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:
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.
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.
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.
Related to the point above: having the mirrors running now are also a hedge against the possibility of Reddit further closing down their API.
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 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.