Since its inception, the Lemmit instance has been controversial. That might be an understatement, but let’s roll with it for now. One of the major issues people have with the bot, is the cross-posting of “interactive” Reddit posts, ie posts where the value lies in interacting with the OP, like AskMen, AskWomen, and AmITheAsshole. Personally, I fully agree with that viewpoint, but I didn’t feel like interfering with supply and demand - in the sense that AmITheAsshole, for some reason, is the most subscribed community on this server.
That might change though. Earlier this week, I disabled the posibility to request new subreddits. This weekend I will follow that up by disabling the scraping of so-called interactive communities. So in order to facilitate that, I created a list of all the communities on this server (posted separately in !about@lemmit.online), and I will check each of them to see if they should be disabled. The goal is to keep a list of “content only” (or at least “content mostly”) communities, where the value lies in the link that’s provided or in the body of the self-post - not in the comment section. I’m sure this is going to be a disappointment to some people, but I do agree with the sentiment that this is better for Lemmy as a whole.
Edit: It is done. All 816 communities have been checked and and 110 of those have been purged from updates. I am sure some mistakes were made - that some communities have been disabled or left intact when they shouldn’t have. If that’s the case, reach out to me, and I’ll fix it.
While I personally liked having the bot, and wasn’t bothered by it since I only browse subscribed communities, I understand the change :)
I had a question that I never got around to asking: Would it be possible to be added as a moderator of a Lemmit community?
I’m still involved with my university subreddit, and it’s a fairly large one (/r/UBC). It would be great to have that content here so that users wouldn’t have to go to Reddit for it. However, one worry I had was about removing content. It doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes users do post personally identifying information or photos of other students (bullying / harassment), or link to harmful materials, etc. So the worry was that the bot would post the content here, and it would stick around even after being removed from Reddit.
Being added as a moderator to the lemmit community seemed like the easy solution. In the off chance that we need to remove content (ex. harmful, or when the original user requests the deletion), we could remove it directly. For communities that request something like that, it should be possible to verify that the request is valid through modmail or something.
Alternatively, the bot could be set up to check and remove content that has been removed from Reddit, but that might go against the archival principle and also consume significantly more resoures
Funnily enough, it initially was the intention to have the bot check up on everything it posted, to see if it got deleted. In that way, it would outsource moderation to Reddit. I never got around to that, and am not sure I ever will.
So for now, handing out moderation to others is a good workaround.
In order for me to make you a mod, you’ll need to leave a comment in the community, and mention me @admin@lemmit.online.Actually, checking out the subreddit in question, that’s exactly the kind of content I want to avoid on here. Most of the posts on there are to invoke discussion, either with the OP or other members. You’d be better off starting a new community on your own instance.
Yes that’s fair, so far we do have a community here and most users are likely using both Lemmy and Reddit. So I won’t request /r/UBC unless there’s a justifiable reason for it in the future. In the meantime we can probably repost the relevant content to the community.
Still that’s good to know for other subreddits that would be more appropriate to have here