I have just deployed a script and a mastodon bot which attempt to hashtag lemmy posts so that they are better discoverable in microblogging services.
Please check the README for the why and the how.
If you have a microblogging account, please consider following the bot account which will help its hashtags federate to your instance’s public timeline.
Many thanks to @jgrim@discuss.online for hosting the bot.
PS: If you have a mastodon account, you can reply to your posts on mastodon (just search for their url) and add hashtags to your replies. This will achieve a quick and dirty version of what this bot is doing
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Cool stuff. I’m not one for microblogging but this could be very beneficial for growing niche communities here by taking advantage of Mastodon’s larger userbase. Thank you for continuing to build tools for the fediverse, @db0 🫡
The best thing about PeerTube is that tags on a video are automatically converted into Mastodon-appropriate tags (spaces removed, basically) that show up in search there, it’s a really cool feature that definitely helps a lot with discoverability. So this definitely has potential.
Unfortunately on the Mastodon side, you’re still seeing a link to the Lemmy post rather than being able to read it in your feed, which confuses a lot of people in my experience as they don’t realise they can reply in Mastodon since it looks like a whole separate thing.
So yeah, great work and I think it probably will help some communities, but nobody get your hopes up too much as the way things federate in that direction is just inherently bad at the moment.
p.s. followed the bot on sunny.garden and mastodon.gamedev.place to get things moving 👍
Ye I am aware. I did link to that bug report in the readme as well :) But you gave me an idea to clarify that replies will appears as comments in the bot reply
More for other mods to be aware that it’s not going to work quite as smoothly as they might hope. But yeah adding that to the bot replies makes a lot of sense, good thinking!
I’m wondering, is it all or nothing in terms of which posts get tagged? For example I mod !knitting@lemmy.world and most of our posts are someone showing off a project, which is easy to comment on from Mastodon (I’ve been boosting and replying to stuff manually to draw attention there as you described in your OP). But then we also have things like Work-In-Progress Wednesday, where multiple people are posting images of their WIPs to one thread. This doesn’t work so well with Mastodon because images don’t federate (in either direction) with the exception of the first image attached to the main post, so there’s no point sharing it there.
Not to give you more work but maybe it’s an idea to have an opt-out keyword that can be included in a post, and the bot will know to ignore that one?
Again, really is great work, you’re always contributing useful stuff to the Fediverse and I for one really appreciate it so please take these rambling thoughts in the constructive manner they’re intended, they are definitely not complaints 😄
Ye, the plan is to keep improving this bot with more fine-tuned mechanisms. Some of the things you suggested are already something I was planning
- Allow excluding posts when a specific keyword is specified in the body
- Allow adding extra optional tags when specific keywords are specified in the body
Is Mastodon ever starts supporting QT, I will also switch to QT the posts instead of replying to them.
Feel free to open feature requests in github about it
Nice! Great minds and all that. Definitely going to be keeping an eye on how it develops :)
Now added both optional tags and post skipping
This is why hashtags have been suggested to the lemmy devs multiple times. Just let lemmy users tag their posts.
There are countless feature requests for Lemmy, but we are only two fulltime devs. Our time is limited so we have to set some priorities, and no matter what we do, some people will always disagree with those priorities. And besides implementing new features we also have many other tasks like reviewing pull requests, or right now bug fixing to get already implemented changes out into production. The only way to implement more features faster is by having more developers. Either as volunteers, or by hiring people with donation money.
I understand all that and am not criticizing the pace of lemmy development. My frustration is that in the past, you’ve said hashtags don’t make sense for lemmy because communities are the organizational method. Even in your other comment to the OP in this thread, you said
I dont think it makes sense to implement federated hashtags before we have post tags in Lemmy figured out.
But federated hashtags already work across the fediverse. Implementation details are basically settled. I don’t know what you mean by post tags, but any other feature that uses a tag-like mechanism would have to work well alongside the currently standard way of using hashtags in order for lemmy’s hashtags to remain interoperable with the fediverse.
It seems that you don’t personally care about federated hashtags and so this feature will probably remain at the bottom of the priority list and that’s what we’re lamenting about in this thread. Federated hashtags would increase interoperability with the rest of the fediverse and would improve the overall experience so its a bummer that yall don’t see that.
Well there are some different ideas for implementing hashtags. One idea was that Lemmy could follow hashtags from Mastodon etc to display them in the corresponding community. The only way to receive these hashtag posts is by following the users who create them, but Lemmy doesnt support user following.
Another option would be that Lemmy adds hashtags to posts so that they are picked up by Mastodon etc, without Lemmy itself using hashtags. This is definitely doable, for example it would be very easy to automatically add hashtags based on the community name, so everything in /c/memes would have #memes hashtag. It would also be possible to configure the hashtags in community settings similar to this tagginator tool, but that would require more extensive changes.
A third option would be to add hashtags based on post tags, thats what db0 was discussing before and which I referenced with that comment. However we are still discussing how post tags should work as you can see from the issue and from the RFC.
