Hello! I wrote a simple bot that periodically checks for new reddit posts and posts them to lemmy, so that people migrating from reddit to lemmy can still be able to see their favourite posts, but familiarizing with lemmy.
currently the coments are not synced, but this may change in the future (perhaps)
Yes, it uses the Reddit API, so it will stop working on the 1st of July, but I think that then I can implement a sort of web scraper to access Reddit posts without the official API, so this may eventually keep working for a while.
this script is currently on my laptop so it will be offline most of the time, but if I get the approval I may host it somewhere to get it running 24h/24.
now the question… Is this allowed? having this bot running 24h/24 on large subreddits will mean a very high quantity of posts. will this cause any problem to Lemmy?
if you want a preview check out https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/c/reddit_memes, where I started syncing a few posts from r/memes
let me know your opinion on this!
==== EDIT
The bot is now running in https://sh.itjust.works/c/reddit_memes, let’s try to see if it work (I hope that shit just works)
I’m a bit concerned about the legality of this, if anyone has any info please tell me!
Not an opinion, but a question - would syncing content from Reddit potentially overwhelm both Lemmy’s servers and its organic content? If posts madenon Lemmy are mixed in with the tidal wave of Reddit material, might that put people off posting on Lemmy at all? Possibly not, just wondering.
I wondered this a bit too and share your concerns. On one hand I like the idea of populating Lemmy with more content, particularly for niche communities, but there’s also a good amount of unique posts here that might get drowned out.
I thought about this yesterday but definitely don’t have the skills to make it happen. Tbh I would go ahead with it, but know you will be required to moderate the posts. I wouldn’t set it up to post on a community that isn’t yours.
No of course I would create a specific community for each subreddit I want to sync
Are you referring to moderating the comments? I was thinking of restricting the post privileges to only the bot
I would create a separate instance for this, I don’t think anybody wants their instance to be flooded with automated posts.
This may be against reddits TOS and may have legal consequences. But I guess mostly for the person operating the bot, and not the Lemmy instance, as long as they block the bot on request.
I have no idea, but at least in EU you may be violating copyright by copying someone else’s database (i.e. collection of data). I am not a lawyer though…
I Read the terms of service and what I understood is that the intellectual property of the content is the users’, not reddit’s, but I asked on r/legaladvices for security (there is no equivalent community on lemmy yet)
Given their recent posture and actions, I would think yes it could be an issue for you, for sure. You’d want to check their terms of service as it may violate them. If you’re doing this for fun, add a step in the middle and get ChatGPT to rephrase every post to obfuscate their source :-)
I was thinking of something like that too, but probably never would’ve gotten around to implement it myself, so thanks! Could you put your script on Github or something maybe?
Also it would be great if it could copy at least top-level comments by OP, because that’s often used for linking to a source.
