Fediverser Portal: update to my fediverser project, people now can migrate away from reddit by signing up to the mirror instance directly.

So, I know that my project fediverser has received quite a bit of criticism and its flagship instance alien.top has been quite controversial, but I hope that this update will help people understand the whole project better, which is more than “just yet-another repost bot”.

Today I am launching the “Fediverser Portal”. The idea is simple: given that alien.top is a instance to be the home of reddit mirror accounts, the portal can let actual reddit users to sign up to the Lemmy instance using OAuth. Registrations are closed on the Lemmy side, and the only way to sign up is by using “Login with Reddit”. When the user successfully authorizes the login, then the account is created on the Lemmy side with the same reddit username. Also important, the system can also get the list of subscribed subreddits from the user and we can then subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy instances automatically.

I believe this can make migration a lot easier, because people will not only avoid the “how do I sign up” part, they will even login and have some content already available in their feed.

As usual, don’t hesitate to give your most honest feedback.

density,
@density@kbin.social avatar

I missed whatever drama was associated with alien.top and the URL just 404s now.

This project reminds me of when Cory Doctorow describes adversarial interoperability. Was it inspired by this?

I think adversarial interop is a good explanation for all the permissions required.

Nerd02,
@Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com avatar

While I admire the initiative of bringing Reddit users to Lemmy, you are asking for way too many permissions, my dude.

https://i.imgur.com/OAH3QxK.png

submit links and comments from my account

read my DMs and send DMs from my account

keep these permissions indefinitely

I wanted to check out your project, but there is no way in hell I am agreeing to that lol. Chances are you don’t even need all of those. Also, I see that apparently Fediverser is open source. You might want to point that out on the portal.alien.top site, as that might make people more keen on trusting you with their Reddit accounts

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Yeah, it is requesting a lot of things because it’s part of the roadmap to actually do them. The next release will have two-way communication, to let people respond to a reddit mirror and send a message to the original redditor.

Keep in mind that the goal of this project is to let people completely replace their reddit usage with their fediverse account, and that will need to let people (for some time) bridge conversations betwern the two platforms.

I will eventually change this so that the reqiests for the actions will be separate, one for connecting and getting the subreddits, another to ask for permission to send messages. I just didn’t get the time to do it “properly”, yet.

Nerd02,
@Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com avatar

I understand. If it was up to me I would consider the permission settings a priority, as agreeing to all of that can be a pretty big deal for some people (I know it is for me). Some users may be willing to go all the way, but many might be gelous or scared of losing their Reddit accounts or even giving access to them to what, in their eyes, would be a complete stranger.

Anyway, as I said, the idea itself is cool. Hopefully your project can be a gateway to the Fediverse for many Redditors, as the enshittification goes on.

rglullis, (edited )
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I actually can tell you: i have 11 people that declined the request vs 135 that accepted, and you are the 3rd that mentioned rejecting it due to the permissions being too aggressive.

But I will bump it up in my backlog. It’s just something that I wanted to avoid doing until I have actual users in the platform and get some actual validation.

Nerd02,
@Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com avatar

Wow ok. Well that was just one man’s opinion, if you have numbers on who is fine with that kind of access and who isn’t then by all means keep going with your schedule. Maybe I’m just too cautious and my perspective is skewed because of that.

HamSwagwich,

GitHub Link isn’t working. How could I theoretically use this for my instance?

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Yeah, I had a typo there. The correct link is github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser.

How to run on your instance? If you are deploying with docker compose, you can add the services needed and you need to make sure that the web app can connect to the lemmy db.

Karlos_Cantana,
@Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz avatar

I tried it and it didn’t subscribe me to any communities.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Do you mean on your alien.top account or this one from sopuli.xyz? Because this is meant to work on the alien.top accounts only (I do not have control over your sopuli.xyz and lemmy doesn’t support oauth yet)

Karlos_Cantana, (edited )
@Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz avatar

I created an alien.top account by following the link posted. I signed in to my reddit account and gave it permission to access it. It said I just sign in with my Reddit name and it gave me a passord. Then I signed into my alien.top account and it said I wasn’t subscribed to any communities.

imgur.com/a/E7c3v6N

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

oh, I see… When you completed the login, you should see a list of your subreddits and what is the recommended lemmy instance. Was there anything showing there?

(If you want you can send me a DM with your reddit username, it will be user to check this)

Karlos_Cantana,
@Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz avatar

This is all I see when I log in.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

You are looking at the “Local” tab. There is no community on alien.top itself.

Please check the “Subscribed” tab to see what your subscriptions. If you still don’t see anything, then it means that there was no lemmy community that was corresponding to any of the subreddits you follow on reddit.

Karlos_Cantana,
@Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz avatar

It shows nothing in the subscribed tab. I subscribe to 89 subs on Reddit. I know some of them have counterparts because I’ve found them on my own.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I think you’re misunderstanding. The mapping reddit and lemmy communities is still being built and depends on the admin of the “portal”. It can very well be that it hasn’t found communities to recommend to you yet because they are missing from this database.

Can you check the portal site and send me the list of subreddits you are seeing?

Karlos_Cantana,
@Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz avatar

I see the list now. 2 subreddits show as having similar Lemmy communities. I know there are at least 4 more that I’ve found on my own. You’re saying that they will eventually make the database?

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

It depends on me building it and I could use some help, but yeah.

nautilathedrowned2, (edited )
@nautilathedrowned2@kbin.social avatar

@Karlos_Cantana I just created an account there and I can say that it's defederated

I can't even see any post from other instances because of that

But even though I have an account on lemmy i still stay on kbin

ZeroCool,
@ZeroCool@feddit.ch avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    Have you found suitable replacements for all the subreddits you used to follow? I sure didn’t.

    ZeroCool, (edited )
    @ZeroCool@feddit.ch avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    The vast majority? Yes.

    So I’m guessing your interests have a lot of overlap with the average Lemmy migrant, because when I tried the tool for myself, less than 20% of my subreddits have a corresponding community, and a lot of those that do are essentially dead.

    Carighan,
    @Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

    searching through the local & ALL listings like everyone else on Lemmy did

    That feels weird to me as a reason, that’s just appeal to tradition. Yeah, you did that. And I did that. But that doesn’t magically make it the best solution. That doesn’t imply there cannot be a better way to discover content.

    dameoutlaw,
    @dameoutlaw@lemmy.ml avatar

    I think this is really cool and can potentially get more people to migrate

    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    Thanks! I think the main thing that needs to be done now is to have a good map of lemmy communities that can be recommended by those signing up.

    rglullis,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    Also, question for @antik as you have given alien.top a censure : how many “organic” users will alien.top need to reach in order for it to be considered legitimate?

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