekend, and then I’ll add /r/theyknew and notify you. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a great contender for synchronisation/archiving.

Can’t blame you for that. Personally, I still think it excels at content where communication with OP is irrelevant, like !itookapicture@lemmit.online, !todayilearned@lemmit.online or !dataisbeautiful@lemmit.online. And by far best example of this, if you look at the subscriber count, is nsfw content.

Nope. That would be very hard to implement, and probably very confusing and disliked by other lemmy users.

I don’t know how the karma thresholds work behind the scenes, but might I suggest for the bot to do a “top for” sort instead? Like it will only repost top content for the past 6 hours only. This will also help get more quality content as well and avoid reposting low effort/quality posts.

This is effectively already kinda how it works. For each subreddit it periodically (anywhere between every 30 minutes to every 12 hours, based on subscriber count and posts per day) requests the “hot” content feed. It then checks each post if it has at least 20 upvotes, and a 80% upvote to downvote ratio. Those numbers are configurable, but that’s what they’re currently set to - I believe they’re a good mix between filtering out the complete garbage while still making sure it doesn’t miss good content is.

@criitz@reddthat.com @Halosheep@lemm.ee @Cagi@lemmy.ca @Hanabie@sh.itjust.works @SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml @WallsToTheBalls@lemmynsfw.com @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de: First of all: those are some wonderful usernames. Secondly: I have taken your concerns to heart and made some changes. See my update here: https://lemmy.ml/post/6190779.

What.

You want to mirror a Lemmy community onto Lemmit? :s

Also, see sidebar.

Funnily enough, it initially was the intention to have the bot check up on everything it posted, to see if it got deleted. In that way, it would outsource moderation to Reddit. I never got around to that, and am not sure I ever will.

So for now, handing out moderation to others is a good workaround. In order for me to make you a mod, you’ll need to leave a comment in the community, and mention me @admin@lemmit.online.

Actually, checking out the subreddit in question, that’s exactly the kind of content I want to avoid on here. Most of the posts on there are to invoke discussion, either with the OP or other members. You’d be better off starting a new community on your own instance.

Voila:

2023-10-07 17:23:54,906 - root - INFO - Community Boise is ENABLED, has 67 subscribers and 0 posts per day.

I understand your argument, and fully agree. There’s over 800 communities that I have to check though, so mistakes will be made.

No problem, as far as I’m concerned, all suspensions are negotiable. Which one was it? I’ll re-enable it straight away.

List of disabled communities

These communities were deemed too interactive (mostly invoking discussion with OP or the community) for Lemmit, and will not be receiving updates from the bot.

deleted by creator

Point taken and no offense taken. Hell, I’ve been thinking about this for some time myself as well.

For now I have disabled the requesting of new subreddits/communities, and tightened the upvote filter to be at least 10 and have an 80% upvote ratio. It’s not much, but it should limit the amount unpopular posts somewhat.

Next step is to go through the list of communities and purge all the “ghost communities” - ones that rely heavily on community participation, like for example AskReddit (221 subscribers). It’s going to be tricky to make that selection though. What to do, for example, with !AmItheAsshole@lemmit.online? With 1100 subscribers, it’s the most popular community on this server. Clearly people are getting something out of it, even though there are no replies to it.

I guess I’ll have to figure something out.

If anyone builds this as an optional feature, I’ll gladly accept a merge request for it. I don’t I will be running it on this instance though.

So ehm… Better late than never :D

good bot! :D