The biggest problem people seem to have with Lemmy at the moment is the lack of content.
If and when r/newzealand comes back online, it would be possible to set up a bot that copied new posts from there to lemmy.nz (and possibly from other NZ related subreddits). That would help get the content we need to get people to stay here.
There are downsides to this. Most content here would be from Reddit, rather than this community - at least for the time being. And there would be posts asking for advice, etc. that don’t make much sense without OP here.
The second issue would be helped a lot by filtering out posts with Advice, Discussion, Meta or AMA flairs. We could also use the other r/newzealand flairs to repost to the appropriate communities here.
So what do people think? Is that something we want to do?
EDIT: What do people think of @[email protected]’s idea of posting into its own community, so people could opt out in or out?
EDIT 2: It doesn’t seem like this is popular. People seem happy for content to be copied over by hand, but not by a bot. To be clear, I’m not talking about bot-generated content, I’m talking about grabbing human-generated content with a bot. Some people seem to have got that confused. It would be doing a kind of manual federation of r/newzealand - especially if the content was kept within it’s own community.
But it’s kind of a relief. It would have been a lot of work to set it up. On the other hand, I’m not at all keen on going back to Reddit to look for stuff to manually copy over here either. I don’t know if others are. I’m just worried that people will feel like they’re missing out on so much here that they go back. If there was a Reddit cross-post community, people would have the option to get everything from here and stay off Reddit altogether.
If we loose enough members to a lack of content, the community will die. That would be a real pity.
Putting it in its own community is a good idea.
I found this bot linked to in the Lemmy repo. No idea how well it works. I’m reasonably confident I could get it up and going, but I’d be in a bit over my head. If I can find someone to answer questions when I need help I’d be OK.
I can help! Any issues just dm me.
I’m looking at something similar, to create a bot to post daily posts.
Thanks! I’ll definitely get in touch if I end up going ahead with it.
Where are you thinking of posting it out of interest?
On a stopdrinking community I’ve been appointed moderator of.
https://lemmy.world/c/stopdrinking
Good on you for doing that. Communities like that change lives.
Yep, it helped me stop drinking alcohol. It was a massive help. I created a very rudimentary bot and managed to post something, yeah! See: https://lemmy.world/post/276715
Nice, I had searched but hadn’t found that. Give it a test, and if you have questions try in the lemmy.nz chat. There are some pretty technical people hanging out there.
People seem pretty opposed to it, but I think that relates to it being posted in the main communities here. I haven’t had anyone directly answer about a separate community, which seems like the way to go if we were going to do it at all.
To me, it seems essentially the same as federating from other lemmy sites, with technical differences. And no cross-commenting.
A separate community may still pollute the “Local” feed. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be it’s own instance. You could take the top posts from various subs on reddit and post them in a matching community on the instance.
In fact, this bot exists, there’s no reason for this to be NZ specific, are we sure such an instance doesn’t already exist?
I was wondering that myself. There would probably needed to be a fair number of bots working together if it covered heaps of subreddits (because of Reddit’s API’s free limits). It depends how much and how often they scrape.
Yeah, I’d think you could get pretty good coverage though. Reddit has millions of subreddits, so I think you’d add the ones you want manually. But if you’re just looking for top posts, you probably don’t need to check too frequently. Every 30 mins or hour seems like plenty often enough.
I’m not familiar with reddit’s API, but I would expect requesting one page of the top posts for a subreddit to be one API call. You could do 3,000 subreddits refreshing once every 30 minutes.
That’s a good point.
I think it could be quite useful. I wonder if others have thought about setting one up too. It would probably needed quite a powerful server.
Probably not as powerful as you’d think. When you check the top page of posts, you’d have most of them duplicated from last time you checked. And you could set an even tighter threshold, so say only the top 5 posts.
You’d start with a smaller number of subreddits (3,000 is a lot to add manually!), and even if you’re adding 1,000 posts a day, the big instances are doing that too so it’s probably not an issue.
You could totally try setting it up in a test instance and see how you go!
Hmm… It’s something I’ll look at doing. I’m sure I’ll need some help in various places.