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·
    4 hours 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·
      5 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·
        5 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·
          4 hours 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·
            4 hours 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.

            • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              4 hours ago

              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