Thoughts on bringing sportbots.xyz to Lemmy?
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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:
- 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.- 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.- 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.
As the mod of a couple of sports communities it would be nice to have some more automated content being posted (like game-day match threads, player trades, etc). However, I have yet to receive a response from sportsbots to any of my requests for adding league and team accounts to be mirrored. I don't think I'd want every one of their microblog post to show up in the communities, though.
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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:
- 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.- 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.- 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.
That sounds handy for Mastodon and annoying for Lemmy.
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Spots and bot accounts are 2 things I don't want in Lemmy. More so if the data source is from a Nazi owned platform.
If the bridge happens between Twatter (at some point we should just start calling it swastter) and mstd then use the existing integration with hashtags to bridge the content to Lemmy.
Why would you "not want sports in Lemmy"? Like, how is a sports community (like those that already exist on here) hurting you?
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With options (2) and (3), I could come up with strategies to solve this. We could, e.g, repost only what has reached a certain number of likes on Twitter, or limit one bot to post only once per hour/day. Etc.
That would be nice!
Something like that going to relevant communities and only posting more popular things might work. I don’t want to see every Adam Schefter post in c/NFL, for example. I guess to some extent we could rely on the sorting algorithms to keep the communities from getting flooded, but it still could start drowning out the experience.
OP, maybe somebody at https://fanaticus.social/ would be interested in hosting these? It seems like their goal is to become Lemmy’s sports home.
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I think there has to be some level of curation. I set up a queue to post loops to [email protected], 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.
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?
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Something like that going to relevant communities and only posting more popular things might work. I don’t want to see every Adam Schefter post in c/NFL, for example. I guess to some extent we could rely on the sorting algorithms to keep the communities from getting flooded, but it still could start drowning out the experience.
OP, maybe somebody at https://fanaticus.social/ would be interested in hosting these? It seems like their goal is to become Lemmy’s sports home.
fanaticus.social seems a bit zombified. Instance hasn't been updated since 0.19.3, last I checked the admin hasn't been active for months and the baseball communities (which were in the beginning the most active) were pretty much silent the whole season.
I have a handful of sports-focused instances which would surely benefit from this:
- [email protected] (and communities for every NBA team)
- [email protected] (and for the teams)
- [email protected] (and the main leagues/biggest clubs)
- [email protected]
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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:
- 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.- 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.- 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.
There's no lack of dead sports communities around. Turning them into dead sport bot communities doesn't sound like it would help. Sports fans aren't going to show up for that.
Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.
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There's no lack of dead sports communities around. Turning them into dead sport bot communities doesn't sound like it would help. Sports fans aren't going to show up for that.
Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.
Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.
Sorry, this is a bit condescending.
Go take a look at my profile. I have almost 2000 posts already. I've been posting 10-20 posts every day to all the different sport communities. Do you think that dedicating a good half-hour every day to read a bunch of feeds and sharing them is not already enough effort?
I'm not saying that we should rely only on mirror accounts, but I'm saying that it makes no sense to ignore them. I'm not proposing to take just a random army of AI slop and put it here. I'm saying that we can look at the places where the content curation already has been made and replicate it here.
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Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.
Sorry, this is a bit condescending.
Go take a look at my profile. I have almost 2000 posts already. I've been posting 10-20 posts every day to all the different sport communities. Do you think that dedicating a good half-hour every day to read a bunch of feeds and sharing them is not already enough effort?
I'm not saying that we should rely only on mirror accounts, but I'm saying that it makes no sense to ignore them. I'm not proposing to take just a random army of AI slop and put it here. I'm saying that we can look at the places where the content curation already has been made and replicate it here.
I have almost 2000 posts already.
FYI, I see indeed 1.43k posts on your https://communick.news/u/rglullis, but https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/[email protected] only shows 597. SJW shows 617: https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected]
So not sure where you posted the missing ones, but it seems like it was on communities that large instances do not follow.
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I have almost 2000 posts already.
FYI, I see indeed 1.43k posts on your https://communick.news/u/rglullis, but https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/[email protected] only shows 597. SJW shows 617: https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected]
So not sure where you posted the missing ones, but it seems like it was on communities that large instances do not follow.
Ok, I have 1.92k comments, not posts.
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fanaticus.social seems a bit zombified. Instance hasn't been updated since 0.19.3, last I checked the admin hasn't been active for months and the baseball communities (which were in the beginning the most active) were pretty much silent the whole season.
I have a handful of sports-focused instances which would surely benefit from this:
- [email protected] (and communities for every NBA team)
- [email protected] (and for the teams)
- [email protected] (and the main leagues/biggest clubs)
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected], with an impressive 66 comments post 4 days ago: https://lemmy.world/post/25015517
- [email protected] has 10 comments on their last posts
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- [email protected]
- [email protected], with an impressive 66 comments post 4 days ago: https://lemmy.world/post/25015517
- [email protected] has 10 comments on their last posts
Keep pushing/promoting the LW communities...
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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:
- 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.- 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.- 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.
Why is the burden on the other users to block your Twitter bots?
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Why is the burden on the other users to block your Twitter bots?
Because it's their responsibility to curate their own feeds.
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Because it's their responsibility to curate their own feeds.
Yes but those are a part of social media.
Content you dont like posted by people here on social media is not equivalent to botspam. -
Yes but those are a part of social media.
Content you dont like posted by people here on social media is not equivalent to botspam."Botspam" is when you have someone mass sending programs sending messages that do not enrich the content of the network. A bot that is mirroring perfectly good accounts from other platforms is far from the case.
Put another way: if the content is relevant to the point where part of the people want to have it, and if the content being mirrored has a proper context for some members of the community, then we shouldn't count it as spam.
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Ok, I have 1.92k comments, not posts.
I think Blaze's point still is relevant: if you are posting a lot on communities that large instances dont even know about, then your efforts will be harder. Ideally one could change something about that, for example use a user account on such a big instance to pull in those communities into federation.
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Keep pushing/promoting the LW communities...
We locked and migrated [email protected] to [email protected], so not sure what you mean?
I'm not active on the two others, but just noted that the LW versions are active
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I think Blaze's point still is relevant: if you are posting a lot on communities that large instances dont even know about, then your efforts will be harder. Ideally one could change something about that, for example use a user account on such a big instance to pull in those communities into federation.
I'm already dealing with more than 15 topic-specific instances, some of them with multiple communities, plus Communick. If I try to keep track of "who-is-following-what", I will go insane. I'd rather believe that eventually more people get to learn about these instances and start contributing as well.
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I'm already dealing with more than 15 topic-specific instances, some of them with multiple communities, plus Communick. If I try to keep track of "who-is-following-what", I will go insane. I'd rather believe that eventually more people get to learn about these instances and start contributing as well.
Seems a lot. I already feel like I stretch myself too thin sometimes, and I'm just a poster, not an admin of 15 instances.