So option two or three seem reasonable, but like you say none of the maintainers seem to give this much priority. So the only way this will get implemented is if someone else writes the code. Thats just the reality, complaining wont change anything.
I want to be able to add hashtags when I create a post, either through a field (like
title,body, etc) or directly in the body of my post like everywhere else on the #fediverse. This doesn’t require any extra moderation, its compatible with the rest of the fediverse, and would increase discoverability.Thats just the reality, complaining wont change anything.
I was venting a frustration with a fellow user, which is perfectly reasonable. And clearly, there’s a chance it could change something, because it got your attention and made you jump in.
I know. I am in those discussions and I linked to them on the readme, but I don’t feel the lemmy devs agree.
Sorry. Any brusqueness in my post was directed at the lemmy devs, not you. It seems like such an obvious feature. I think some people on the fediverse get into the mindset of recreating corporate silos one-to-one instead of building a cohesive fediverse that has way more functionality than any one network.
totally agree. Our strength is our unity.
I think your proposal is reasonable. However it depends how exactly post tags will get implemented, which is still rather vague. I dont think it makes sense to implement federated hashtags before we have post tags in Lemmy figured out.
In any case your tool looks very useful as a stopgap, and can help to test how hashtag federation can work in practice.
Repeatedly getting tagged by this bot sounds like it is a PITA.
Having a command you can send with a private message so it won’t tag you could be useful , something like :
dontTagMe: @wiki_me@lemmy.ml .
It’s also pretty confusing if you encounter a post the first time, having it write something like :
new lemmy post: ‘Moving media library to bigger HDD’ on community #Selfhosted by @rambos
(Replying in this thread will appear as a comment in the lemmy discussion.)
about this bot (link to a explanation)
Could be more understandable.
Regarding you saying on the read me you are not a rust developer A tutorial on youtube implies you can learn the basics in aboutt 3h, since your contribution gets reviewed by experienced developer that should be enough and you can learn more things on the fly (Assuming there are more things you want to contribute to on lemmy).
having a command where the moderators of a community can tweak the frequency of posting (or maybe even posting just the top post for day/week/month etc) could also be helpful
Unfortunately I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to pick up Rust atm. My hands are beyond full.
Repeatedly getting tagged by this bot sounds like it is a PITA.
This shouldn’t really make any difference. In lemmy it would appear as a normal reply notification once per thread.
Could be more understandable.
I’ll see if I can expand the bot, but I don’t want each reply to end up like a wall of text.
having a command where the moderators of a community can tweak the frequency of posting (or maybe even posting just the top post for day/week/month etc) could also be helpful
That would defeat the purpose, as the discovery from mastodon would happen days/weeks/months after that thread was active.
This shouldn’t really make any difference. In lemmy it would appear as a normal reply notification once per thread.
Still an annoyance, i post on reddit and lemmy for years, to keep having to delete that reply for years to come could accumulate to a significant amount of time, and small segments of time wasted tend to add up
I’ll see if I can expand the bot, but I don’t want each reply to end up like a wall of text.
You could add the “about this bot” the line above it ( making a two lines message) but this could be cryptic and therefore off putting for new lemmy users (creating a bad impression of the platform).
That would defeat the purpose, as the discovery from mastodon would happen days/weeks/months after that thread was active.
When you reply the person you reply to still get notifications , lemmy “active” sort bumps posts when they get new comments (see docs) and anyway most of the time i assume people just read comments and don’t respond, and the idea is to make lemmy more discoverable so after that they could visit lemmy and participate more actively.
Thanks for the tutorial link, looks like a pretty good tutorial. I will watch them.
Cool, thanks!
interesting idea
one thing I like from kbin is that because it does this natively I can follow a kbin magazine from an empty unused account and create a misskey antenna pointed at the hashtags in question (with replies hidden) which allows me to subscribe to kbin communities without getting spammed with boosts of replies, so I may end up making use of this depending on how widely it gets adopted
that said I’m still not convinced that increasing lemmys reach outside the threadiverse makes sense just yet while its federation is so buggy, case in point: https://brain.d.on-t.work/notes/9md8phwlkzlj0xe9 (edits on posts are repeatedly re-boosted, which likely wasn’t noticed as mastodon only ever allows one boost from an actor)
(or the fact that link posts don’t federate to misskey and forks at all, but that’s due to a bug in misskey)
(edits on posts are repeatedly re-boosted, which likely wasn’t noticed as mastodon only ever allows one boost from an actor)
Ye, lemmy integration with the microblogging fediverse is pretty janky atm.
i can see why you may not want this but have you potentially considered rehosting/attaching any images from image posts in the bot’s replies? as lemmy doesn’t federate those properly just yet (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4035/commits/ecd8e3b11b5292bad73d48c2fbf11db00bc432c2 will fix it for posts originating in lemmy AFAIK) it’d make the bot quite a lot more useful and things like memes do tend to get boosted a lot more widely than links, though i can definitely see why it may feel a bit like freebooting (so, it could perhaps be a per-community option for non-OC-heavy communities?)
