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.
I think there has to be some level of curation. I set up a queue to post loops to !loops@midwest.social, but I didn’t just write a script that posts everything. I use Loops myself and add things I think are interesting to the queue to be posted. It’s a lot of manual work, but I’m happy to do it for now to help grow the Fediverse, and I enjoy watching the loops anyways.
You could accomplish this with more automatic curation, such as automatically reposting stuff that’s highly upvoted or has some other signal that it’s interesting. I didn’t do that for Loops because there’s a lot of stuff that’s highly-upvoted and is just stuff scraped from TikTok and I don’t care for those. I would probably use this approach if I didn’t want to wade through myself to find signal.
You’re one of the big posters I don’t mind seeing and now it makes sense why. The way so many of the other top posters (well, two in particular but I won’t name them) post feels so…soulless. Either spamming 20 memes they saved off Instagram that day in 10 minutes or posting Reddit’s Greatest Hits.
As much as I’d love if everything was OC, I MUCH prefer the curated approach to making Lemmy yet another bucket to archive everything from every other site
Reposting based on a signal sounds like the best idea.
Because we kinda have the alternative in place: lemmit chose the way of replicating reddit posts onto a committed instance. That means that someone still has to manually go, look at - for example the F1 - lemmit, choose an interesting post there and cross-post it to the relevant lemmy community.
If the repost into a relevant lemmy community happened automatically based on a signal, that would take off work from users.
Could that signal be the number of interactions in activitypub for a sportsbots post? Or would it be the Twitter interactions?
I’m old enough to remember when Reddit had a built-in RSS feed reader. You could add the RSS feeds you’d like to follow and it would present it to you on a separate page. But the cool thing is that you could up/downvote it like any other link. This meant that every blog entry could become a submission on its own, and all the user had to do was upvote it.
I tried to build something similar on the Fediverser page, but to this there is still too much friction. People need to: