this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Does anyone know if creating a content-"sharing" bot for Lemmy(, from reddit subs and elsewhere,) would be illegal ? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There's quite a few communities that i'm missing on Lemmy.
It could potentially lead to a trial, and/or "save" Lemmy, so it seemed worth asking, just in case.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By illegal, do you mean against Lemmy's rules or against legislation?

For the former, I think it's up to each communities rules. In general, bots should be marked as such so that users can chose to hide them if they wish. For the latter, apart from neighboring rights which allows news outlets in some countries to seek remuneration from links to articles, there's nothing illegal in sharing links on Lemmy.

As for existing bots copying posts from Reddit, there is lemmit.online but is has been broken since Reddit removed their RSS feeds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The latter
But thanks, i didn't know about lemmit even if i read about the different instances before, it's still a bit hard to find communities of interest(, but not anymore than with reddit, youtube, twitter, facebook, discord, etc ). I've subscribed to their TIL but the search function for Sync or Jerboa aren't very informative.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't been able to subscribe to communities I'm not already subscribed to using Sync, I usually go on the web interface.

If you want to search for already copied communities, you should search lemmit's local communities. To request new ones, you have to post on [email protected], but keep in mind that the bot is broken until its author updates it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep that's what i'm currently doing with mapporn, it's easier with a computer, i'm glad to have found out this bot exists(, or existed until 3 days ago, don't yet know how it'll turn out).

[–] RadDevon 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not a lawyer, but I believe if you want to take content others have posted on Reddit and repost it here, you would violate their copyright on that content. You would want to get their consent before you post it here or else the instance you post them to could start getting DMCA requests and could ultimately be sued. I’m guessing you could also be sued for writing the software that violated the copyright.

It’s not likely to happen but it could. My concern would be less about what ill effects you and/or Lemmy might incur and more around the ethics of taking content belonging to other social media users and reposting it without their permission. Reddit TOS says users retain copyright on their content, so it’s other users’ rights you’re violating in doing so.

Now if you’re talking about a bot that reposts only content you have posted on Reddit, you’re probably in the clear.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the only thing worrying me, yes, but since lemmit did it... i.d.k. Thanks for the comment !

[–] RadDevon 3 points 1 year ago

Sure! Here's one more thing I wish you would consider before you go forward with it: if you didn't get sued for doing this, it wouldn't be because you didn't break the law. It would be because the people whose rights you violated can't afford to sue (or maybe it's just that they don't have teams of lawyers scouring the internet to make sure all their rights are protected and haven't noticed as a result). If Reddit claimed ownership over all content posted on the platform, it would be no less illegal, but you'd get a cease-and-desist in a heartbeat, followed by a lawsuit if you didn't comply. Trying it only because the people whose rights you're violating can't protect themselves makes the whole thing feel like punching down.

The justification I hear for this sort of activity is usually to damage Reddit in some way… but it's not actually Reddit that's being damaged. It's other people like all of us who ultimately have been used by Reddit for free labor for the last nearly two decades now. These bots are now victimizing them again in the interest of getting back at the entity who first victimized them… but that should really be their choice since it was their content. It just doesn't feel justified to me.

Now if you wrote a script that a Reddit user could use that would grab all of their own Reddit posts, post them to an appropriate Lemmy community, and delete them from Reddit (not sure if deleting a Reddit post is even possible at this point 😅), and convinced a bunch of them to use it, that seems to me like the right approach. The users have full agency to decide whether or not their content gets moved, but you're making it easy for them to do the thing you want them to do.

I'm no staunch defender of copyright, but it sucks that because access to the legal system is expensive, corporations like Reddit get the benefit of the law while regular people like you and me don't get that if we can't afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. If we're going to have copyright law, it should definitely protect regular people who take the time to share things with others online for virtually no benefit to themselves just as much if not more than it does massive corporations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The question is unclear. What are you proposing to do? Everything that anyone posts here is already publicly available.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

An instance would simply post(, or create a community for each large or interesting-enough subreddits that doesn't already exist here,) every day all the posts from the last 24 hours, with the same title and the same picture. A simple bot should be able to do the trick without accessing the a.p.i.(, or even so by paying less than a personal app since it would be a single "person"(bot) making the calls one time per day ; in any case, most likely not a technical problem).
If it's open and automated to such an extent then it may bring trouble, but if such content is free to be stolen then it should perhaps be done i suppose(, even if reddit won't like it, especially if it's before their first public offering, but probably afterwards as well).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This ruins the Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For you perhaps, but for me it's the lack of content/communities that make Lemmy inferior. Just block this bot if you don't want to see it on your instance, and the userbase as a whole will be satisfied :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There were instances doing exactly that. I don't know if they're still around because I blocked them as soon as they started showing up my feed. Most people absolutely hated them because it's basically just spam.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Do you remember their names ?
If people loved the content on reddit then they would continue to love it on Lemmy, it'd be the same posts, not anymore of a spam here than there, that's not a decisive counter-argument for me but thanks for the reply :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s one thing for you to find content that you think is worth posting on lemmy and then duplicating the post here - even using a bot. This requires you to self evaluate whether the content is worthwhile before posting it. It’s another to simply repost all content from a sub without any human evaluation.

The biggest issue I see with bot posts is that they tend to spam the heck out of lemmy. At first I tried blocking bots that I found spammy, but ultimately I disabled seeing bot accounts because I got tired of constantly blocking them individually.

Keep in mind that yes, there is less content here, but that also means that if you make a bot that reposts all (or a lot) of content from active Reddit subs, you are going to inundate peoples feeds. It won’t be a problem for me, because I’ll never see it. But new and less tech savvy users might be annoyed/frustrated by the situation.

when I was seeing bot posts, it didn’t seem like they got any activity. It was a bunch of posts filling up my feed with no comments or activity — Just a bot shouting into the void.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you prefer that Lemmy stays small and eventually dies because of a lack of content then it's your problem, don't make it mine.
Only people subscribed to these communities will see these posts, except in the local feed if your instance hasn't defederated with lemmit.
If there's only one bot who mentions in his posts that you can block him, then your issue is solved as well as mine, and Lemmy will become as attractive as Reddit. Can't believe your opinion has so much support, it's like you'd prefer Lemmy to stay insignificant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No need to be hostile, nor put words in my mouth. I gave my view and reasoning without doing so. You should try to do the same. This isn’t Reddit, and I would prefer it to stay that way.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

And i would prefer if Lemmy was the number one social media in terms of usage, i hope that it's @dessalines goal if it's not yours, once again you would just have to block the bot if you don't desire to have more content. Thanks for the chat.