If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.
With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I’m realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.
I’d like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:
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Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.
Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.
Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.
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Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.
Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.
Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.
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Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.
Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.
Cons: It’s yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don’t have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.
Please, let’s avoid any “who cares about sports?” or “I only want organic content here” type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don’t care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.
That is the exact reason why I ended up creating 15+ topic-specific instances, plus alien.top when I started mirroring reddit content. The idea was that the bots would live on alien.top (and could be taken over by their real owner, when they authenticated via Reddit) and all these instances and communities were to be the destination of the posts.
Turns out that even with this separation, some people would still complain about their feed being “taken over” by alien.top. So, people could simply avoid it by simply curating their own feeds and stop “browsing by all”.
Right, but browsing by all is nice to be able to do 😅 if you’re posting so much all at the same time that it’s flooding “c/all” or whatever, then I’m not surprised people would be unhappy
They had a way of engaging with the platform they were happy with, so if abnormal posting patterns of inorganic content kinda ruined that for them, of course they’re gonna be unhappy about it 😅
Its not unreasonable for people to want the option to use c/all and/or their front page at their discretion, that’s why both are there lol. I visit both regularly for different reasons. My feed is mostly small niche communities and then I like to go check out the larger global discussions
I don’t think it’s particularly fair to argue “well if everyone just engages with this platform in one narrow way (in spite of it having other options baked into it) they wouldn’t have this problem”
Like… Sure, but they might not want to engage with it in that one very narrow way 😅 and that’d be entirely valid.
When chatting with the guy who curates a feed of loops to post I suggested maybe slowing down the rate of posts because it was drowning everything out for me, and he kindly obliged.
Curration and spacing things out a little bit might also be a good solution here :)
Yeah, sorry. I really don’t want to rehash this discussion. Browsing by all only makes sense because the whole network is so small that people still believe that drinking from the firehose is the only way that can satiate they content consumption needs. And for the thousands of users here on Lemmy saying “this is too much content”, there are tens of millions still locked on Reddit because no other place has the content they are looking for.
Until last year, users could not filter the instances themselves, so it was up to the admins to limit things at the federation level. Newer versions of Lemmy already give this tooling to end users, so if the bots bother them, I am just going to say “sorry, you have everything in your power to stop this from bothering you, go ahead and block it yourself”.
I mean… I used to browse r/all on reddit where there was absolutely no dearth of content. Some folks just like being able to scroll through the bigger global stuff too.
Lots of people did that on reddit. I don’t mean to come across as rude or confrontational, but I do kinda feel you might be making assumptions about how people want to engage with link aggregator sites like reddit or lemmy based on how you like to engage with them. People don’t just browse the “all” feed if there’s not enough in their subscriptions. Sometimes it’s nice to see what people are discussing across the broader social space here
If that’s flooded with inorganic posts, it changes the experience and takes away someone’s ability to do something they wanted to be able to do, and when that happens people generally find it frustrating, even if they can fix it by going around and blocking the communities flooding the all feed. And that frustration is even bigger if they feel like inorganic content doesn’t belong on Lemmy, which isn’t exactly an uncommon sentiment. I don’t mind inorganic posts personally, but I do think the way you go about it matters.
That’s just my two cents. Like I said, I’m not trying to be overly argumentative, I apologise if it feels like I’m turning things into a debate. I just felt there’s a perspective missing in this discussion and wanted to contribute
I hope you can support sports discussion on Lemmy in a way you and other Lemmy users can enjoy. Hope you have a good one :)