rglullis OP , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Okay, I am starting to realize that most people are looking at the word “bot” and stop reading the rest of the description.

The point of fediverser is not about creating an army of bots or a fully automated content firehose. The point of fediverser is to have a tool that gives a way for humans to bring content that they want to have on the fediverse. The mirrored instance and the bot accounts are just a mechanism to (1) facilitate the curating process, (2) automate the posting of content that has been curated and (3) to keep a bridge with Reddit which can help redditors to signup to Lemmy in a frictionless-way.

All this work started because I spent almost 3 months bootstraping !emacs by doing the following:

• checking /r/emacs.
• Manually posting one or two links that I found there to the lemmy community
• Realizing that the majority of content on the community is from “self posts” with questions
• sending DMs to the authors of these self-posts, telling them about the community and inviting them to join my instance.
• Having about 10% of successful positive rate.
• The people who joined start asking “ok, now what? I can post here, but if the majority of people are still on reddit, what is the point? How about we have the reddit comments as well, so that we can start the conversation from here?”

At no point the idea is to:

• pull content automatically from reddit to lemmy
• use bots to flood the lemmy communities
• ignore the people that already joined lemmy.

I’ve repeated multiple times in this thread and in the original announcement, but I can do it yet again: the main usage of fediverser is for people that do not want to use reddit but still are interested in interacting with niche communities.