If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.

With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I’m realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.

I’d like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:

  1. Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.

    Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.

    Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.

  2. Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.

    Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.

    Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.

  3. Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.

    Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.

    Cons: It’s yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don’t have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.

Please, let’s avoid any “who cares about sports?” or “I only want organic content here” type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don’t care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.

  • rglullisOPAEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    r/all is not the same as drinking from the firehouse. Reddit has other selection algorithms beyond the vote count to build the front page.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t think that really changes my point 😅

      People like having both. People browse browse either all feed for similar reasons, or at least I do. I much preferred when r/all wasn’t personalized at all.

      I like it for discovery and seeing what else folks are chatting about. You get to see what’s worth talking about in so many different communities, big and small. So many subcultures and communities, ones you’re loosely familiar with, and ones you straight up didn’t know exist, and everything in between. Big communities you want to check in on like the politics stuff but that you don’t want to dominate your feed. And novel things you’d have never found otherwise. And when it’s flooded with automated posts I can see why people would be frustrated that they can’t interact with part of the user experience in the way they want

      I switched off .ee when there were a ton of subs being mirrored from reddit that .ee was federated with (it seems to have died down now?), and c/all was just a neverending stream of posts with no one talking or engaging. Just empty posts taking up like half of c/all. It meant I couldn’t engage with the platform in the way I wanted, so I changed instance back to my previous .world account so I could use c/all again, I really missed it.

      I wanna talk to folks, and see new things. Making sure communities keep going and can sustain themselves is important but the point of social media is usually to socialize, or at least lurk and observe other people socializing, even on a more anonymous site like reddit or lemmy 😅 I think balance is important

      • rglullisOPAEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        I could argue that there l was never a time when r/all was free from filters, but I there is another conversation I think we should be having: if you are switching instances because one has bot accounts listed and the other doesn’t, you are still “manually curating your feeds”, albeit in a very complicated way.

        You think bots are bad, so you moved to LW. I’ve heard people glad about being on .ee because they like what the bots can bring.

        At the end of the day, the deeper issue seems to be that people not only want to feel like they are in control of what they do, they also want to feel validated in their choices. And we keep searching for justifications to back those up, even when it’s completely irrelevant.

        • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          I don’t mind bots, it’s the details of how they can impact the user experience in some cases that causes issues for me. On several occasions I’ve defended bots being on lemmy and the Fedivers. And I switched instances because curating my feed by moving back to .world was easier than chasing down all the mirrored comms and slowly blocking all of them, and I’m not opposed to those comms existing, but I can absolutely empathize with why so many on lemmy don’t like them. I’m not at all opposed to curating my feed, I also have a couple comms blocked.

          My point was really just that it’s understandable people would be frustrated if you’re impeding their ability to do something they expect they should be able to do. Sure it’s fixable, but no one expects to have to filter out a torrent of empty bot posts, because why would they? And most folks here are opposed to that kind of traffic. When you create a new problem that people hadn’t even anticipated could be an issue, people will find that frustrating, and they’ll view it as a problem that didn’t need to exist in the first place

          I can empathize with your desire to supplement content with automation, but I’m not getting the impression you’re able to empathize with anyone else’s perspective. There’s probably a way of going about this that wouldn’t cause any realy issue for folks, but you’re definitely not going to find it if you just refuse any opportunity to learn from the perspectives being voiced to you.

          You’re now more or less trying to psychoanalyze the people telling you they don’t like what you want to do instead of trying to understand why and find a path that’s more pro-social.

          If what you personally wanna do makes half the site unhappy, it’s worth considering whether all of the people replying are wrong, or if you, the person who’s trying to figure out how to do a thing lots of people are telling you would make them unhappy, are in the wrong

          I won’t be replying further, I don’t get the impression you care what my perspective, or anyone else’s is, so I’m not going to spend more time voicing it. I hope you have a good day, take care.

          • rglullisOPAEnglish
            1·
            48 minutes ago

            If what you personally wanna do makes half the site unhappy (…)

            You are looking at half of the people on the site (~25k) What about the the other 99.96% (75 million) of people still on Reddit who won’t leave because Reddit has kept a choke-hold on the communities and monopolized the content?

            You are treating this as a static system. There are second-order effects.

            but I’m not getting the impression you’re able to empathize with anyone else’s perspective.

            I don’t get the impression you care what my perspective,

            It’s not a matter of caring/not caring. It’s about accepting that this is an issue with conflicting interests. I am asking about how we can do this in a way that minimizes these conflicts while increasing/keep the upside (for the many) and minimizing the downside (for the few), but you are appealing to thought-terminating accusations (“you are not showing empathy”) instead of looking for a compromise that can make everyone happy.

            • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 hours ago

              I literally made suggestions in my first comment along side explaining why I thought it was important to find compromises, and you argued with my reasoning for suggesting compromise so I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to assume you were opposed to my position that considering people’s dislike of bots and non organic traffic in your approach

              There’s no conflict of interest if we both want compromise, so I’m not sure why youd argue with my reasons and tell me you “don’t care” about the reasons I’d want compromise on this issue, while also saying you want compromise… I’m sincerely confused by that

              It sounds like we agree…?

              • rglullisOPAEnglish
                1·
                2 hours ago

                “don’t mirror all the posts, but only those that have a threshold of interest” is a compromise.

                “Don’t post to communities unless the admins/moderators gave strict permission” is a compromise.

                “Don’t post at all, because some people want to be able to drink from the firehouse and not filter the content themselves” is not a compromise, it is a mandate.

                • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  1 hour ago

                  I don’t want you to not post at all…? My suggestions were to organize with the sports comms (collaborate to make sure it works for them), or potentially create a dedicated comm for all the mirrored stuff. I think picking and choosing what to mirror would also be a great idea.

                  Mostly I just wanted to express that I thought thinking about the human aspect of how your plan will be recieved is important…

                  I don’t think I said not to post at all at any point, did I…? (I’m falling alseep, I’ll look back at my comments when I’m more awake) I don’t want that at all.

                  When I said I hoped you were able to support the discussion you wanted to I meant via post mirroring, though looking at my wording I’m realizing I could have been more specific. I just wanted you to be mindful of folks who are here for organic traffic and would be frustrated if you aren’t intentional about what you wanna build and how.

                  I think theres maybe been a breakdown in communication

                  • rglullisOPAEnglish
                    1·
                    1 hour ago

                    My suggestions were to organize with the sports comms (collaborate to make sure it works for them), or potentially create a dedicated comm for all the mirrored stuff. I think picking and choosing what to mirror would also be a great idea.

                    All of that was done already when I was mirroring the alien.top accounts, and people still complained, and we were here spending a good hour arguing over that whether their complaints are legitimate or not.