An idea for more content on Lemmy (and the fediverse): Relly (Relay+Lemmy)

So, Lemmy is sometime missing content. I don’t regret switching from Reddit to Lemmy but, expecially for niche communities, the content isn’t always here.

My idea is to fix this is a Fediverse-based content relay named Relly.

Relly allows you to select RSS feeds, Mastodon users, Mastodon hashtag and Mastodon instances (so, the top posts on that instance) as sources for content, and post them to your favourite Lemmy community.

There are several features which make Relly better and anti-spam:

  • Limits for a source (example: only up to 5 posts a day from this RSS feed)
  • Limits for a community (example: only up to 5 posts a day to !archlinux)
  • Global limits (example: only up to 10 posts made each day)
  • Opt-out for servers & communities (instance and community moderators will be able to ask to be put in the UNLIST, which blocks by default Relly on your instace/community; this isn’t an anti-spam, as it is more a tool for avoiding common users to use Relly in a malicous and spammy way)
  • Order posts (so, if i have 10 RSS posts and 10 Mastodon posts and a global limit of 15 posts, you can either have the 10 RSS posts and the 5 most upvoted Mastodon posts, or some RSS posts and some Mastodon posts [always the most upvoted])
  • Multiple communities (post the same content to different communieties, or set up a fraction [ex. 50%], so that each post has a certain percentage to be posted on a certain community)
  • Dynamic limits: You can set an objective of active users/post made in the last 24 hours, so that the limits (either for a specific source, a specific community or globally) will be reduced. Example: if you set a objective of 50 posts, and 25 are made, the limits of Relly will be 50% of what they were originaly set to be; this allows Relly to completly stop posting on a community if the objective was already reached.
  • Do not repeat: before posting a link, checks if it was already posted in the community in a specific time period (by default, 48 hours)
  • Modularity: new post sources and post outputs can be implemented; an example could be an e-mail output, so that you can run Relly in local and recieve an e-mail everyday with your favourite news)

Relly is designed to be used by moderators of communities, but users can also use it. A user should always ask the moderator if it is OK to use it. A moderator should always ask the admins if it is OK to use it. Moderators, if they are the one using it, should also make public the list of sources, and allow the community to discuss possible edits to the list. The admins should put in the sidebar notes if Relly is OK to use for moderators of communities.

At the moment, Relly is just the idea that I presented here; I want to hear the community’s feedback, and if the community is OK with this project being made, I will start working on it (I will make it in Rust and release under the MIT License).

NeonPayload,

Everyone always wants a technical solution to grow communities. act as though some sort of filter rule or item in the settings menu that will cause more users to post and communities to grow, but always will refuse the most basic thing in communities. Community culture you can always say forums are the public square of the internet. If you don’t have anything to see or do in said square it might as well be a empty abandon parking lot.

wiki_me,

I really like this linus torvalds quote:

Don’t ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle

People have opinions but lets be completely honest here what do they know? Why not trying to build it and see what happens, it might work, btw I myself thought about having something like “fediverse greatest hits” that would show the most liked posts for a particular hashtag so maybe that could be configured to do that.

shrugal,

The content is out there on the internet, you don’t need Lemmy to consume it. What you want is a community of people that care and talk about the content, but you can’t just create that with a f*cking bot.

Please stop this content bot shit and just give it some time to grow organically. Reddit and Twitter weren’t built in a year either. If Lemmy is any good then people will come, if not then we will move on and that’s fine as well.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

If Lemmy is any good then people will come, if not then we will move on and that’s fine as well.

No, it’s not. This is a fight against tech companies with multi-billion dollar budgets, who profit from exploiting your data, getting you addicted for “engagement” and who won’t mind destroying any glimpse of social fabric to keep things this way.

Thinking that “community is enough” is bringing a knife to a gun fight. We need to neutralize Big Tech. We need to get as many people as possible out of the Borg. Social media works by the 1/9/90% rule, and the bots are a first step to make this place a viable alternative to the 90%.

Die4Ever, (edited )
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

I agree with most of your comment but IDK about the end part. Bots haven’t seemed to be working at all, most people hate them. Luckily there’s a setting to hide all bot posts but most people don’t know that option exists in their settings.

