I’m the developer of Fediverser Project, which is a set of services to make it easy for people on Reddit to migrate to the Fediverse. It lets people use their Reddit credentials (OAuth) to sign up and create an account on a Lemmy server.
It also offers a cool onboarding feature: during signup, we can fetch the user’s subscribed subreddits, and we use this information to automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy (or Kbin/Mbin) community. This “subreddit -> fediverse group” map is crowdsourced and people can sign up if they want to contribute. The “main” site also provides a “Find an instance” feature: it can track all the servers that use the Fediverse software and redirect users to their closest instance.
To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).
I’d really like to see aussie.zone becoming part of the network. I believe this would make it faster and simpler to get more people in the fediverse, and I’m willing to provide all the support and help needed to get the “country-based” services getting started with it.
Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
This has probably been asked before but is there any reason why this couldn’t be implemented as a basic lemmy client (with signup facilities only)? Meaning instances don’t need to host anything or are you concerned that centralisation might drive up Reddit API costs or will the OAuth stuff require a server?
Thanks for trying to make the fediverse more accessible!
Excellent question! The truth is that it can be done on the client only, but the instance would need to be fully open for registrations. The server-side service is needed in order to ensure that any user authenticated via Reddit can signup and get started right away.
(Sorry it took me so long to see this. None of the comments were federating to my instance, so I wasn’t seeing any of the comments here.)
I love the idea, and I also believe that getting more people onto the fediverse is a good thing. However, I do have a couple of questions/concerns.
Firstly, I’m not really sure why this would require access to Lemmy instances themselves? is it to improve coverage by automatically crawling all the communities on a given instance to match with Reddit alternatives? Or is it to automatically sign new people up to an instance and then subscribe them to the Lemmy communities automatically? I believe that pushing for admins to provide root level access to their Lemmy servers is going to limit your growth. I don’t run an instance, but if I did, I’m not sure that I would allow anything except the bare minimum access to the server.
I also noticed that the Subreddits section doesn’t display anything. I ended up creating a second account which I OAuth’d to my Reddit account, and it was still empty. I was trying to figure out how to add an ‘alternative to’ section on a few communities (which took me a while to figure out how to do)
Also, about the above: Are there any plans to add a way to link a Reddit account to a pre-existing account? What about account deletion, data anonymisation, and GDPR compliance? I do realise most of those aren’t relevant at the moment, and probably won’t be for some time, but I think you may encounter some issues, considering the more privacy-conscious nature of a lot of Fediverse users.
I do really hope to see this expand and grow, though. Despite the potential to bring some unsavoury Reddit types, it’ll be an overall win for the Fediverse.
To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).
If i’ve read your post correctly, it seems @lodion or @nath need to weigh in on this one, before anybody else could take any actions themselves in support of your project?
Exactly, this is something that only the admins can execute on. In any case, it’s still a good idea to have users chiming in.
@lodion@aussie.zone and @nath@aussie.zone, you can reach me here or via matrix (@raphael:communick.com), I’ll gladly help.
Sorry not interested in any hooks into Reddit, or additional software requiring ongoing management.
Ok, no worries… do you have any objection though to have your instance as the recommended instance for migrating redditors who are subscribed to Australia-specific subreddits?
That’s fine.
