Hello! I’m excited to share that I’ve built a service that bridges Discord forum channels with the Fediverse, particularly with Lemmy communities!
In short: with the bot, you can either subscribe a Discord forum channel to an existing Fediverse community, or create a new federated community and assign a forum channel to it. Posts and comments are then synchronized between Discord and the Fediverse via ActivityPub.
Please note that the project is at a very early stage.
You can try it on your own on a dedicated Discord server I created:
If you find it useful or interesting, or if you have any concerns about it, I am open to your feedback. Financial support for further development would also be very appreciated.
I have also created a dedicated community for this project, so you can write something there and the messages will be synchronized between Discord and the Fediverse:
!discord_fediverse_bridge@bridge.nachitima.com
To learn how the service works in more detail, you can read the README on the repository page:
https://github.com/denikryt/discord-fediverse-bridge
And by the way, this post was created in Discord 🙂
So every new conversation thread becomes a new post and every response becomes a comment?
Exactly! Replies are also supported 🙂
Do you really think this is a good idea? Have you considered the amount of traffic will be generated and the amount of data storage this will require?
Most Discord forums don’t have much traffic. Even in a popular Discord, people usually stick to chat channels not forums. Besides, the amount of data doesn’t beat what any boring bot could already do, so this is not a new or unique problem.
You mean storage for the bridge to maintain state or storage in terms of fediverse content?
The latter. Any instance that has at least one user following the bridge will have to process and store every message coming from the bridge discord room.
But that’s a scale problem for the fediverse, not this bridge. I would expect the fediverse already has the architecture to scale to that. If not, then it should, and that’s a fediverse/lemmy bug. (What happens if you have that many regular users posting, without the bridge?)
The same works with other genuine federated platforms,doesn’t it? The amount of content in the fediverse would inevitably gradually increase over time as people become more aware of it
Well, yes, but a bridge to Discord could be bringing traffic from order of magnitude more people than we currently have, and we do not have the infrastructure for it yet.
Well, technically, it is possible to flood fedi instances with a huge amount of noisy content but it is always up to an instance admins whether to keep such data and continue federating with such instances. So as long as the bridge instance is not producing tons of unrelated content, it is ok for everyone, I believe. In the end, situations could be different.
Also, motivating people to use this bridge is not a very easy task, by the way 🙂
I haven’t considered any of it, because I just wanted to build it to use it on my own 🙂 If someone in the world also finds it useful, then implementing some optimizations would not be a huge deal I believe. At least for personal use it is a working tool already
Short of pruning the data every once in a while (and losing all history) there is nothing that can be done to optimize it. It may work as a proof-of-concept or if you want to run on your own, but I really don’t think it is a good idea to promote it.
Oh that’s a very cool idea. Thanks!
Very cool!
Awesome idea! I wonder if there’s some reasonable mechanism for grouping discord messages into a single post? E.g. time bound: the previous message was greater than 5m ago so the next message is a new post and otherwise, it’s a reply to the latest post. Food for thought!
If I understood correctly the bridge requires the Forum type channel on the discord side, so posts can be mapped 1 to 1 into the fediverse.
To sort the replies into a lemmy-style thread the timing could be a decent way to group them, but the resulting thread would look less like a tree and more like multiple, possibly quite long chains of comments. This would also assume that Discordians only ever answer to the last message in the chat, which isn’t actually the case. I think the only way to fix this would be to utilise some sort of natural language processing to figure out which message they’re replying to, though I’d be curious how easy/difficult it would be to get decent results out of that
There is also a way to turn on a slow mode on discord channel side specifically to prevent very frequent message sending
Would slow mode merge multiple small messages or simply wait a bit and send them all in one payload?
Simply wait a bit between sending messages. There would be enough time to edit the first message and add a follow up instead of sending a new one 🙂
Yeah that could be a safety mechanism for that kind of discord users who split a single thought into single messages. The user experience across platforms is different, for sure. Discord is more conducive to this type of communication.
I don’t see any reliable workarounds for this, except for just knowing where you write and how it works. Methods, like you suggested, would be pretty hard to implement and they are more like a workaround from people who don’t know how messages are displayed in Lemmy for example. Or simply don’t want to write long texts.
I’m totally ok with writing longreads, I like it 🙂
But I think it would make sense to add some sort of information about the Fediverse to the bridge registration page for example. So an uninformed user could learn first before actually starting to write. Thank you