I think the problem with bot posts is that they can put more content in than the human community can sustain. If we don’t have enough humans to vote on all these posts and comment on them, then adding more posts into the pile makes the problem worse, it’s artificial. If humans were actually interested in the content then they would’ve posted it themself. The OP is someone that put themself out there for engagement, it’s an offer to socialize with someone. The next person to see the post knows there’s at least 1 other person willing to talk about this, because there’s always at least the OP.

Instead of bots we’re probably better off just doing our part to make more posts and comments.

Also we probably need to kick some habits from Reddit, like we’re used to not doing self promotion, or being afraid of a community being mostly compromised of your own posts. Also another Reddit habit I think is only posting in specific communities but here if the community is too specific then it won’t have many subscribers, so we should be crossposting to the more general communities too.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I think the problem with bot posts is that they can put more content in than the human community can sustain.

What you are talking about seems to the problem of the RSS bots, which I also dislike. The system I’m working on has a post-mirroring aspect to it, but that’s only one part of it. The main goal of fediverser is to let people migrate away from reddit without letting them feeling like they are missing out on the content from niche communities.

Instead of bots we’re probably better off just doing our part to make more posts and comments.

I’ve said in another thread, this is important but only goes so far. I was subscribed to ~40 subreddits, but I was actively participating in maybe 5-6 of them. For the other 85% of subs, I just wanted to keep a pulse on the discussion but didn’t have the time, energy or expertise to contribute. In my case, there was maybe a handful of communities that I could contribute on Lemmy but about 35 communities that I “wished” there was more content but the people are simply not here yet.

So, what am I to do? I don’t want to be on reddit, but I can bring the content from reddit into these communities. And I completely understand that it might be annoying for those that actually want the interaction, but to those I’d say: please subscribe to the mirror anyway because we are going to “fake til we make it”. The more content we have (even if mirrored) the easier it will be to convince people to migrate and the easier it will be for them to think “if I can follow the same content on both networks, I might as well just move to the place that is not run by a big corp that exploits me and my data”.

Die4Ever,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

What you are talking about seems to the problem of the RSS bots, which I also dislike.

Really I dislike any post where the OP isn’t willing to respond to their notification that they have a comment in their post.

I guess your thing requires linking your Reddit account to it? I’m not sure if I want to risk it currently, I would actually be kinda annoyed if my Reddit account got banned or something.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Your account wouldn’t be banned. Worst case scenario, the API keys from my service would be revoked and that would stop working.

Also, nothing stopping you from creating throwaway accounts just to have the bridge activated…

shrugal,

The bots are a big step backwards imo. They make this place look like a surreal ghost town, instead of an inviting place to start or participate in a discussion.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

It depends on the implementation. If all you have is a handful of bots posting all their posts on a fixed schedule, then yes, it gets quite tedious.

But I believe IMHO that the system I have going for fediverser avoids a lot of those issues. There is one “mirror bot” for each account that is posting on reddit, and they posted to lemmy’s mirror instance in near real-time. This means that the conversations basically happen in the same way they happened on reddit. This also opens up the possibility of (a) two-way communication between Lemmy and Reddit threads and (b) the mechanism for the real person to “take over” the bot account.

shrugal, (edited )

So what if people don’t want their answers being mirrored back to Reddit because it’s a greedy company, or redditors don’t want their comments on Lemmy?! Are you going to ask each one individually or just do it without their consent? Does it become a one-way mirror where someone from Reddit will never see your answer, or are you going to flood Reddit with bot accounts as well? That sounds really engaging and not at all creepy to me! /s

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

So what if people don’t want their answers being mirrored back to Reddit because it’s a greedy company,

Good question. The way that I am designing it at the moment will actually ask for consent. The idea is that if you reply to a reddit mirrored comment, you get a bot telling you “hey, this poster is on reddit, connect your reddit account to if you want to bridge the conversation”.

or redditors don’t want their comments on Lemmy?!

Then it works by opt-out. By logging to the fediverser instance, the reddit -> lemmy mirror is automatically disabled.

shrugal,

The idea is that if you reply to a reddit mirrored comment, you get a bot telling you “hey, this poster is on reddit, connect your reddit account to if you want to bridge the conversation”.

So for someone who doesn’t want to use Reddit (probably quite a lot on Lemmy) these posts are gonna be filled with comments that they can’t really anwers to. That’s exactly what I mean by surreal ghost town.

Then it works by opt-out. By logging to the fediverser instance, the reddit -> lemmy mirror is automatically disabled.

