this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Fediverser Network

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Fediverser is a project to build all the required tools to help people leave legacy social networks and to join the fediverse. Currently, it provides a web application that runs alongside a traditional Lemmy service to provide the following functionality:

The Fediverser Network is a website that aims to crowdsource the information used by the different fediverser deployments and to coordinate all users and instance admins.

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Lemmy instance admins: interest in "onboard via Reddit OAuth"? (self.fediverser_network)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by rglullis to c/fediverser_network
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I know that the fediverser project is quite a bit controversial due to the mirroring bots and how they were being used on alien.top, but today I'd like to talk about two other pieces of functionality which I believe have been ignored and eclipsed by the mirrors:

  • The ability for users to signup to the lemmy instance by connecting via their Reddit account.
  • The ability for instance admins to create a custom map of subreddit-to-lemmy communities, which can be used to auto-subscribe users who are registering via Reddit.

I think that these two pieces can really help solve the problem of user onboarding. Because it works as an extra service along with Lemmy, no changes in the core service are needed. For users, the possibility of starting an account on Lemmy and get a list of interesting content right away can reduce friction and would hopefully get more people to talk about it.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from the admins of the topic-focused instances, as (I believe) would have an easier way to reach out to the people that are closer to their interests. So, apologies in advance for the mass-tagging, here are the ones that I found on join-lemmy:

To reiterate, this has nothing to do with the bots or mirrors deployed on alien.top. I'm only asking who would be interested in adding the functionality to allow user registration via Reddit OAuth. In case of any questions, feel free to ask here or reach out via matrix.

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[–] willya@lemmyf.uk 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Also @‘notifying doesn’t work in posts. Only comments as far as I know.

[–] rglullis 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't particularly care about Reddit oauth2, but in general if you want to contribute oauth2/OIDC client capabilities to Lemmy-ui and backend that would be of course nice.

However, even better would be OIDC provider functionality in Lemmy to link additional services to a Lemmy instance.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

Having OAuth integrated with Lemmy would be of course nice (to let an external system do the auto-subscription to Lemmy communities) and I even volunteered to work on SSO via LDAP but it does little in the way of helping with the goals of fediverser. The idea is to make migration of Reddit users as easy as possible and to do that we'd need to get the redditor's subscribed subreddits, which AFAIK is not possible to do programatically without OAuth.

[–] willya@lemmyf.uk 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I’m all for it. Anything that breaks the barrier that would help bring in a less nerdy crowd.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@willya@lemmyf.uk was right, I only got notified about the tag after you commented it.

From my perspective, I want as little user information on my servers as possible. I'd need to think about it a little more, but initially I am slightly against using reddit oauth. I understand that we could reduce down the retrieved data, so I could be convinced, but also, we like to do polls of our users for these kinds of things, so I also wouldn't make a unilateral decision without a poll first.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

You don't need to store any user information on your server. The only thing you'd be getting from this method is the user list of subreddits, which could then be used to auto-subscribe them to corresponding lemmy communities. Everything else, can then be ignored or discarded.

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Edit: I am all in. If I understood correctly this is a easy way to create a lemmy account and join similiar communities the user is subscribed on reddit.
This is pretty neat, indeed!

Thanks for letting me know. Right now I cant dive into it, but I will come back later at night. Just posting to let you know that I see great potential in this, once we all discuss with an open mind and establish an action plan.

[–] fanaticus_admin@fanaticus.social 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a fun coding project. Go ahead and build it! I'm always in favor of more discoverability.

It also sounds like something that would belong on join-lemmy or another standalone service. Not sure where us instance admins come into play.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] fanaticus_admin@fanaticus.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, I may be misunderstanding then. How will you integrate fediverser into the lemmy registration process? I don't think I understand your vision here.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

The best way to understand it is by signing up to alien.top via the portal.

alien.top is running the fediverser services alongside with lemmy code. These services provide the following:

  • An "admin" webapp that can be used by instance admins to manage the reddit-to-lemmy map and the mirror bots.
  • (Optional for those that want to mirror content) Services to pull content from reddit and push to Lemmy according to the rules defined the reddit-to-lemmy map.

The fediverser.network website is a separate thing, where I'm trying to build a full reddit-to-lemmy map, which could then be "cloned" by the admins running lemmy+fediverser instances.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago

That would be nice

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

@TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world

[–] TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Ty for letting me know about this!

[–] hitagi@ani.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I like the idea but I think it's more fitting for general instances to have a feature like this. This is especially true for our case as we've been defederated by .ml which hosts a large number of active communities that new users will miss out on.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Defederated by .ml? Why, if I may ask?

[–] hitagi@ani.social 1 points 11 months ago

You can read about it on our meta community but in short, we host some lewd/ecchi communities which goes against their rule regarding pornography.

[–] eerongal@ttrpg.network 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As long as it isnt a bot spamming posts on our instance or mass signing up accounts or something, i have no issues with tools that help someone migrate from reddit and finding our instances/communities that directly mirror reddit subs.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

As for community mapping: it would be of great help if you could go to https://fediverser.network and indicate what subreddits are related to the topic of RPG / board games and if could create the communities that are "missing" on Lemmy. Even if they are empty, having them mapped would mean that users would be automatically subscribed to them and it would help bootstrap them.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

You won't need to worry about it. The software is able to do the mirroring, but only if the admin explicitly sets it up to do so. The instance admin can simply choose to use only the "portal" functionality and never turn on any of the mirrors.

[–] TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hello! TheArstaInventor here, and this sounds amazing! But I would like some clarifications. Is this something instance admins would have to do? Or is this something moderators from communities can incorporate? Very new to this so trying to wrap my head around how it would work but the concept and what it can achieve is absolutely amazing and certainly something we need.

[–] rglullis 1 points 10 months ago

For this to work, instance admins would have to deploy another set of services along with Lemmy code.