Bots of this type have appeared recently, and people are asking if it's okay to use them. I'm not sure about this either, so I think it would make sense to ask users.
These bots follow some subreddits on Reddit and automatically post it to Lemmy when a post is created there.
I've seen an example site for it: lemmit.online. This instance is dedicated solely to mirroring Reddit posts to the Lemmy instance.
Maybe instead of mirroring to a community on Lemmy NSFW, we can subscribe to lemmit.online via Lemmy NSFW. This way we could have kept Lemmy NSFW free of bots. Currently, even if accepted, I believe it should be done under admin control to prevent duplicates.
Here is the poll: https://strawpoll.com/polls/PbZqRw82byN
I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for the notification of this post @yay@lemmynsfw.com.
I have created a script that would take the top (user-selectable) 0-1000 posts of a subreddit and post them to a Lemmy community. My plan was then to implement a vote threshold so that posts older than 48 hours and above a user-defined karma limit would be pulled in each time it was run - however the account login no longer works so I assume it and its posts were purged, so I'm here instead!
I do think that in order to get people engaged, we need content to draw them in. I noticed that once I'd posted 50 items across I immediately started getting subscribers to the community.
What I don't think is right is using bots to just replicate all the content on Reddit. As a moderator of several subs, a lot of content gets removed through moderation (hence the 48 hour limit), and a lot of junk gets through but just doesn't get upvoted (resulting in the karma threshold). Avoiding the "rubbish" would be good.
My view is that using bots/scripts to seed communities means we can kick start them into life much more quickly, and then when a critical mass of users is reached they become irrelevant and can be disabled. I don't think we're here to just copy and paste from Reddit - otherwise surely you'd just go there instead.
Edit: Just to comment on the poll itself. I don't think "bot only" communities make sense - we're not here to just copy Reddit... lemmit.online can do that. I believe we should allow bots to seed, and then let actual users take over. Unfortunately there isn't an explicit option for that so I just went with "Yes".