Hi all! I’m not usually a fan of bots, but as per usual @[email protected] has come up with something that could be genuinely useful and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether we as a community should use it.
Basically the Lemmy Tagginator is a Mastodon bot that would respond to all posts in our community, adding hashtags (in our case, probably just the one tag #Knitting). More info on Github / in the announcement thread.
Why would this be a good thing?
Mastodon is so much bigger than Lemmy, and content from other Fediverse services genuinely does benefit from the discoverability there in my experience. Basically, more people chatting about your knitting.
Why might this be a bad thing?
You’d get a bot reply on your posts, that could be annoying for some people.
Also the dev has already added an opt-out feature to tell the bot to ignore a given post, but it’s one more thing to remember how to do.
What do you reckon?
I’m not going to go opting you into something that the majority doesn’t want, so this is your chance to yea or nay. Of course, we could always give it a whirl and stop if we don’t like it or aren’t seeing any benefit.
Community feedback, go!
Not a knitter (yet) and I just lurk here so don’t put any weight on my opinion. I’m sharing my thoughts on the bot in general.
Personally I like the idea on paper. More exposure, more interaction, more anything. I love that. The bot reply won’t be anything different than reminders to follow the rules on That Other Site.
My problem is mostly with the way Mastodon displays Lemmy content and I hope I’m wrong with this. I follow a couple of communities. I have a hard time even opening Lemmy links - could be an issue with Jerboa, Android or anywhere along the line. I usually notice a Lemmy post on Mastodon by people commenting on it and the community “boosting” the comments. If it works by adding hashtags to the post that might make it really good for discussion-based posts or commenting on general. Would it share the images as well? I don’t know how exactly the bot works and the fediverse is still a bit murky to me on some topics.
Other than my little nitpicks I’m all for it. Overall it seems like a good addition.
It’s not the greatest format over on the Mastodon side, you’re right there and there was a little bit of discussion about it in the announcement post. The bot now has an added line about how to interact with the post, to hopefully avoid a bit of that confusion.
In theory over time it’ll get better, there are a few feature requests in for incremental improvements, but for now I think the boosted links is really all we’ve got so the goal of the tagginator is to give them a bit more context until that beautiful day arrives.
(not sure about the Jerboa thing, sorry, if I open a Lemmy post link from Tusky it just opens it in the browser 🤷♀️)