Happy July 1st! Starting today, free third-party Reddit apps will no longer be usable, but as much as we don’t want to admit it, some of us still miss the content on Reddit, and it can be hard to resist the “just browse Old Reddit with an adblocker” loophole. Before we get into yet another “crossposting bots on the Fediverse” debate, here’s a quick summary of what this bot is and is not intended to do:
| Intended | Not intended |
|---|---|
| Allow users to consolidate their link aggregation and discussion feeds onto an open-source, non-proprietary site | “Increase activity” in a community by compensating for the lack of real users |
| Encourage ex-Redditors to spend more time on the Threadiverse when they are able to access their favorite content here | Serve as a “bridge” between Reddit and the Fediverse. Threads are archives and messages will not be synced back to Reddit |
| Preserve thoughtful, valuable and informative content, and make them accessible without a privacy-hostile corporate platform |
(Please don’t leave comments on the Reddit archive threads on the demo instance.)
Leddit is a fork of lemmit.online and does not use the Reddit API at all. Unlike lemmit.online which is a public service, Leddit is meant to be self-hosted on a personal instance as syncing comments is a very slow process that will get rate-limited on a normal instance.
Based on my demo instance that syncs posts and comments from two subreddits with a combined subscriber count of about 1 million, this takes about the same amount of time that lemmit.online takes to sync only posts from more than 100 subreddits.
An example of a thread that is automatically created and updated by Leddit can be seen here. The header message and position can be customized. Leddit preserves the comment thread’s structure and identifies the OP in the comments.
For shorter threads, all comments are synced, but comments in longer threads that are hidden below “show more comments” are not synced as they consume additional requests to Reddit with very little content in return.
If there’s interest, I can also add a feature that allows the bot to archive entire subreddits instead of retrieving the newest posts. Please feel free to ask for support to set up your personal bot and instance in the Leddit Lounge community.
Why?
Explained in the post. A very common complaint I see in the migration discussions is “my hobby’s community isn’t on the Fediverse/doesn’t have an active community like Reddit so I still have to visit Reddit”. Unless they intend to participate in that Reddit community (which most users don’t), they can bring their community’s knowledge here instead of giving Reddit more traffic.
We survived for decades without Reddit and we will survive without it in the future. There’s no shame in checking up on small subs there and a community here. And if there isn’t a community here yet. We can make one.
The problem with a copybot, aside from the potential legality, is that all the threads here will be static/stale. There is no reason to interact with them here as the comms are one way.
Archiving publicly available content is not illegal, otherwise sites like archive.org would have been taken down ages ago.
Users are where the content is, and most people don’t have the energy to support a growing website that lacks content when another website that is full of content exists. Reddit’s advantage was that people only needed one account on one website to see content related to diverse interests. Mirroring Reddit content (while being transparent about the fact that the content is mirrored) can help the Threadiverse gain this advantage and make it easier to retain users who will eventually contribute to the Threadiverse.
(In Reddit’s early days, it was full of Digg crossposts too.)
The purpose of the bot is to make Reddit’s content accessible without being forced to use a corporate platform. The value Reddit has, in my opinion, is the wealth of knowledge that is stored there. The content is often stale, but most of us have experienced finding a solution to a problem from a years-old Reddit thread. If you used Reddit for social interactions, this bot is not the solution for you.
Is the body of the post not appearing on certain apps or something? There is a summary that explains the bot’s purpose in the post body.