I know that the fediverser project is quite a bit controversial due to the mirroring bots and how they were being used on alien.top, but today I’d like to talk about two other pieces of functionality which I believe have been ignored and eclipsed by the mirrors:

  • The ability for users to signup to the lemmy instance by connecting via their Reddit account.
  • The ability for instance admins to create a custom map of subreddit-to-lemmy communities, which can be used to auto-subscribe users who are registering via Reddit.

I think that these two pieces can really help solve the problem of user onboarding. Because it works as an extra service along with Lemmy, no changes in the core service are needed. For users, the possibility of starting an account on Lemmy and get a list of interesting content right away can reduce friction and would hopefully get more people to talk about it.

I’m particularly interested in hearing from the admins of the topic-focused instances, as (I believe) would have an easier way to reach out to the people that are closer to their interests. So, apologies in advance for the mass-tagging, here are the ones that I found on join-lemmy:

To reiterate, this has nothing to do with the bots or mirrors deployed on alien.top. I’m only asking who would be interested in adding the functionality to allow user registration via Reddit OAuth. In case of any questions, feel free to ask here or reach out via matrix.

  • rglullisOPMAEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    You won’t need to worry about it. The software is able to do the mirroring, but only if the admin explicitly sets it up to do so. The instance admin can simply choose to use only the “portal” functionality and never turn on any of the mirrors.