I think it’s a cool idea, and it could be the best way to help users on Reddit learn about Lemmy and migrate over.
I have some concerns though
What I like:
If you go to communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, you can see what I mean. Lemmy commenters are generally more helpful, more detailed, and get to the posts a lot faster than Reddit users.
If I understand correctly, once the network is implemented:
- Reddit user signs up on Fediverser
- Reddit user posts on a subreddit that has a Lemmy equivalent
- Post is crossposted to Lemmy
- When a Lemmy user replies to the post, that comment is reposted by a bot on Reddit
Users on the Reddit post will:
- learn about Lemmy
- see the good quality reply (if the reply is good, Reddit mods won’t ban the bot)
- get a direct link to a community/instance relevant to them
Users in the Lemmy community will
- get more content from people that are already curious about Lemmy
That would be really cool!
HOWEVER
Right now, the network isn’t fully implemented. Instead, in communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, there is a flood of ALL content that is posted in the respective subreddit.
This is bad because:
- Lemmy users don’t know that no human will see their replies, and the helpful Lemmy users are just talking to a wall. This will make them… less helpful in the future
- Because ALL content is being mirrored, this spams out the actual Lemmy posts
- Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored. I only noticed on the datahoarder community, but there are more sensitive subreddits where I would want control over where it is posted. I would also need a way to delete the content from Lemmy, and right now the users can’t do that.
Proposed fixes
- Don’t mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up. There is already an incentive for signing up (more replies, better replies, better reach). If a user doesn’t sign up, their post will not be mirrored, and they will not get the benefit.
- If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly (ex. from Modmail). Encourage them to talk to their communities before deciding
- Any automated post NEEDS a note saying so
- Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an “about” page for Fediverser
- Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an “about” page for Fediverser, and a link to some “what is lemmy”/“new to lemmy” article.
- If it’s not being implemented like the above, maybe change it up to consider the points about user control
As it is, reposting everything is damaging to Lemmy and potentially harmful to Reddit users that don’t know their stuff is being mirrored.
It’s a good idea I guess but I don’t understand the need to include Reddit into anything. Seems like a lot of work to include a site that is openly hostile towards competitors and would easily be shut down through their API if they wanted. Just my two cents.
Exactly. I am operating like is a war against Reddit who are taking the users and the communities hostage. I do not want to cause any harm to the users of Reddit, but I am sure not going to depend on having Reddit’s approval to do anything.
That’s a good point. I guess given that a lot of work is already done, it could be a cool learning experience for those involved if nothing else.
If and when it gets shut down, that would be another way that Reddit enshittifies, and people will see that. Part of my suggestions are to prevent the service from being shut down. The more we dot our i’s and cross our t’s in good faith, the worse it will look if Reddit shuts it down.
Ultimately I don’t see this as helping Reddit but rather helping the people and communities that make our platforms great. Some communities have official Lemmy spaces, and others are just two groups of like-minded people that would want interconnectedness if they could get it.
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Reddit has some excellent niche communities that don’t exist here. I want to access that content but I refuse to give Reddit any ad revenue.
Not even just the niche communities, there are plenty of large communities that just don’t have a presence here whatsoever. Show subreddits, for example, don’t really seem to exist or get any attention, apart from Star Trek and Futurama. If I want to talk about the new episodes of Invincible or Rick and Morty or Doctor Who, Reddit is currently the only place, unless I want to sit around talking to myself in an empty Lemmy community.
Conversely, though, filling dead subs with mirrors of reddit content that we can’t seriously interact with feels like it’s just ramming home the point that the specific Lemmy community in question is dead. It’s like saying “come to Lemmy where you watch reddit have a discussion, but not join it.”
Ultimately this whole idea is trying to apply a tech solution to a human problem. If people won’t come here and fill the place with content themselves, that’s not an issue that can be programmed away without Reddit’s API access, but if we had that, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.
come to Lemmy where you watch reddit have a discussion, but not join it.
