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.
Are you after the sort of content that regurgitates headlines from media outlets and encourages comments on the headline, or the sort of content where someone posts to ask a question, or to rant?
If it’s the first then I wonder if a bot to simply bring the headlines+links straight from the media feeds might be more effective. If it’s the second then what are the implications for things like copyright, etc? Also is there much point in cross-posting stuff like that to a place where the author won’t see and interact with it anyway?
Part of me wonders that if having more posts will magicly drum up participation then it might make more sense for someone who cares just to spend a few days manually creating posts more aggressively, and see if it actually happens.
I’m thinking headlines, pics, videos, etc. It would try to avoid questions and rants, because that’s unlikely to make sense without the OP here. It would probably set it up so that if there wasn’t a link or media, it wouldn’t be posted.
Copyright is an interesting point. I’m so used to copyright being ignored on Reddit that it didn’t occur to me. Essentially it would be like a cross-post, with a link to the original. But that’s still an issue.
Edit: Reddit regularly violates the copyright of users from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. And users on those sites do the same to Reddit and each other. I don’t see this as being much different.
I’m not expecting it to magically drum up participation as such. It’s more about making sure there’s enough content here to retain users until they start posting their own content. If there’s not much to see here, and heaps they’re missing out from Reddit, many will just go back.
But it might be a good idea to do it manually at the start. I’d be inclined to restrict it to the top rising and/or hot posts too.