The biggest problem people seem to have with Lemmy at the moment is the lack of content.
If and when r/newzealand comes back online, it would be possible to set up a bot that copied new posts from there to lemmy.nz (and possibly from other NZ related subreddits). That would help get the content we need to get people to stay here.
There are downsides to this. Most content here would be from Reddit, rather than this community - at least for the time being. And there would be posts asking for advice, etc. that don’t make much sense without OP here.
The second issue would be helped a lot by filtering out posts with Advice, Discussion, Meta or AMA flairs. We could also use the other r/newzealand flairs to repost to the appropriate communities here.
So what do people think? Is that something we want to do?
EDIT: What do people think of @Dave@lemmy.nz’s idea of posting into its own community, so people could opt out in or out?
EDIT 2: It doesn’t seem like this is popular. People seem happy for content to be copied over by hand, but not by a bot. To be clear, I’m not talking about bot-generated content, I’m talking about grabbing human-generated content with a bot. Some people seem to have got that confused. It would be doing a kind of manual federation of r/newzealand - especially if the content was kept within it’s own community.
But it’s kind of a relief. It would have been a lot of work to set it up. On the other hand, I’m not at all keen on going back to Reddit to look for stuff to manually copy over here either. I don’t know if others are. I’m just worried that people will feel like they’re missing out on so much here that they go back. If there was a Reddit cross-post community, people would have the option to get everything from here and stay off Reddit altogether.
If we loose enough members to a lack of content, the community will die. That would be a real pity.
There’s definitely nothing wrong with posting/crossposting interesting things from Reddit that you think would be a good talking point for the people here but I don’t like the idea of a bot just automatically regurgitating everything from one place to another. So far this instance has been very welcoming and I’ve been participating a lot more than I did on reddit because there’s more of a sense of being seen, while over on Reddit I’d lurk more and let louder people do all the shouting. Turning into a clone of r/nz would be a real shame IMO.
I subbed to two different book communities here to see which fit me better and there was a lot of crossposting but it all went off in different directions in each instance. I like that idea, we’d just have to make a bit more an effort to participate to keep the place alive instead of creating a shadow reddit.