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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
“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.
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
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.
Sorry I was still making changes to my comment to try and convey what I mean, its a bit different now. I’ll read this I’m the morning