There’s quite a few communities that i’m missing on Lemmy.
It could potentially lead to a trial, and/or “save” Lemmy, so it seemed worth asking, just in case.
By illegal, do you mean against Lemmy’s rules or against legislation?
For the former, I think it’s up to each communities rules. In general, bots should be marked as such so that users can chose to hide them if they wish. For the latter, apart from neighboring rights which allows news outlets in some countries to seek remuneration from links to articles, there’s nothing illegal in sharing links on Lemmy.
As for existing bots copying posts from Reddit, there is lemmit.online but is has been broken since Reddit removed their RSS feeds.
The latter
But thanks, i didn’t know about lemmit even if i read about the different instances before, it’s still a bit hard to find communities of interest(, but not anymore than with reddit, youtube, twitter, facebook, discord, etc ). I’ve subscribed to their TIL but the search function for Sync or Jerboa aren’t very informative.I haven’t been able to subscribe to communities I’m not already subscribed to using Sync, I usually go on the web interface.
If you want to search for already copied communities, you should search lemmit’s local communities. To request new ones, you have to post on !requests@lemmit.online, but keep in mind that the bot is broken until its author updates it.
Yep that’s what i’m currently doing with mapporn, it’s easier with a computer, i’m glad to have found out this bot exists(, or existed until 3 days ago, don’t yet know how it’ll turn out).
Not a lawyer, but I believe if you want to take content others have posted on Reddit and repost it here, you would violate their copyright on that content. You would want to get their consent before you post it here or else the instance you post them to could start getting DMCA requests and could ultimately be sued. I’m guessing you could also be sued for writing the software that violated the copyright.
It’s not likely to happen but it could. My concern would be less about what ill effects you and/or Lemmy might incur and more around the ethics of taking content belonging to other social media users and reposting it without their permission. Reddit TOS says users retain copyright on their content, so it’s other users’ rights you’re violating in doing so.
Now if you’re talking about a bot that reposts only content you have posted on Reddit, you’re probably in the clear.
That’s the only thing worrying me, yes, but since lemmit did it… i.d.k. Thanks for the comment !
Sure! Here’s one more thing I wish you would consider before you go forward with it: if you didn’t get sued for doing this, it wouldn’t be because you didn’t break the law. It would be because the people whose rights you violated can’t afford to sue (or maybe it’s just that they don’t have teams of lawyers scouring the internet to make sure all their rights are protected and haven’t noticed as a result). If Reddit claimed ownership over all content posted on the platform, it would be no less illegal, but you’d get a cease-and-desist in a heartbeat, followed by a lawsuit if you didn’t comply. Trying it only because the people whose rights you’re violating can’t protect themselves makes the whole thing feel like punching down.
The justification I hear for this sort of activity is usually to damage Reddit in some way… but it’s not actually Reddit that’s being damaged. It’s other people like all of us who ultimately have been used by Reddit for free labor for the last nearly two decades now. These bots are now victimizing them again in the interest of getting back at the entity who first victimized them… but that should really be their choice since it was their content. It just doesn’t feel justified to me.
Now if you wrote a script that a Reddit user could use that would grab all of their own Reddit posts, post them to an appropriate Lemmy community, and delete them from Reddit (not sure if deleting a Reddit post is even possible at this point 😅), and convinced a bunch of them to use it, that seems to me like the right approach. The users have full agency to decide whether or not their content gets moved, but you’re making it easy for them to do the thing you want them to do.
I’m no staunch defender of copyright, but it sucks that because access to the legal system is expensive, corporations like Reddit get the benefit of the law while regular people like you and me don’t get that if we can’t afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. If we’re going to have copyright law, it should definitely protect regular people who take the time to share things with others online for virtually no benefit to themselves just as much if not more than it does massive corporations.
