Before I go on, I know we don’t want to talk about the other site here. I’m not trying to do that in the context of removed about anything. I’ve got what I think is a question that highlights a concern possibly worth considering AND seeking a potential solution that someone may or may not already be working on behind the scenes that perhaps needs to bubble up.

One of the major reasons I have been drawn to a particular aggregator community (and, to be fair, a handful of independent SIG forums such as Lemon64 as a particularly great example) is that posts in their communities hit immediately in search engines. Due to orders of magnitude larger userbases compared to the relatively young communities in the fediverse (for the time being), it naturally follows that there will be more engagement and responses at the more mature sites. This is particularly important in communities where people depend on the experience of people, where numbers matter, to get feedback on problems of an esoteric nature.

Currently, I am massively impressed by the growth in userbase of some core communities (selfishly, in particular those that appeal to my own interests and bias) on Lemmy. What keeps me refreshing pages of the other aggregator are the posts of interest in those communities that aren’t being mirrored in their respective Lemmy communities. Until some of those key “announcements” or “seed posts” if you will, which generate engagement, begin to organically synthesize here, those communities can use some help.

I heard the term “bootstrapping communities” from a moderator here while browsing, and I think this is related to that kind of activity.

As we know, the predicate for much of this movement were API changes that will make it massively more difficult to leverage any existing solutions to effectively crosspost from one aggregator community to its sibling(s) on Lemmy. Duplication of current headlines from something like /r/fpgagaming to /c/fpgagaming or similar, for example, is important to anyone interested in that niche Special Interest Group (SIG) who may prefer to consume their content exclusively / primarily through Lemmy, and depends heavily at this time on the passion for BOTH fediverse engagement AND the SIG in question. Those aren’t always easy to find in combination. Harder still in non-technically inclined SIGs.

What I am NOT suggesting, in case this post might unintentionally but strongly imply otherwise, are activities that presume to wholesale “lift and shift” content from one aggregator community or SIG site to a Lemmy community. There are obvious ethical problems with engagement and other kinds with automation at that level. What I’m wondering is the most honest approach to bootstrap existing SIG communities that may be looking for alternatives into those alternatives on the fediverse, without missing crucial content.

What I’m wondering is who (not if, I think it’s safe to assume that more than one person is thinking about this problem) and what activities, if there is anything to be discussed in open air, are working on the challenge of aggregating the aggregator to populate relevant content to appropriate communities?

I’m not embarrassed to wonder about this, but please don’t take the question as an invitation to flame. PMs are fine also.

To close this thought with a personal anecdote, although this is rather specific it’s certainly by no means unique in the broader quality:

I’m reminded of how the owner of d3fmod and several key core developers for MiSTer still depend nearly exclusively on birdsite for product announcements and community updates. These are often posted first to the first party’s own website or patreon, and replicated to the other aggregator near immediately by a 3rd party in the community. We can’t expect or insist that anyone prefer fediverse engagement when there is presently a small fraction of the community to be engaged, and the best way to encourage that engagement is to demonstrate availability of the exact right content.

Until we have the levels engagement and moderation within our respective Lemmy communities, which may (or may not) develop organically over time, it’s practically a liability to fail at ensuring the most important content to those interests are present in the fediverse at large. While it could be considered incumbent on mods to perform that function, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that part-time without good software to assist, and that is what this post is about: software shims to enable effective bootstrapping for community moderators and their current state of work / availability.