Join fediverser.network, make it easy to bring Australian redditors to the Fediverse?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨rglullis@communick.news⁩ to ⁨meta@aussie.zone⁩

I’m the developer of Fediverser Project, which is a set of services to make it easy for people on Reddit to migrate to the Fediverse. It lets people use their Reddit credentials (OAuth) to sign up and create an account on a Lemmy server.

It also offers a cool onboarding feature: during signup, we can fetch the user’s subscribed subreddits, and we use this information to automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy (or Kbin/Mbin) community. This “subreddit -> fediverse group” map is crowdsourced and people can sign up if they want to contribute. The “main” site also provides a “Find an instance” feature: it can track all the servers that use the Fediverse software and redirect users to their closest instance.

To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).

I’d really like to see aussie.zone becoming part of the network. I believe this would make it faster and simpler to get more people in the fediverse, and I’m willing to provide all the support and help needed to get the “country-based” services getting started with it.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

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Comments

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Auzy@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I personally don’t see more redditors as a good thing at this point.

Reddit has gone full blown cesspool on many subs, and I’m not sure having them would help, especially if it overwhelms moderation.

A lot of Reddit is also posting populist stuff at this point to get attention, rather than acting normal.

I’d prefer a smaller quality community where people are normal, instead of one where we end up with people trying to fight for the most attention (sometimes as an attempt to get attention by advertisers).

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- guismo@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Since I just made an account, I’ve been wanting to give my opinion on this for a while.
  
  I agree that the usual reddit people would destroy a nice community like aussie.zone. But I wanted to mention that the bad kind of people from reddit would not try to find an alternative. They are happy there. There are decent people who want out, but don’t know where to or how. I am very confused with lemmy (not that I am a decent person, that remains to be judged), and I would have appreciated more help. So helping people dissatisfied with reddit might be helpful as they are unlikely to be bad (or at least not belonging to the normal reddit bad) and wouldn’t harm the community.
  
  I have some other opinions as well but that was the main point I wanted to bring every time I see this kind of comment.
  
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  - Ilandar@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    There are decent people who want out, but don’t know where to or how.
    
    What has changed since last year that would make those people leave now? reddit’s AI policies? There was a massive migration with tons of coverage and assistance not long ago and most people chose to stick with reddit. Even those who migrated over last year left in droves after just a month or two. This idea that there’s a renewed push to get off the platform doesn’t really make sense to me. On the other hand, maybe that’s an argument in favour of services that make transitioning easier. I doubt we will get an influx of losers again so why not help a small number of people and see where it leads?
    
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- TheHolm@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Lemmy reminds me FIDO of old by this. Collective of elitist geeks.
  
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  - Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What is/was FIDO. I looked up fidoalliance.org , is that what you mean?
    
    It looks like they do some kind of passkey instead of password service, did they start as a security focused forum or something?
    
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- Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I definitely would like to see more people in general. Without it, you just can’t reach that critical mass where it’s possible to have meaningful conversations about niche topics. And that, far more than any other element, is what the value of Reddit is. The fact that /r/olympics daily megathreads get thousands of comments per day but !olympics@sh.itjust.works threads are lucky to reach 10 is a great example of what I mean. And I started those megathreads because I figured hey, it’s the gods damned Olympics. That’s got to be a broad enough topic to get some interest. And yet no. If something that big doesn’t even make it with this platform’s current size, what hope do you have of sharing your niche interests and getting good discussion?
  
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  - Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Haha, i hadn’t even noticed !olympics@sh.itjust.works on my feeds damn! I wonder why that hasn’t gained traction?
    
    If one of Frances special sports was a Linux Power User comp, i reckon that would’ve lit up lemmys Oympics megathreads! :p
    
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unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This has probably been asked before but is there any reason why this couldn’t be implemented as a basic lemmy client (with signup facilities only)? Meaning instances don’t need to host anything or are you concerned that centralisation might drive up Reddit API costs or will the OAuth stuff require a server?

Thanks for trying to make the fediverse more accessible!

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Excellent question! The truth is that it can be done on the client only, but the instance would need to be fully open for registrations. The server-side service is needed in order to ensure that any user authenticated via Reddit can signup and get started right away.
  
  (Sorry it took me so long to see this. None of the comments were federating to my instance, so I wasn’t seeing any of the comments here.)
  
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Baku@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I love the idea, and I also believe that getting more people onto the fediverse is a good thing. However, I do have a couple of questions/concerns.

Firstly, I’m not really sure why this would require access to Lemmy instances themselves? is it to improve coverage by automatically crawling all the communities on a given instance to match with Reddit alternatives? Or is it to automatically sign new people up to an instance and then subscribe them to the Lemmy communities automatically? I believe that pushing for admins to provide root level access to their Lemmy servers is going to limit your growth. I don’t run an instance, but if I did, I’m not sure that I would allow anything except the bare minimum access to the server.

I also noticed that the Subreddits section doesn’t display anything. I ended up creating a second account which I OAuth’d to my Reddit account, and it was still empty. I was trying to figure out how to add an ‘alternative to’ section on a few communities (which took me a while to figure out how to do)

Also, about the above: Are there any plans to add a way to link a Reddit account to a pre-existing account? What about account deletion, data anonymisation, and GDPR compliance? I do realise most of those aren’t relevant at the moment, and probably won’t be for some time, but I think you may encounter some issues, considering the more privacy-conscious nature of a lot of Fediverse users.

I do really hope to see this expand and grow, though. Despite the potential to bring some unsavoury Reddit types, it’ll be an overall win for the Fediverse.

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Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).

If i’ve read your post correctly, it seems @lodion or @nath need to weigh in on this one, before anybody else could take any actions themselves in support of your project?

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Exactly, this is something that only the admins can execute on. In any case, it’s still a good idea to have users chiming in.
  
  @lodion@aussie.zone and @nath@aussie.zone, you can reach me here or via matrix (@raphael:communick.com), I’ll gladly help.
  
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  - lodion@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sorry not interested in any hooks into Reddit, or additional software requiring ongoing management.
    
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