If you intend to create inorganic content like that maybe the best solution would be a dedicated community so that folks who are happy to have updates and be able to discuss with folks can go there, and other folks can avoid it
That is the exact reason why I ended up creating 15+ topic-specific instances, plus alien.top when I started mirroring reddit content. The idea was that the bots would live on alien.top (and could be taken over by their real owner, when they authenticated via Reddit) and all these instances and communities were to be the destination of the posts.
Turns out that even with this separation, some people would still complain about their feed being "taken over" by alien.top. So, people could simply avoid it by simply curating their own feeds and stop "browsing by all".
Running the topic-specific instances is not the hard part. The hard part would be to manually find content, posting and then ensuring that it is replicated across the whole Fediverse.
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.
"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.
Because it's their responsibility to curate their own feeds. You don't see me asking for people to stop posting stupid memes and the outrage bait of the US news cycle, I just avoid these communities.
Ok, but the whole idea of Fediverser is to let people get rid of Twitter/Reddit by giving people an alternative source of content. Sending content there would make those platforms more interesting, not less.
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.
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:
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:
Sign up to the Fediverser site
Become a community ambassador
Add different RSS feeds as content sources
Get in the habit of visiting the site to repost the contents they think it's interesting.
Yes. There is no information on sportbots about how many accounts they have listed, but I'm guess it's in the "high hundreds - low thousands" range.
There would probably need to be some fine-tuning about the number of posts. Some reporters post a lot, that could potentially flood those communities.
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.
Even with Tor you also have to trust the exit nodes. So, yes, I agree you will still need to trust someone, but we can control/design to have less things depending on this trust.
Specifically with ActivityPub, everything is designed around the idea that the server owns it all. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news Posts 39Comments 1,814Joined 2 yr. ago
That is the exact reason why I ended up creating 15+ topic-specific instances, plus alien.top when I started mirroring reddit content. The idea was that the bots would live on alien.top (and could be taken over by their real owner, when they authenticated via Reddit) and all these instances and communities were to be the destination of the posts.
Turns out that even with this separation, some people would still complain about their feed being "taken over" by alien.top. So, people could simply avoid it by simply curating their own feeds and stop "browsing by all".