I’m the developer of Fediverser Project, which is a set of services to make it easy for people on Reddit to migrate to the Fediverse. It lets people use their Reddit credentials (OAuth) to sign up and create an account on a Lemmy server.

It also offers a cool onboarding feature: during signup, we can fetch the user’s subscribed subreddits, and we use this information to automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy (or Kbin/Mbin) community. This “subreddit -> fediverse group” map is crowdsourced and people can sign up if they want to contribute. The “main” site also provides a “Find an instance” feature: it can track all the servers that use the Fediverse software and redirect users to their closest instance.

To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).

I’d really like to see aussie.zone becoming part of the network. I believe this would make it faster and simpler to get more people in the fediverse, and I’m willing to provide all the support and help needed to get the “country-based” services getting started with it.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

  • BakuEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    I love the idea, and I also believe that getting more people onto the fediverse is a good thing. However, I do have a couple of questions/concerns.

    Firstly, I’m not really sure why this would require access to Lemmy instances themselves? is it to improve coverage by automatically crawling all the communities on a given instance to match with Reddit alternatives? Or is it to automatically sign new people up to an instance and then subscribe them to the Lemmy communities automatically? I believe that pushing for admins to provide root level access to their Lemmy servers is going to limit your growth. I don’t run an instance, but if I did, I’m not sure that I would allow anything except the bare minimum access to the server.

    I also noticed that the Subreddits section doesn’t display anything. I ended up creating a second account which I OAuth’d to my Reddit account, and it was still empty. I was trying to figure out how to add an ‘alternative to’ section on a few communities (which took me a while to figure out how to do)

    Also, about the above: Are there any plans to add a way to link a Reddit account to a pre-existing account? What about account deletion, data anonymisation, and GDPR compliance? I do realise most of those aren’t relevant at the moment, and probably won’t be for some time, but I think you may encounter some issues, considering the more privacy-conscious nature of a lot of Fediverse users.

    I do really hope to see this expand and grow, though. Despite the potential to bring some unsavoury Reddit types, it’ll be an overall win for the Fediverse.