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.
Stolen from another user:
Reddit sucks. Let’s make our own reddit with blackjack and hookers.
Result: there are now 15 competing reddit knockoffs. Each one is small and lonely.
Solution: let the reddit knockoffs talk to each other. This solves the problem of a fractured userbase. This was always reddit’s strength: disparate communities united, on the same site. This size and diversity meant there was a high likelihood of someone who knows what they’re talking about or someone with a unique perspective stumbling across the post and chiming in.
By understanding the motivation, hopefully the concept of “Federation” makes more sense.
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My own explanation: you can find a message board for pretty much anything somewhere on the internet, but you’d have to go to a different website for each message board you’re interested in separately - they can’t talk to each other. What Reddit did was create message boards (subreddits) that could interact with each other on the same site. The fediverse is the equivalent of Reddit.com. Communities are the subreddits.
I think the complicated bit are the instances - Reddit doesn’t have those. Instances are like servers. You need to join an instance to access the fediverse. It doesn’t matter which instance you register to unless you’re really interested in the alt-right (for example). A couple of alt-right instances have been defederated because they’re pretty hateful. They have splinted off and can make their own message boards/communities/subreddits but you can’t see or interact with them unless you join that instance separately. Unless whatever instance you’ve registered to defederates (unlikely if you’re in a mainstream one like lemmy.world) you don’t need to worry about instances or join a second one.