An idea for more content on Lemmy (and the fediverse): Relly (Relay+Lemmy)
An idea for more content on Lemmy (and the fediverse): Relly (Relay+Lemmy)
So, Lemmy is sometime missing content. I don't regret switching from Reddit to Lemmy but, expecially for niche communities, the content isn't always here.
My idea is to fix this is a Fediverse-based content relay named Relly.
Relly allows you to select RSS feeds, Mastodon users, Mastodon hashtag and Mastodon instances (so, the top posts on that instance) as sources for content, and post them to your favourite Lemmy community.
There are several features which make Relly better and anti-spam:
- Limits for a source (example: only up to 5 posts a day from this RSS feed)
- Limits for a community (example: only up to 5 posts a day to !archlinux)
- Global limits (example: only up to 10 posts made each day)
- Opt-out for servers & communities (instance and community moderators will be able to ask to be put in the UNLIST, which blocks by default Relly on your instace/community; this isn't an anti-spam, as it is more a tool for avoiding common users to use Relly in a malicous and spammy way)
- Order posts (so, if i have 10 RSS posts and 10 Mastodon posts and a global limit of 15 posts, you can either have the 10 RSS posts and the 5 most upvoted Mastodon posts, or some RSS posts and some Mastodon posts [always the most upvoted])
- Multiple communities (post the same content to different communieties, or set up a fraction [ex. 50%], so that each post has a certain percentage to be posted on a certain community)
- Dynamic limits: You can set an objective of active users/post made in the last 24 hours, so that the limits (either for a specific source, a specific community or globally) will be reduced. Example: if you set a objective of 50 posts, and 25 are made, the limits of Relly will be 50% of what they were originaly set to be; this allows Relly to completly stop posting on a community if the objective was already reached.
- Do not repeat: before posting a link, checks if it was already posted in the community in a specific time period (by default, 48 hours)
- Modularity: new post sources and post outputs can be implemented; an example could be an e-mail output, so that you can run Relly in local and recieve an e-mail everyday with your favourite news)
Relly is designed to be used by moderators of communities, but users can also use it. A user should always ask the moderator if it is OK to use it. A moderator should always ask the admins if it is OK to use it. Moderators, if they are the one using it, should also make public the list of sources, and allow the community to discuss possible edits to the list. The admins should put in the sidebar notes if Relly is OK to use for moderators of communities.
At the moment, Relly is just the idea that I presented here; I want to hear the community's feedback, and if the community is OK with this project being made, I will start working on it (I will make it in Rust and release under the MIT License).
When the perceived problem is lack of content, why is the solution always to throw more bot posts at it? I've blocked or site-banned pretty much every bot account because they're just adding dead end posts and noise.
For Mastadon content, Lemmy just needs the ability to follow individual users. Not sure if that's on the roadmap, but it should be straightforward to implement. Same goes for other ActivityPub platforms. When user-follow is possible, that opens up many avenues for users to subscribe to just what they want.
What you're proposing is not really adding content, just clutter and the appearance of content.
Give Lemmy time, and it will grow organically. Let's not try to force feed it with reposts from bots. As people discover Lemmy, if half or more of what they see is dead end crap reposted via bots, then I personally feel that will be a turn off for many (which defeats what you're trying to accomplish).
68Thanks for replying to my post.
For Mastodon: this isn't the same as you are saying with the user-follow. In your case, each users follows the users that they want to see, and they can partecipate in the comments of that post, but they will see ALL of the posts of that user in their timeline/feed. Here, the community choose what users/hashtags/instances to follow, the best posts get selected and they get posted, without being spammy. You don't have to see everything, but only the one that both were highly-ranked on Mastodon and they were upvoted on Lemmy. At the same time, you can't control exactly what sources are selected, but you can also interact with the community in order to drive the moderators to change the sources list, or you could just change/make a new community based on Relly. They are two different approches, that could live in symbiosis (ex. You select your own Mastodon users to follow, and the only Relly's Mastodon posts that appear are the one that you didn't already saw in your personal timeline [this would require collaboration with the Lemmy Server Development Team])
Some other additions:
- This isn't the same as other bots that keep on posting contents, thanks to Limits, objectives, top posts, ...
- Being moderated by the moderators/admin of the community/instance, the quality threshold is/should be higher.
- Content is created by users who want more content. We can provide more content, and slowly stop pumping from the outside, until Lemmy is fully independent. (see Dynamic limits in my original post)
- Now that I think of it, it might be a good idea to make a reverse bot, which takes the top posts from Lemmy and posts on Reddit/Mastodon/..., while providing the link to the original lemmy post, in order to drive more traffic and engagement
Hope this is useful!
0Sounds like you have a plan, and nothing I say is going to talk you out of it. So go for it, I guess. I'll just block those bots, too.
Personally, I think what you're trying to do is the wrong way to increase engagement and feel it will add yet more noise, regardless of your intent.
18To your last bullet point, Lemmy posts actually already are visible on Mastodon
A user https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev
A community https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@deus_ex_randomizer@lemmy.mods4ever.com
And a Mastodon user can post to Lemmy by mentioning the community
4
No please, no more bot content. My main problem with Lemmy is that commenting in a lot of posts it's like shouting into a black hole, precisely because they were posted automatically by bots.
We don't need more bots. If you want more content on Lemmy, it's a better a idea to share Lemmy posts in Reddit, Discord, Telegram or similar. When people start finding interesting discussions over here they will start signing up. The reason I originally created an account in HackerNews and Reddit back then was because I clicked on a link and I wanted to participate in an interesting discussion.
20It’s been 7 hours and not a single fucking twat has corrected a spelling mistake you made by accident (and I sure as hell won’t be the one to do it). I love lemmy
6
My view: if users want to see mastodon content then they should go to mastodon. I say this as a mastodon user. Lemmy isn't an RSS and microblog reader, it's an entity all of its own and needs to evolve its own culture.
16The content is out there on the internet, you don't need Lemmy to consume it. What you want is a community of people that care and talk about the content, but you can't just create that with a f*cking bot.
Please stop this content bot shit and just give it some time to grow organically. Reddit and Twitter weren't built in a year either. If Lemmy is any good then people will come, if not then we will move on and that's fine as well.
14If Lemmy is any good then people will come, if not then we will move on and that’s fine as well.
No, it's not. This is a fight against tech companies with multi-billion dollar budgets, who profit from exploiting your data, getting you addicted for "engagement" and who won't mind destroying any glimpse of social fabric to keep things this way.
Thinking that "community is enough" is bringing a knife to a gun fight. We need to neutralize Big Tech. We need to get as many people as possible out of the Borg. Social media works by the 1/9/90% rule, and the bots are a first step to make this place a viable alternative to the 90%.
1I agree with most of your comment but IDK about the end part. Bots haven't seemed to be working at all, most people hate them. Luckily there's a setting to hide all bot posts but most people don't know that option exists in their settings.
I think the problem with bot posts is that they can put more content in than the human community can sustain. If we don't have enough humans to vote on all these posts and comment on them, then adding more posts into the pile makes the problem worse, it's artificial. If humans were actually interested in the content then they would've posted it themself. The OP is someone that put themself out there for engagement, it's an offer to socialize with someone. The next person to see the post knows there's at least 1 other person willing to talk about this, because there's always at least the OP.
Instead of bots we're probably better off just doing our part to make more posts and comments.
Also we probably need to kick some habits from Reddit, like we're used to not doing self promotion, or being afraid of a community being mostly compromised of your own posts. Also another Reddit habit I think is only posting in specific communities but here if the community is too specific then it won't have many subscribers, so we should be crossposting to the more general communities too.
4
I think the limited number of posts per day feature of this is really the standout that makes this intriguing to me. We already have the Lemmit bot posting every single post from reddit to Lemmy like a firehose, but discussion on them is sort of like yelling into a void. If we only post the top ~3 posts per day from a subreddit, we can condense any conversation into just those and guarantee that it's not going to get washed away with the rest of the junk content. Even though it's not ideal, I think a crutch like this could go a long way to seeding some "natural" activity.
8I'm begging people to take a look at my fediverser project, and it already does some of these things.
- You can choose if you want to mirror posts from reddit or posts with comments
- You can choose if you want "self posts" or link posts
- You can set a rate limit of mirror posts (maximum X posts per past 24 hours)
- It doesn't mirror any post if there is already a submission in the Lemmy community with the same URL.
It wouldn't be difficult to add something similar to RSS feeds.
But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because "that's where most people are" and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.
7It's a great project, to be honest.
4But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.
This is cool! As said in another comment, I'm now also thinking about a reverse bot which posts from Lemmy to other platforms and keeps the original URL, so that people can partecipate, see the instance homepage, register, ... Just trying to improve this amazing environment!
3What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.
Getting content from the outside, with all of the tools integrated in Relly, might just be the solution, I guess.
2
Yes, and the fact that it doesn't post any link that was already posted in the last 48 hours avoid spamming.
I think that subreddits could be usable using the RSS feed system, as Reddit API are expensive and if we set up a RSS feed containing the top of 24 hours, we can extract links from there.
3
I really like this linus torvalds quote:
Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle
People have opinions but lets be completely honest here what do they know? Why not trying to build it and see what happens, it might work, btw I myself thought about having something like "fediverse greatest hits" that would show the most liked posts for a particular hashtag so maybe that could be configured to do that.
7for niche communities, the content isn’t always here.
What subreddits are you missing? If you join alien.top through the portal, it will give you a list of subreddits you have and the recommended Lemmy alternative.
3Everyone always wants a technical solution to grow communities. act as though some sort of filter rule or item in the settings menu that will cause more users to post and communities to grow, but always will refuse the most basic thing in communities. Community culture you can always say forums are the public square of the internet. If you don't have anything to see or do in said square it might as well be a empty abandon parking lot.
1