cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/1047028 - because ironically this will not reach instances where Lemmit is blocked.

A few months ago, I launched the Lemmit instance and bot (@[email protected]). Primarily, this was to help me stay up to date with some of the content I’d leave behind on Reddi. Additionally, I wanted to give back to the community, so I made it possible for anyone to request the archiving of subreddits to the Lemmit instance.

However, this came with some unintended consequences. Notably, the most subscribed community on the instance has been [email protected]. Even though it should have been obvious that there is no way to communicate with the Original Poster, given they’re on Reddit.

The pushback against the bot and the instance has increased over time. A recent post, This bot is bad for Lemmy, highlighted these concerns. I’ve also received similar feedback from admins of major Lemmy Instances and through direct PMs.

As a response, last week I stopped accepting requests for archiving new subreddits. This weekend, I went a step further by discontinuing the archiving of a large amount of “interactive subreddits”—communities primarily centered around Q&A or communication with the Original Poster. This includes subs like [email protected] and [email protected], as well as niche and support communities. Such discussions are better hosted on Reddit or Lemmy’s equivalent spaces.

I’ve also adjusted the post karma thresholds to curb spam posts. While this probably won’t appease everyone, it should reduce the bot’s posting frequency.

Perhaps this might prompt some admins to rethink their choice to defederate from the Lemmit instance, or the banning of the bot. I’m not expecting anyone to, and won’t take it personally if you don’t, but I wanted to give the community this update nonetheless.

In [email protected] there’s a sticky post of all the Actively archived communities on the server (including NSFW ones, since that is not public without logging in), as well as the list of communities for which archiving is now disabled.

Cheers!

  • @adminAEnglish
    4•9 months ago

    I don’t know how the karma thresholds work behind the scenes, but might I suggest for the bot to do a “top for” sort instead? Like it will only repost top content for the past 6 hours only. This will also help get more quality content as well and avoid reposting low effort/quality posts.

    This is effectively already kinda how it works. For each subreddit it periodically (anywhere between every 30 minutes to every 12 hours, based on subscriber count and posts per day) requests the “hot” content feed. It then checks each post if it has at least 20 upvotes, and a 80% upvote to downvote ratio. Those numbers are configurable, but that’s what they’re currently set to - I believe they’re a good mix between filtering out the complete garbage while still making sure it doesn’t miss good content is.