this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023

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Electronics

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Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here? (communick.news)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Arguments to support the idea:

According to browse.feddit.de, this is the largest community for showcasing electronics projects, the last post is almost one month old.
People that signup to alien.top via the fediverserver portal will have this community as the recommended alternative to /r/electronics, but they will pretty much never see it if the community does not have any fresh content and will be more likely to lose interest.
Despite the usual criticism of mirroring bots, the way that the fediverser tool works is showing to actually help interaction. In the past two weeks, I'm seeing an above average increase of subscriber and (more importantly) user count on communities like [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Mirroring reddit posts is so incredibly annoying

[+] [email protected] -11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The point is not just to mirror posts, it's also to create a clear migration path for people who are still using reddit because the niche communities have not achieved critical mass here.

Besides, those who are on lemmy.world have nothing to worry about because the LW admins have defederated from alien.top.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.

Imagine signing up and finding that all the posts are just cross-posts from reddit with barely any engagement.

One of the main things I despise about this concept is that it provides an implication that lemmy is some kind of budget-reddit. As though, all the good content is on reddit but we're all camped out here on lemmy.

The way to build a community is to simply post more.

To respond to your other comment here also:

I’m working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.

Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?

the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy

That's not my experience. I've only ever seen dozens of cross posts with no comments.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

If it's a full bidirectional bridge, I think that's amazing. Matrix bridges exist, and people love them. I think there's value to the community for a full bridge.

One Way mirroring bots totally agree to, not valuable to build a community. But Bridges Bridges build communities

[–] [email protected] -4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.

The community already exists, it's just that they are located in a place where we don't want to be. The goal is to get the majority to switch and re-center in a place that is determined by the intolerant minority.

As though, all the good content is on reddit but we’re all camped out here on lemmy.

Which is true, if we are being honest. And if we are being even more honest with ourselves, most of the people that came to Lemmy are going back to Reddit because there is no content for the niche communities here. I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?

We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.

Our problem should not be with the people on reddit, but reddit itself. Instead of pretending that we don't care about the people there, we should try to find ways to bring them here.

Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?

The comment would not be coming from a bot account, it would come from the redditor who have used the "Fediverser portal" to connect the accounts (and given permission to send comments) so it would also be "organic".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be.

Both of us are just going to have to acknowledge that our thoughts around online communities are very different.

Back in June I was thinking along the same lines as your good self, as in "what can we do to move /r/whatever to whateverinstance.tld/c/whatever". I eventually realised that not only is that not possible, it's antithetical to the idea of online communities.

An online community is not a set of users, it's a combination of culture and momentum. Sure there might be a few key core personalities that everyone recognises from day to day, but if those users left the community would continue because it has an established culture and momentum - a collective recollection that this is the place to go for a certain flavor of content and engagement with that content.

The thing is, you can't force it. You can't create a culture because it's a combined input from many people. All you can do is create the environment within which the right type of culture will coalesce. You can't herd the swarm of bees that is /r/electronics to /c/electronics. All you can do is make /c/electronics the most favorable place to build a hive and have confidence that /r/electronics is becoming less favorable over time.

I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?

The solution I'm proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds, look at old magazines, ponder questions for discussion. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.

We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.

That's one metric. It doesn't feel like content and engagement has really reduced much in the last several months. Honestly I suspect that the orchestrators of the influx of bots in July have realised that other platforms are more fertile for scams and manipulation et cetera.

Besides which, even if valued users are leaving, that's kind of disappointing but a re-post bot isn't going to change that. The kinds of community builders you're looking for are critical thinkers like your good self putting effort into building good communities.

The comment would not be coming from a bot account

Foregive me, I'm not familiar with alien.top - I'll have to take a look.

Technically, such a bridge is going to be interesting I guess and I have to concede that in some cases it might facilitate discussion.

That said, it's still based on the (IMO flawed) premise that mirroring content from reddit is the right move. From my impractical purist / idealist perspective. Lemmy should not seek to be new-reddit. Just let lemmy be lemmy - allow it's culture and communities to emerge and coalesce in their own time.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum.

Agree, 100%.

The thing is, you can’t force it.

Agree, 100%.

The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.

That's where we disagree. Not because I don't think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I don't think this is enough.

The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of "1/9/90" of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.

I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldn't get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should "go read some books so I can ask questions"?

No, I'm sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.

The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It won't be "forced", but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say "it's fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmy".

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think mirroring questions and requests for help is a terrible idea, no one is going to want to answer a question here if most of them are mirrored and the original asker is not here to get the answer.

It's frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Your points are valid, but turns out that the practice is showing different results:

the original asker is not here to get the answer.

I'm working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.

It’s frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.

This is not what is happening at the selfhosted communities. Turns out that a lot of the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy already.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Personally, I've blocked most repost bots (as I see them), because of the above stated reasons. I know I'm just one data point in a statistic, but I'm one that comments, as opposed to one that just lurks.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago

My main goals with this tool are:

completely drop reddit without losing access to its content and the communities that are there.
create a migration path for the people who are on reddit and don't want to give it away because there is no real alternative.

