So, this isn’t meant to be a “guide” or anything but I thought it could be helpful to some.
- Find yourself an RSS feed reader (e.g. Feedbin).
- Grab your subreddit link. (Example:
reddit.com/r/museum) - Add
.rssto the end of that link. (Example:reddit.com/r/museum.rss) - Add your subreddit RSS feeds to your feed reader.
This way, you can keep reading reddit without having to visit it. You will still need an account to participate, of course.
But I asked myself this question: “Do I really want to participate and keep feeding reddit content for free?”
You are what makes reddit what it is. If you can be yourself elsewhere, why waste your precious time on reddit?
You deserve better.
I started up a visual novels community on my server but would definitely like it if others could help share the burden once it gains some traction.
Is it permissible to transfer the submissions from reddit to lemmy directly, to at least provide a seed to start conversations going?
If by “permissible” you mean ethically, stuff is posted and reposted on the internet all the time. Much of the posts you see on Reddit aren’t new either. Unless a community expressly forbids it, I think it’s fine.
On the other hand this might be a good opportunity to find some sources that you like reading, and post those (if you’re referring to articles)
Is it permissible to transfer the submissions from reddit to lemmy directly, to at least provide a seed to start conversations going?
Theoretically yes, however… Say User A made a comment on Reddit but User A doesn’t exist (yet) on Lemmy, do you then create a new user for that new user or do you attribute that comment to an “unknown user” ? And if so, what’s the value than of that comment ? You cannot really interact with that comment other then ‘it exists’. But you decide to create a user for that, how do you verify that that person can “migrate” or have access to that ‘new user’ ? Assuming they even want to migrate to Lemmy in the first place.
Not to mention the fact, that it’s probably a GDPR violation to reupload that comment somewhere.
I wasn’t thinking about reuploading comments, just submissions. There are a lot of submissions that would be interesting to discuss here as separate conversations away from reddit. For example, Futurology, Science, Finance, and even Aww and Eyebleach have some nice things to discuss.
There are a ton of twitter bots that do exactly this already. I’ve seen a few mastodon bots do the same so I imagine it’s possible with lemmy as well.
At worst, you could just set it up on mastodon and then have them automatically post to lemmy.
RSS seems really handy tbh, and yet I’ve never gotten around to ever using it. I looked up what the term was, went ‘oh neat’ and continued to ignore each time the RSS icon appeared on a webpage.
Maybe I should look into an RSS reader. Seems I could pull from multiple different sources and curate something far more interesting/relevant to me than, say, Google’s ‘Discover’ page.
Fun fact: Aaron Swartz who helped create RSS, was involved early in the development of Reddit.
Feedly is a nice one. I keep up with a few web comics and tech sites using it.
I used to use Google Reader and then Feedly when it shuttered, but that was back in heady days of blogmania, when everyone was self-publishing. Haven’t done RSS in years, not since social media platforms took over. Having said that, I find it strangely hollow now reading any article without an accompanying discussion zone like Reddit. Like only getting half the story or a limited perspective. Hopefully Lemmy scratches that itch.
RSS readers are fantastic–I use the Nextcloud RSS reader for everything (news, youtube, reddit, etc.)
+1 It just works and I can see the RSS feeds on web and multiple devices.
I’d rather use my social media time on a platform like what we’re on now and use Google when I need to find an answer to some question that might be answered on Reddit.
My only hope is that it doesn’t turn into Voat and get overwhelmed with fringe view conspiracy cookers and go to poop.
This is my concern. That being said, I don’t think that’s quite as likely to happen because the reason for Voat’s creation was fundamentally different. The Lemmy exodus is because of API changes and the treatment of Apollo’s creator, while Voat was created as a result of a crackdown on hate subreddit (/r/fatpeoplehate was the big one, but this was years ago so I might be misremembering things).
That being said, I do specifically remember that the driving force behind the Voat push was “free speech.” I’m pretty sure we know who screams the loudest about free speech at the expense of all else, and it looks like Beehaw at least was created with the core idea of being against that crowd. So, while I can’t speak for Lemmy as a whole, I’m trying to at least be optimistic about Beehaw, since the reason for the exodus is completely different from the Voat exodus,meaning the migrants will have a different composition.
I too am optimistic however I think it’d be rather easy to push fringe views as mainstream ideas as things currently stand on Lemmy etc, just like on Voat. But you gotta start somewhere and I’m glad somebody is trying.
I think the federated approach Lemmy is taking can both help with that and exacerbate it. While it’s easy to push fringe views, it’s also easy to quarantine/block off servers that are going in that direction. I’m not sure what tools are available for doing that in Lemmy, but I don’t imagine it would be hard to block users from a Voat-like server if push comes to shove. It winds up coming down to the culture and values of the server you’re on, and if those go in a direction you don’t like you can also go elsewhere. Sort of like how there were bots that would pre-emptively block people that post in specific subreddit, but more granular control so you don’t wind up with situations like where someone would post in /r/conservative to argue against misinformation, then find themselves blocked from leftist subreddits. Here, if you’re a member of a leftist Lemmy server, that’s part of your identity so it’d be easier to see situations like that and prevent collateral damage from blocking members of the alt-right server from brigading. The only issue there is that it also becomes easier to set up echo chambers, so there’s a fine line to walk. I’m rambling a bit, but hopefully I’m making sense.
True, but the same is inversely possible too, particularly if they heavily infect some of the more popular servers in the federation.
They will likely crack down on RSS next arguing that “most people don’t use it anyway”
