You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.
Yes, but they’re fine in my opinion as they don’t clutter up my All feed. I personally wish there were active Kerbal Space Program and Rain World communities, but they don’t exist because there aren’t sufficient members. It’s just not sustainable currently, and mirrored posts would not fix it.
I fail to see how it’s worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.
My reason for saying that this is worse is not because I can’t talk with the original poster. it’s very hard for me to word this in the exact way I want to, but it’s a combination of the original poster not consenting to / willfully posting the content on Lemmy making it feel intrusive, and me appreciating the human effort behind the post, not the post itself. It’s the same reason I don’t talk to LLMs like ChatGPT to pass time. I just don’t appreciate it for some reason.
First, it’s not “Reddit content”. It’s about the content from the communities.
Sure, the content is not tied to Reddit that much, but they might for example have references to other subreddits, their tags, and Reddit users. Because content on Reddit is made to be on Reddit, unless Lemmy is made exactly to mimic Reddit (which I don’t want btw), you are always going to have a worse experience browsing Reddit content on Lemmy, than browsing Reddit content on Reddit. This isn’t just a problem with Lemmy-Reddit bridging btw, it’s also a problem with all the Matrix bridges and stuff like that.
Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there.
That might be useful for some people, but it’s not for me. The communities I want that aren’t on Lemmy are extremely niche. No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (and I don’t want this btw) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements, and so everyone’s small niche communities won’t be bridged. Personally, I found these mirroring bots to be a nuisance in my early days on Lemmy, and slightly reminisce for when they weren’t a thing yet. So in my opinion, these bots hurt the migration experience, and Lemmy would be better without it
If this bridging was an opt-in system, I’d be fine with it. But because it’s currently an opt-out system, and an opt-out system where you have to block hundreds of accounts, I really don’t like it. Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy, and I’d be fine with these mirror/bridge bots then. This is sort of like how it works on Matrix, and I like the bridging there. But with the current circumstances on Lemmy, I don’t like the mirror/bridge bots.
Sorry for the wall of text btw, but these are my opinions and I wanted to state them clearly.