I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in many places. You can’t just copy someone’s content and tell them to login to your service if they don’t like it.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

So for someone who doesn’t want to use Reddit (probably quite a lot on Lemmy) these posts are gonna be filled with comments that they can’t really anwers to. That’s exactly what I mean by surreal ghost town.

There is an asymmetry here.

Judging by MAU, we have currently ~35k people on Lemmy because they are against Reddit. We have 300 million people on reddit who are on reddit because “it is where everyone else is”.

If the mirrors are creating 250k new mirror accounts per day, and if one fediverser instance can convert 0.1% of these per day, it’s 250 new users who “don’t care”. In one week, these ~1500 converted users will be in conversation on both networks, which will increase the number of non-bots in mirrored threads and be enough to stop the “ghost town” feeling.

I’m not talking hypotheticals. It is happening already some of the communities where I set this up.

I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in many places.

I’m pretty sure you are wrong. The archive project does not need consent from the users (or reddit) to archive their content. Mirror sites from twitter exist for years already, none of them have faced charges. The worst that Reddit can do is to revoke the keys by claiming violation of the terms of service.

BallsInTheShredder,

Where is this set up at? I’d like to see

shrugal, (edited )

If the mirrors are creating 250k new mirror accounts per day, and if one fediverser instance can convert 0.1% of these per day, it’s 250 new users who “don’t care”. In one week, these ~1500 converted users will be in conversation on both networks, which will increase the number of non-bots in mirrored threads and be enough to stop the “ghost town” feeling.

If that’s not a purely hypothetical argument then I don’t know what is. Your conversion numbers are taken from thin air, as is the claim that those numbers will prevent or revert the ghost town feeling. You completely ignore users signing up or going back to Reddit, you assume that everyone migrating will be ok with sharing their stuff back to Reddit, and so on. The fact of the matter is that you’ll be creating a read-only copy of Reddit at the beginning, and there is no telling if that will ever convert back to a real community. But in the meantime you’ll have spammed a lot of communities with tons of bot content.

I mean, try it on a few communities that agree to this and see how it works out, but don’t let something like this loose on Lemmy as a whole.

The worst that Reddit can do is to revoke the keys by claiming violation of the terms of service.

I’m more concerned with the personal rights of Reddit users than whatever Reddit as a company would do, although violating their ToS on a big scale might have consequences as well. IANAL so idk what the right answer is here, but an approach like “it’s fine as long as they don’t sue me” is pretty reckless imo. Maybe take the rights of the people you affect into account before flipping the switch. E.g. what would you think about someone creating a bot account of you on FB and posting all your stuff there?

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I mean, try it on a few communities that agree to this and see how it works out, but don’t let something like this loose on Lemmy as a whole.

I am already doing it, not just for communities but even whole instances:

All of them are getting a lot of “bot” activity and increased usage by real subscribers. And it is because of the positive results that I started looking at some of dead communities around and started asking other mods if they would like to have the alien.top accounts working there.

sir_reginald, (edited )
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

No please, no more bot content. My main problem with Lemmy is that commenting in a lot of posts it’s like shouting into a black hole, precisely because they were posted automatically by bots.

We don’t need more bots. If you want more content on Lemmy, it’s a better a idea to share Lemmy posts in Reddit, Discord, Telegram or similar. When people start finding interesting discussions over here they will start signing up. The reason I originally created an account in HackerNews and Reddit back then was because I clicked on a link and I wanted to participate in an interesting discussion.

MycoBro,

It’s been 7 hours and not a single fucking twat has corrected a spelling mistake you made by accident (and I sure as hell won’t be the one to do it). I love lemmy

wagoner,

My view: if users want to see mastodon content then they should go to mastodon. I say this as a mastodon user. Lemmy isn’t an RSS and microblog reader, it’s an entity all of its own and needs to evolve its own culture.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

for niche communities, the content isn’t always here.

What subreddits are you missing? If you join alien.top through the portal, it will give you a list of subreddits you have and the recommended Lemmy alternative.

ptz,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

When the perceived problem is lack of content, why is the solution always to throw more bot posts at it? I’ve blocked or site-banned pretty much every bot account because they’re just adding dead end posts and noise.

For Mastadon content, Lemmy just needs the ability to follow individual users. Not sure if that’s on the roadmap, but it should be straightforward to implement. Same goes for other ActivityPub platforms. When user-follow is possible, that opens up many avenues for users to subscribe to just what they want.

