I think it’s a cool idea, and it could be the best way to help users on Reddit learn about Lemmy and migrate over.
I have some concerns though
What I like:
If you go to communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, you can see what I mean. Lemmy commenters are generally more helpful, more detailed, and get to the posts a lot faster than Reddit users.
If I understand correctly, once the network is implemented:
- Reddit user signs up on Fediverser
- Reddit user posts on a subreddit that has a Lemmy equivalent
- Post is crossposted to Lemmy
- When a Lemmy user replies to the post, that comment is reposted by a bot on Reddit
Users on the Reddit post will:
- learn about Lemmy
- see the good quality reply (if the reply is good, Reddit mods won’t ban the bot)
- get a direct link to a community/instance relevant to them
Users in the Lemmy community will
- get more content from people that are already curious about Lemmy
That would be really cool!
HOWEVER
Right now, the network isn’t fully implemented. Instead, in communities like !datahoarder@selfhosted.forum, there is a flood of ALL content that is posted in the respective subreddit.
This is bad because:
- Lemmy users don’t know that no human will see their replies, and the helpful Lemmy users are just talking to a wall. This will make them… less helpful in the future
- Because ALL content is being mirrored, this spams out the actual Lemmy posts
- Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored. I only noticed on the datahoarder community, but there are more sensitive subreddits where I would want control over where it is posted. I would also need a way to delete the content from Lemmy, and right now the users can’t do that.
Proposed fixes
- Don’t mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up. There is already an incentive for signing up (more replies, better replies, better reach). If a user doesn’t sign up, their post will not be mirrored, and they will not get the benefit.
- If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly (ex. from Modmail). Encourage them to talk to their communities before deciding
- Any automated post NEEDS a note saying so
- Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an “about” page for Fediverser
- Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an “about” page for Fediverser, and a link to some “what is lemmy”/“new to lemmy” article.
- If it’s not being implemented like the above, maybe change it up to consider the points about user control
As it is, reposting everything is damaging to Lemmy and potentially harmful to Reddit users that don’t know their stuff is being mirrored.
When Google and company do “opt-out” features that people are forced into using unless they manually opt-out (usually with long and convoluted procedures that aren’t front and centre in the docs), they are (rightly) excoriated for it.
Thankfully you don’t have long and convoluted procedures to opt out…
… Oops.
Rethink this if you don’t want really serious backlash. This is almost the textbook case of how not to do features.
Does the archive team ask permission from users before crawling data?
If you put a website and don’t set up a robots.txt file, does it still get indexed by Google? IOW, isn’t it “opt-out”?
If you ever posted a question on StackOverflow, did you have to give explicit permission to have your data pushed to their data exports? Can you ask to have it removed?
Google gets (rightfully) a ton of shit when they violate users privacy. What “privacy” is being violated here, when the data is on a public network and it can be crawled even without access to the API?
“Other people do this obnoxious thing so it’s OK if we do this obnoxious thing” isn’t the moral killing point you seem to think it is.
What is exactly “obnoxious” about search engines crawling public data?
(Incidentally, my issue is the other direction. I don’t want my content over on Reddit. I don’t have a Reddit account. I’ve never had a Reddit account. I don’t ever want to have a Reddit account. And, get this, I don’t want my stuff showing up on Reddit.)
Oh, no worries about that! The only part that is opt-out is on the reddit -> lemmy mirror. I will only be able to do two-way communication if there is a proper authorization from the user. :)
Then perhaps make the opt-out process better and easier? Requiring people who want to opt out to sign into a completely different service and then manually delete messages fully qualifies as “obnoxious”.
The biggest problem I see right now is with deleted and removed content.
Generally there is a reason for why someone would want to delete/remove something on Reddit.
If someone posts something that should be removed (spam, illegal content, hateful content), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here. If someone deletes a post/comment on Reddit (they’re getting harassed, they accidentally shared personal info, stalkers), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here.
A chunk of my moderation experience is from a university subreddit where stuff like that DOES happen, putting a real person at risk.
I like this idea and want it to succeed, and this is a concern for me. I don’t know about the legality/liability, but I think even Google updates their caches when stuff is deleted and tools like ceddit/removeddit/reveddit don’t let you see stuff that’s deleted by the user.
This is a different problem than requiring opt-in to have the mirror started and I fully sympathize. The technical challenge for this is mostly the lack of bandwidth to periodically check for all the posts that ended up being mirrored. To illustrate, alien.top alone already has pushed over 1M comments since it started running a couple of months ago.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, and I think that it’s one that could be solved client-side - e.g, a modified Lemmy client could identify mirror posts and comments and check the original reddit link - or worst-case scenario we could check every day for changes in some percentage of past comments every day to see if there is anything that needs to be updated.