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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    13 minutes ago

    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

    You might also be able to organize with certain communities and discuss what kinda stuff they’d appreciate you mirroing or posting automatically. But I wouldn’t go doing it without talking with the folks running those comms personally.

    I get that’s not what you wanna discuss, but as I think you can see that’s pretty important to the culture of this space for a lot of people, and anything you build will be more successful if you’re mindful of that human aspect. It’s at least as important as any technical choice, if not more

    (Overlooking the human or social considerations for purely technical ones is a open source community pet-peeve of mine. Everything here is intrinsically collaborative and needs to be pro-social to truly succeed.)

    Regardless, I hope you’re able to support the sports discussions on Lemmy you wanna see thrive. Just remember, more content than people can engage with dilutes the engagement and makes it harder for folks to find themselves in the same space such that human interaction can happen. Ultimately that’s the point of online social spaces :)

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      1·
      9 minutes ago

      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”.

  • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Why is the burden on the other users to block your Twitter bots?

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      52·
      4 hours ago

      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.

      • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        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.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          1·
          58 minutes ago

          “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.

  • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    25·
    8 hours ago

    No. Account mirroring and bot posts go against the essential nature of social threaded link aggregation. I see sportsbots is already a Mastodon project which makes much more sense because microblogging has a follow-the-user rather than a follow-the-community model. Lemmy is follow-the-community. If there is interest in this content, users will create a Lemmy community and post content there. Maybe they will even link to the sportsbots mirror. But don’t just set up a script to do it for you, that’s just something people are going to block.

  • KichaeEnglish
    7·
    6 hours ago

    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.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      62·
      6 hours ago

      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.

          • Microw@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            50 minutes ago

            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.

            • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
              1·
              30 minutes ago

              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.

              • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                24 minutes ago

                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.

                • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
                  1·
                  16 minutes ago

                  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.

  • Baron Von J@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    7 hours ago

    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.

  • m_f@discuss.onlineEnglish
    12·
    8 hours ago

    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.

    • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      7 hours ago

      You’re one of the big posters I don’t mind seeing and now it makes sense why. The way so many of the other top posters (well, two in particular but I won’t name them) post feels so…soulless. Either spamming 20 memes they saved off Instagram that day in 10 minutes or posting Reddit’s Greatest Hits.

      As much as I’d love if everything was OC, I MUCH prefer the curated approach to making Lemmy yet another bucket to archive everything from every other site

      • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        18 minutes ago

        I always enjoy seeing pug Jesus posts cause he posts little context blurbs for his history memes so I get to learn about stuff, and sometimes I’ve asked him stuff and he’s taught me all about certain parts of history ☺️

        His memes come with story time lol.

    • Microw@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      7 hours ago

      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?

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      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.
  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    126·
    8 hours ago

    Sports 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.

  • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    8 hours ago

    How would it work, in terms of number of bots? Would it be one bot per mirrored account?

    If they only post to relevant communities (such as [email protected] or [email protected] ), that could help to have more activity.

    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.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      31·
      8 hours ago

      Would it be one bot per mirrored account?

      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.

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        6·
        8 hours ago

        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.

        That’s way too many bots for people to block. Yes, I’m aware there’s a setting to block all bots, but that’s too all or nothing.

        If you insist on going that route, maybe stand up a dedicated instance like one of the other repost instances (and only post to local communities there) so people can just block that instance.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          3·
          8 hours ago

          Yeap, all of the alternatives assume would be set under the same domain, or at most just broken down by sport.

      • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        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!