At first. After we map the places where the discussions are happening, it becomes “do you know this discussion you are having on reddit? Come to this place on Lemmy so that we can continue it without being molested by ads and Big Tech oligarchs”.
Redditors are smelly and icky and I don’t like them
I’m a Redditor. I don’t like you.
farts in your general direction
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Yeah the datahoarder one was the first time I commented on a post thinking it wasn’t a bot/reddit-repost. I had a lengthy answer and only realized later on I was talking into a void. lol
If it is any consolation, you were not talking to a void and your message was visible to at least 60 other people.
I block every one of these garbage repost bots.
If I wanted to see Reddit content, I’d go on Reddit. Instead, I am inundated with content there’s no point in interacting with, when interacting with content is the purpose of these site.
Ban repost bots
If I wanted to see Reddit content, I’d go on Reddit.
What about the people who do not want to go to Reddit?
when interacting with content is the purpose of these site.
For you, maybe. But for everyone like you there are 10 other people who are just interested in following the content and be informed, entertained, distracted.
Keep it on your instance (that the rest can easily block or defederate from) and it’s all good.
Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored.
I can’t believe that I actually had to say this, but what these bot instances are doing is EXTREMELY ILLEGAL.
Reddit comments are COPYRIGHTED materials, and when reddit users sign up, they agree to a ToS that grants reddit essentially a permanent license to do with the contributed content as reddit pleases. However, anyone else mirroring these reddit comment would not have permission to do so, and theoretically reddit, or any reddit user whose comments are being mirrored, can start issuing DMCA takedowns against any instance that host these comments by federating with these bot instances.
I’m not a lawyer, but @rgullis@communick.news, instead of saying they are archivers or frontends that explicit do not host contents, you are ACTUALLY dumb enough to admit that you are illegally scraping, mirroring, and rehosting reddit’s content for the explicit purpose of making a competitor and harming their commercial interest so you can’t even claim fair use. You better pray that reddit’s lawyers don’t find out about your little projects, they’ll find you through your domain registrar or your cloud host, and you, and any instance that federates with yours would be in a world of pain.
Any instance owner should defederate from these bot instances immediately.
Has there ever been a case where a user has been able to legally enforce the copyright of internet comments?
From what I understand, the copyright is exclusively Reddit’s.
Well, you give them the right to do whatever they want with your content, as is common with similar services and social media, but you retain the ownership of the content. I don’t know of any services that take away your ownership and I am not even sure that’s legally possible in an agreement like this. Don’t quote me on the last part though.
From their user agreement:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
I don’t really understand the part I made bold, so if anyone could explain it (optimally with credible sources) that would be great :)
I’m not sure but signing away any moral rights seems so dystopian.
Which moral rights are you signing away?
Copyright isn’t a moral right imo. Ownership might be the closest to a moral right and you are keeping that one.
I know it’s not quite what you’re talking about, I could see automatic posts being pretty useful if they are informational such as weather alerts. I guess it’s not possible to do a repost bot from Twitter at this point with their API restrictions, but hopefully there are at least some services on Mastodon that would be worth mirroring on Lemmy for people who don’t use kbin.
That could be cool
Once Lemmy gets the ability to follow other users, that could be extended to the rest of the Fediverse. Let Lemmy users follow people/services from Mastodon/PixelFed directly
I like that idea!
I have selfhosted.forum blocked. All the posts I see I see no point in replying and since they’re all tech support it’s not like I learn something from reading them
I like learning about the stuff there, but recently I’ve noticed a rise in one sided posts
Have you tried browsing by “Subscribed” instead of “All”?
I have. It’s dreadful. Suggesting it as the solution to a problem created by software that is not ready is profoundly stupid.
It’s dreadful.
Why? How else do you expect to be able to curate your feed?
When advertising the service, the benefit to Reddit users could just be
Sign up here and forget about it. When you make a post on a subreddit with a Lemmy equivalent, we will post it with your Fediverser Lemmy account and let you know. Any replies from Lemmy users will be forwarded to your Reddit post.