I'm also one that comments, I just don't want to do that on reddit anymore. I want to be able to do that on Lemmy, and have the two-way bridge until the community here is self-sustainable. This is how I think this tool can be helpful.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

A manually curated mirror of interesting Reddit posts that are self-contained, would be useful. But a bot just mindlessly copying and pasting everything would push us away

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you see something interesting on reddit... just post it here, problem solved.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 9 months ago

It's not just about the links, it's also the discussion threads from "self" posts.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

See point #3 of my list. The particular clever thing about the tool is that it is not using one single bot account to mirror the content, but it actually creates a mirror account for every poster and commenter who participates in the discussion. This is showing some interesting advantages:

The conversation "feels" organic.
It makes it possible for the reddit user to "take over" the mirror account, which helps conversion.
(WIP) It allows two-way conversation between lemmy and reddit, which for the niche communities will tend to favor lemmy (As in, conversations started in Lemmy happen only in Lemmy, but conversations started on reddit will be both on Lemmy and reddit)

How about we give this a go for a couple of weeks? This community in particular is pretty much inactive anyway. If people feel annoyed by the mirrored posts or think that is detrimental to the community, I can disable them again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

How about we dont

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you get a great Reddit bridge working bi-directionally. More power to you. I took a look at home lab right now, there's a ton of post but no comments. So I'm not sure it's there yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is what I'm seeing...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah. That looks great. Just not what I'm seeing on my instance, maybe I need to update?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure I read before that those counts do not include federated instances and only represent user/subscriber count on the instance you're viewing from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I'm not looking at the statistics. I'm looking at the different posts in the community. And they're all empty for me. I open them up and they're still empty.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If no one at your instance subscribes to the community, you won't see the updated data. If you subscribe to the community, you'll be seeing the posts/comments as well (provided the instance is federating properly)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Subscribing did it. Nice bridge. If it's bi-directional then that's amazing. Bring a lot of activity into Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If it’s bi-directional then that’s amazing.

Not yet, but working on it :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

What's the long-term anti-blocking plan?

Different people run bridges for different communities? So it's difficult to track down all the different bridges?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Multiple bridges is the short-term plan. The real long-term plan is to bring enough people to the fediverse to the point reddit is obsolete and the bridges are no longer necessary...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

https://www.mushroomlabs.com/

Isn't working or loading for me.

Your doing good work, you should have some crypto (xmr, etc) donation addresses on your GitHub page

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I don't have a website there, I do need to find the time to put it up.

I've added an Ethereum address on the github sponsors page, but honestly the best way to help me is by subscribing to communick. 5 bucks a month will give you access to 10 mastodon accounts, which you can then share with your friends. It helps me to fund the operation and it helps overcome the issue of network effects.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Rather than mirror reddit posts here, you can set up a dedicated community for that so people that want that kind of thing can get it. No need to kill an existing community further.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago

That's exactly what I am doing for lots of communities that have no reddit equivalent, and what I did for [email protected] when it was clear that [email protected] was already somewhat active. Regarding these, go take a look at the usage numbers for both, tell me which is going up and which is going down...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If there's more activity on Reddit then here, then Reddit repost bots make it feel like all the community action is happening on Reddit. They push people back to Reddit because that's where all the new posts are coming from, so why engage here if the active discussion is already in progress over there?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Communities with >50% repost content are unsubscribed by me. If I have communities spamming my timeline with reposts, I just block em. Having to open at least two link and read the content on both sites just to get the info and understand the discussion/context is generally a huge waste of my time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I am giving you real data: the communities where the mirrors are active end up with more organic activity than those without.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. I've mostly seen communities overwhelmed with bot posts and 0 replies, but I haven't taken any statistics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Bit they're giving you real data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, they made an assertion, without statistics or raw data to back it up. How many replies do cross-posts get, compared to regular posts? What's the mean? What's the median? Does the distribution look Gaussian, and if so what's the standard deviation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I was being sarcastic. I always forget the /s.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Interesting comments all round. Let's run with the discussion for a week to allow infrequent visitors a chance to comment and then see if there's a strong trend towards a specific opinion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

After 9 days, the upvotes and downvotes are tied so nothing changes for now, but we can revisit later.

Personally, I'd prefer organic growth rather than reposting stuff from Reddit.

Spread the word about the sub!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I greatly prefer the occasional original post with actuall engagement to a flood of reposts. If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit (and also get comments and things like that). On a more meta level, the only way a community can gain and retain users is by offering unique content. If 99% of content is just content from Reddit (with missing comments), why should anyone bother to use Lemmy?

Subscribing to a comunity does not cost anything, very few people will leave a community because it is dead, but people will leave a community that spams their feed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Sorry, your comment is just rehashing all the arguments that I had in many other discussions:

If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit

The idea is to not give more traffic to reddit and to help people get out of it. By having the content mirrored here, not only we have a method to consume the content from there, we also ensure that the majority of people (a.k.a, the 90% of lurkers) can find on Lemmy the content they are used to consume from Reddit, thus facilitating the migration and fueling network effects.

with missing comments

My system also mirrors the comments, so you won't be missing anything.

but people will leave a community that spams their feed.

I'm not talking about mirroring posts from communities that are super popular. The idea is to get the content from the long tail of niche communities. There won't be a "flood" of spam because we are talking about communities that have a handful of posts and comments per day.