I guess I’m kind of asking / supposing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if lemmy / activitypub doesn’t really work that way.

As in, posts to feddit.uk are stored on feddit.uk. If you read a thread from sh.itjust.works/c/whatever@feddit.uk then sh.itjust.works server will pull it down from feddit.uk and show you the post. It may even cache a copy of the post to show it to another user, but that’s not the same as backing up the post.

What data do you want backed up though ?

That’s not how the fediverse works.

… that’s why I included the second sentence?

I think you upset the americans 😆

Meta is a threat to the platform though.

The fediverse is an emerging threat. It’s not ready yet, but it’s on the right trajectory. Every time there’s angst on some other platform, the fediverse get’s a bump. Fediverse is not a real competitor yet, perhaps it never will be, but for meta it’s sensible to establish a presence here in the short term, because it may be much more difficult later.

People have been writing about this ad nauseum. It’s the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Join fediverse, extend the spec with so that not all clients are compatible with all features, repeat as necessary until everyone is using your client, finally drop compatibility with other clients.

created an account on a popular well federated server

Why would they do that?

They would create a custom instance.

Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.

People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.

In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.

Do you think any users would populate a place that’s over-run with trash?

If there are, would they be the type of users who would populate communities you would feel comfortable in?

Sure, but where is the line between spam and threads content? If the content a community produces is heavily manipulated, isn’t that undesirable for all the same reasons as spam ?

If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?

What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?

What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?

Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.

Removed by mod

I was being sarcastic. I always forget the /s.

Bit they’re giving you real data.

The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be.

Both of us are just going to have to acknowledge that our thoughts around online communities are very different.

Back in June I was thinking along the same lines as your good self, as in “what can we do to move /r/whatever to whateverinstance.tld/c/whatever”. I eventually realised that not only is that not possible, it’s antithetical to the idea of online communities.

An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum. Sure there might be a few key core personalities that everyone recognises from day to day, but if those users left the community would continue because it has an established culture and momentum - a collective recollection that this is the place to go for a certain flavor of content and engagement with that content.

The thing is, you can’t force it. You can’t create a culture because it’s a combined input from many people. All you can do is create the environment within which the right type of culture will coalesce. You can’t herd the swarm of bees that is /r/electronics to /c/electronics. All you can do is make /c/electronics the most favorable place to build a hive and have confidence that /r/electronics is becoming less favorable over time.

I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?

The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds, look at old magazines, ponder questions for discussion. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.

We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.

That’s one metric. It doesn’t feel like content and engagement has really reduced much in the last several months. Honestly I suspect that the orchestrators of the influx of bots in July have realised that other platforms are more fertile for scams and manipulation et cetera.

Besides which, even if valued users are leaving, that’s kind of disappointing but a re-post bot isn’t going to change that. The kinds of community builders you’re looking for are critical thinkers like your good self putting effort into building good communities.

The comment would not be coming from a bot account

Foregive me, I’m not familiar with alien.top - I’ll have to take a look.

Technically, such a bridge is going to be interesting I guess and I have to concede that in some cases it might facilitate discussion.

That said, it’s still based on the (IMO flawed) premise that mirroring content from reddit is the right move. From my impractical purist / idealist perspective. Lemmy should not seek to be new-reddit. Just let lemmy be lemmy - allow it’s culture and communities to emerge and coalesce in their own time.

Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.

Imagine signing up and finding that all the posts are just cross-posts from reddit with barely any engagement.

One of the main things I despise about this concept is that it provides an implication that lemmy is some kind of budget-reddit. As though, all the good content is on reddit but we’re all camped out here on lemmy.

The way to build a community is to simply post more.

To respond to your other comment here also:

I’m working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.

Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?

the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy

That’s not my experience. I’ve only ever seen dozens of cross posts with no comments.

If you see something interesting on reddit… just post it here, problem solved.