We are curating a list of official and unofficial Lemmy communities for each subreddit. By signing up, you are likely to get replies from helpful, kind, and like-minded users on Lemmy; many of which who migrated from your subreddits to the Lemmy communities.
You can learn about Lemmy passively and migrate when you’re ready, or just benefit from the further reach.
Also @rglullis@communick.news, if you have a community where people can talk about the project and help out, I’m sure there are people here that would be interested!
I’m really glad to see that people are a lot more accepting of the project compared to when I first announced it, and believe me when I say that I am taking a lot of everyone’s feedback in consideration. Initially I was set on having this a simple tool to get users from reddit into Lemmy, so I was thinking that having bi-directional communication would actually be counter to the project’s goals and I thought that it would be better to simply send a DM to the users on reddit with a link to the Lemmy post and promoting the join-lemmy website. I changed my mind on this regard and now I see it this hard-nosed approach would likely just be treated as spam by Reddit users and would turn them away or flagging the bot.
However, I am still not convinced that the automated posts are a bad thing. To support my argument:
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Having the content from niche communities on Lemmy means that most people can leave Reddit right away. I keep reminding people about the 90/9/1 rule of social media because it’s important to keep in mind that the majority of any social network is made of lurkers, not of active participants, and at the same time a good part of these active participants go where their audience is.
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Lots of people are saying “once people realize they are talking with bots, they will stop posting”. The data I am seeing suggests that not to be the case. Participation in the mirrored communities is growing in relation to some (relatively big for Lemmy standards) communities on lemmy.world. The important thing to realize is (again) the 90/9/1 rule. A community that has 100 organic subscribers and zero bots will see maybe 1 post per day and 10 comments. A community with 100 organic subscribers and 1000 bots will see 10-20 posts per days and hundreds of comments, some of which will be happening between organic users who would never had interacted if the mirrored post was not there in the first place.
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Content is king. Having the content mirrored on the Lemmy instances increases the chances of making it visible on the search engines. Even if the mirrored communities were nothing but “absolute ghost towns” as some of the critics have called it, the fact that I can search for something directly on Lemmy without having to go to Reddit is a huge plus, for me.
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Related to the point above: having the mirrors running now are also a hedge against the possibility of Reddit further closing down their API.
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There really isn’t a difference in behavior from “users on Reddit” and “users on Lemmy”. While I certainly agree that really large communities will have a different user base compared to the niche ones, I find it hard to believe that the average subscriber of /r/datahoarder will behave differently from the average !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum Lemmy “organic” subscriber. And even if these differences exist they will disappear as Lemmy (hopefully) grows.
Regarding “Reddit users have no control over the mirror”. I’d argue that they do have a way to delete the content from Lemmy and it’s quite simple. Any user that has been mirrored by alien.top needs to do the following:
- Sign up via the portal to take over the bot account.
- Login to the instance using the password provided.
- Delete all their posts.
Re: “proposed fixes”.
Don’t mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up.
This is actually impossible to do. Once a user signs up to the mirror instance, they take over the bot account and I can no longer post on their behalf.
If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly.
For all intents and purposes, we should assume that mods on Reddit are aligned with Reddit. The last thing I want to do is to ask for their permission to do anything.
Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an “about” page for Fediverser
There is a reason that I am not going to alter the content of any Reddit post, because I am working with the assumption that any bot user will eventually become a organic account. I am planning though to make the user profile page be more informative, though.
Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an “about” page for Fediverser, and a link to some “what is lemmy”/“new to lemmy” article.
Yes, this is my plan, but the hardest part (UX-wise) is figuring out a way to post the content on reddit in a way that seems natural without a bunch of “spammy” content around it.
