If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.
With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I’m realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.
I’d like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:
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Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.
Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.
Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.
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Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.
Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.
Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.
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Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.
Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.
Cons: It’s yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don’t have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.
Please, let’s avoid any “who cares about sports?” or “I only want organic content here” type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don’t care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.
How would it work, in terms of number of bots? Would it be one bot per mirrored account?
If they only post to relevant communities (such as !Football@lemm.ee or !nba@lemmy.world ), that could help to have more activity.
There would probably need to be some fine-tuning about the number of posts. Some reporters post a lot, that could potentially flood those communities.
Yes. There is no information on sportbots about how many accounts they have listed, but I’m guess it’s in the “high hundreds - low thousands” range.
With options (2) and (3), I could come up with strategies to solve this. We could, e.g, repost only what has reached a certain number of likes on Twitter, or limit one bot to post only once per hour/day. Etc.
That’s way too many bots for people to block. Yes, I’m aware there’s a setting to block all bots, but that’s too all or nothing.
If you insist on going that route, maybe stand up a dedicated instance like one of the other repost instances (and only post to local communities there) so people can just block that instance.
Yeap, all of the alternatives assume would be set under the same domain, or at most just broken down by sport.
That would be nice!
Something like that going to relevant communities and only posting more popular things might work. I don’t want to see every Adam Schefter post in c/NFL, for example. I guess to some extent we could rely on the sorting algorithms to keep the communities from getting flooded, but it still could start drowning out the experience.
OP, maybe somebody at https://fanaticus.social/ would be interested in hosting these? It seems like their goal is to become Lemmy’s sports home.
fanaticus.social seems a bit zombified. Instance hasn’t been updated since 0.19.3, last I checked the admin hasn’t been active for months and the baseball communities (which were in the beginning the most active) were pretty much silent the whole season.
I have a handful of sports-focused instances which would surely benefit from this:
Keep pushing/promoting the LW communities…