What you’re proposing is not really adding content, just clutter and the appearance of content.

Give Lemmy time, and it will grow organically. Let’s not try to force feed it with reposts from bots. As people discover Lemmy, if half or more of what they see is dead end crap reposted via bots, then I personally feel that will be a turn off for many (which defeats what you’re trying to accomplish).

djtech,

Thanks for replying to my post.

For Mastodon: this isn’t the same as you are saying with the user-follow. In your case, each users follows the users that they want to see, and they can partecipate in the comments of that post, but they will see ALL of the posts of that user in their timeline/feed. Here, the community choose what users/hashtags/instances to follow, the best posts get selected and they get posted, without being spammy. You don’t have to see everything, but only the one that both were highly-ranked on Mastodon and they were upvoted on Lemmy. At the same time, you can’t control exactly what sources are selected, but you can also interact with the community in order to drive the moderators to change the sources list, or you could just change/make a new community based on Relly. They are two different approches, that could live in symbiosis (ex. You select your own Mastodon users to follow, and the only Relly’s Mastodon posts that appear are the one that you didn’t already saw in your personal timeline [this would require collaboration with the Lemmy Server Development Team])

Some other additions:

  • This isn’t the same as other bots that keep on posting contents, thanks to Limits, objectives, top posts, …
  • Being moderated by the moderators/admin of the community/instance, the quality threshold is/should be higher.
  • Content is created by users who want more content. We can provide more content, and slowly stop pumping from the outside, until Lemmy is fully independent. (see Dynamic limits in my original post)
  • Now that I think of it, it might be a good idea to make a reverse bot, which takes the top posts from Lemmy and posts on Reddit/Mastodon/…, while providing the link to the original lemmy post, in order to drive more traffic and engagement

Hope this is useful!

ptz,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Sounds like you have a plan, and nothing I say is going to talk you out of it. So go for it, I guess. I’ll just block those bots, too.

Personally, I think what you’re trying to do is the wrong way to increase engagement and feel it will add yet more noise, regardless of your intent.

Die4Ever,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

To your last bullet point, Lemmy posts actually already are visible on Mastodon

A user mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever

A community …gamedev.place/@deus_ex_randomizer…

And a Mastodon user can post to Lemmy by mentioning the community

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

I think the limited number of posts per day feature of this is really the standout that makes this intriguing to me. We already have the Lemmit bot posting every single post from reddit to Lemmy like a firehose, but discussion on them is sort of like yelling into a void. If we only post the top ~3 posts per day from a subreddit, we can condense any conversation into just those and guarantee that it’s not going to get washed away with the rest of the junk content. Even though it’s not ideal, I think a crutch like this could go a long way to seeding some “natural” activity.

djtech,

Yes, and the fact that it doesn’t post any link that was already posted in the last 48 hours avoid spamming.

I think that subreddits could be usable using the RSS feed system, as Reddit API are expensive and if we set up a RSS feed containing the top of 24 hours, we can extract links from there.

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

Is scraping reddit’s HTML without using an API doable? I’m not sure if the reddit RSS feed has any notion of upvotes/popularity.

djtech,

I should check, but if i remeber correctly, i had some subreddits that i read on newsboat using some kind of option in the RSS link in order to get the top. (something like ?top=24hrs or like that)

djtech,

I had to enter reddit (eeewww…) but I found it: reddit.com/…/how_to_get_rss_feed_of_a_subreddit_w…Check the first comment.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

You can make basically any “read” operation on reddit without an API key. The problem is rate-limiting. You can at most make only 600 requests for every 10 minutes.

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

I’m begging people to take a look at my fediverser project, and it already does some of these things.

  • You can choose if you want to mirror posts from reddit or posts with comments
  • You can choose if you want “self posts” or link posts
  • You can set a rate limit of mirror posts (maximum X posts per past 24 hours)
  • It doesn’t mirror any post if there is already a submission in the Lemmy community with the same URL.

It wouldn’t be difficult to add something similar to RSS feeds.

But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.

djtech,

But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.

This is cool! As said in another comment, I’m now also thinking about a reverse bot which posts from Lemmy to other platforms and keeps the original URL, so that people can partecipate, see the instance homepage, register, … Just trying to improve this amazing environment!

djtech,

What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.

Getting content from the outside, with all of the tools integrated in Relly, might just be the solution, I guess.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

It’s a great project, to be honest.

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