Regarding “Reddit users have no control over the mirror”. I’d argue that they do have a way to delete the content from Lemmy and it’s quite simple. Any user that has been mirrored by alien.top needs to do the following:
When Google and company do “opt-out” features that people are forced into using unless they manually opt-out (usually with long and convoluted procedures that aren’t front and centre in the docs), they are (rightly) excoriated for it.
Thankfully you don’t have long and convoluted procedures to opt out…
- Sign up via the portal to take over the bot account.
- Login to the instance using the password provided.
- Delete all their posts.
… Oops.
Rethink this if you don’t want really serious backlash. This is almost the textbook case of how not to do features.
Does the archive team ask permission from users before crawling data?
If you put a website and don’t set up a robots.txt file, does it still get indexed by Google? IOW, isn’t it “opt-out”?
If you ever posted a question on StackOverflow, did you have to give explicit permission to have your data pushed to their data exports? Can you ask to have it removed?
Google gets (rightfully) a ton of shit when they violate users privacy. What “privacy” is being violated here, when the data is on a public network and it can be crawled even without access to the API?
“Other people do this obnoxious thing so it’s OK if we do this obnoxious thing” isn’t the moral killing point you seem to think it is.
What is exactly “obnoxious” about search engines crawling public data?
(Incidentally, my issue is the other direction. I don’t want my content over on Reddit. I don’t have a Reddit account. I’ve never had a Reddit account. I don’t ever want to have a Reddit account. And, get this, I don’t want my stuff showing up on Reddit.)
Oh, no worries about that! The only part that is opt-out is on the reddit -> lemmy mirror. I will only be able to do two-way communication if there is a proper authorization from the user. :)
Then perhaps make the opt-out process better and easier? Requiring people who want to opt out to sign into a completely different service and then manually delete messages fully qualifies as “obnoxious”.
The biggest problem I see right now is with deleted and removed content.
Generally there is a reason for why someone would want to delete/remove something on Reddit.
If someone posts something that should be removed (spam, illegal content, hateful content), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here. If someone deletes a post/comment on Reddit (they’re getting harassed, they accidentally shared personal info, stalkers), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here.
A chunk of my moderation experience is from a university subreddit where stuff like that DOES happen, putting a real person at risk.
I like this idea and want it to succeed, and this is a concern for me. I don’t know about the legality/liability, but I think even Google updates their caches when stuff is deleted and tools like ceddit/removeddit/reveddit don’t let you see stuff that’s deleted by the user.
This is a different problem than requiring opt-in to have the mirror started and I fully sympathize. The technical challenge for this is mostly the lack of bandwidth to periodically check for all the posts that ended up being mirrored. To illustrate, alien.top alone already has pushed over 1M comments since it started running a couple of months ago.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, and I think that it’s one that could be solved client-side - e.g, a modified Lemmy client could identify mirror posts and comments and check the original reddit link - or worst-case scenario we could check every day for changes in some percentage of past comments every day to see if there is anything that needs to be updated.
Hi. With the utmost courtesy and respect: please look at the vote counts and feedback here.
At the least, in anything like its current form, we fediverse people don’t want this.
If people want to be on reddit, they can be. If they want their niche community on that site, they’re allowed. Trying to bridge content between sites that are potentially even antagonistic toward one another is not a good plan, no matter how virtuous your intentions.
Not that vote count is a good measure of feedback, but the votes are more favorable for my comments than the ones saying “I don’t want this” or “I don’t like this”, so…
In any case, one of the greatest things about the fediverse is that the “fediverse people” can decide for themselves. Don’t like mirrored content? Don’t follow it. Don’t like mirrored instances, block them. There is absolutely nothing being forced on you, and those that are complaining about “flooding content” are usually browsing through “all”, to which there isn’t much to say besides “I can not fix stupid.”
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Thanks for the post.
I always found the project interesting, but you bring valid points.
Here’s one problem with bidirectionality.
I’m banned from reddit. But if a bot is mirroring my comments back to reddit, that means I get to affect the reddit conversation again. This tells me reddit is going to have a problem with mirroring comments back to reddit.
