Hi,

I don’t post this to be malicious or rude, but simply out of concern.

I believe this bot is killing community growth on Lemmy. I keep coming across would-be-interesting communities only to find a wall of bot posts with zero comments, zero votes, zero engagement. And I walk away disappointed instead of getting into a new community. As, I’m sure, may other users are doing.

Sure, you say, “just block the bot” if I don’t like it. But that doesn’t stop this thing from stifling any real engagement and growth in communities. Surely if someone can “just…”, you can “just” go back to reddit if you want to read reddit content that badly.

I admire the engineering you put into making this thing work. It’s impressive, and honestly very cool. But I really think it’s actively disengaging users, when Lemmy has enough of a hurdle to overcome in growing new communities.

Thats just my 2 cents. I’m not sure it will mean much, but I felt I had to share it. Again, no ill intent against what you’ve accomplished in creating this. Best wishes.

    • Arthur BesseEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      Hey, it’s cool you took some people’s suggestions, but I guess you didn’t take mine… which was to allow signups on your instance so that people who want to see your reddit mirror and the rest of lemmy in a single interface can have a place to do so.

      Right now they can only do that as long as some other instances don’t ban your bot. But this means those other instances need to carry that load (i see you now have over a million posts!), which is something they might decide to stop doing at any time.

      If you let users signup on your instance, they could use it to follow stuff on other instances and see your bot posts.

      Why not?

      • @adminMAEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        Ah, I guess I must have overlooked that part. There are several reasons for not wanting to allow signups.

        One is quite simple, cost. Right now this is running on a small, single core instance. It often stutters (especially when handling video updates), and that is not an issue, since that just means it’s going to take small while before updates are sent out. But you wouldn’t want to have that delay for actual users. Right now the costs are quite manageable, if I have to scale up in order to provide a fluent experience for its users, not so much.

        Most of the other reasons come down to the responsibility of having to provide a home to any outside users that sign up. I don’t have the interest or time to maintain a community of people, nor to guarantee the uptime that such a server would require. It also wouldn’t work. The largest Lemmy instance in existence, lemmy.world, has defederated from this instance. So any users that sign up here, would be devoid from content on there. And as you said, any other instance can decide to do so at any time (in fact, I very much suggest they do so in the FAQ).

        I could go on, but I think you get my drift.