Happy July 1st! Starting today, free third-party Reddit apps will no longer be usable, but as much as we don’t want to admit it, some of us still miss the content on Reddit, and it can be hard to resist the “just browse Old Reddit with an adblocker” loophole. Before we get into yet another “crossposting bots on the Fediverse” debate, here’s a quick summary of what this bot is and is not intended to do:
| Intended | Not intended |
|---|---|
| Allow users to consolidate their link aggregation and discussion feeds onto an open-source, non-proprietary site | “Increase activity” in a community by compensating for the lack of real users |
| Encourage ex-Redditors to spend more time on the Threadiverse when they are able to access their favorite content here | Serve as a “bridge” between Reddit and the Fediverse. Threads are archives and messages will not be synced back to Reddit |
| Preserve thoughtful, valuable and informative content, and make them accessible without a privacy-hostile corporate platform |
(Please don’t leave comments on the Reddit archive threads on the demo instance.)
Leddit is a fork of lemmit.online and does not use the Reddit API at all. Unlike lemmit.online which is a public service, Leddit is meant to be self-hosted on a personal instance as syncing comments is a very slow process that will get rate-limited on a normal instance.
Based on my demo instance that syncs posts and comments from two subreddits with a combined subscriber count of about 1 million, this takes about the same amount of time that lemmit.online takes to sync only posts from more than 100 subreddits.
An example of a thread that is automatically created and updated by Leddit can be seen here. The header message and position can be customized. Leddit preserves the comment thread’s structure and identifies the OP in the comments.
For shorter threads, all comments are synced, but comments in longer threads that are hidden below “show more comments” are not synced as they consume additional requests to Reddit with very little content in return.
If there’s interest, I can also add a feature that allows the bot to archive entire subreddits instead of retrieving the newest posts. Please feel free to ask for support to set up your personal bot and instance in the Leddit Lounge community.
That sounds like a nuisance. Maybe we could have one instance whose only job is to collect scraped Reddit data, but it shouldn’t have any ties to Lemmy instances where actual users want to post content.
That’s exactly what https://lemmit.online is. Just one bot to block, or one instance to defederate from. It doesn’t post anywhere else, so interested users can just request a subreddit on there, and follow what they want.