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Fediverser Portal: update to my fediverser project, people now can migrate away from reddit by signing up to the mirror instance directly.

So, I know that my project fediverser has received quite a bit of criticism and its flagship instance alien.top has been quite controversial, but I hope that this update will help people understand the whole project better, which is more than "just yet-another repost bot".

Today I am launching the "Fediverser Portal". The idea is simple: given that alien.top is a instance to be the home of reddit mirror accounts, the portal can let actual reddit users to sign up to the Lemmy instance using OAuth. Registrations are closed on the Lemmy side, and the only way to sign up is by using "Login with Reddit". When the user successfully authorizes the login, then the account is created on the Lemmy side with the same reddit username. Also important, the system can also get the list of subscribed subreddits from the user and we can then subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy instances automatically.

I believe this can make migration a lot easier, because people will not only avoid the "how do I sign up" part, they will even login and have some content already available in their feed.

As usual, don't hesitate to give your most honest feedback.

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[HN] Show HN: Fediverser Portal – Bring your subreddits to Lemmy
25 comments
  • I think this is really cool and can potentially get more people to migrate

    • Thanks! I think the main thing that needs to be done now is to have a good map of lemmy communities that can be recommended by those signing up.

  • Also, question for @antik@lemmy.world as you have given alien.top a censure : how many "organic" users will alien.top need to reach in order for it to be considered legitimate?

  • GitHub Link isn't working. How could I theoretically use this for my instance?

  • While I admire the initiative of bringing Reddit users to Lemmy, you are asking for way too many permissions, my dude.

    submit links and comments from my account

    read my DMs and send DMs from my account

    keep these permissions indefinitely

    I wanted to check out your project, but there is no way in hell I am agreeing to that lol. Chances are you don't even need all of those. Also, I see that apparently Fediverser is open source. You might want to point that out on the portal.alien.top site, as that might make people more keen on trusting you with their Reddit accounts

    • Yeah, it is requesting a lot of things because it's part of the roadmap to actually do them. The next release will have two-way communication, to let people respond to a reddit mirror and send a message to the original redditor.

      Keep in mind that the goal of this project is to let people completely replace their reddit usage with their fediverse account, and that will need to let people (for some time) bridge conversations betwern the two platforms.

      I will eventually change this so that the reqiests for the actions will be separate, one for connecting and getting the subreddits, another to ask for permission to send messages. I just didn't get the time to do it "properly", yet.

      • I understand. If it was up to me I would consider the permission settings a priority, as agreeing to all of that can be a pretty big deal for some people (I know it is for me). Some users may be willing to go all the way, but many might be gelous or scared of losing their Reddit accounts or even giving access to them to what, in their eyes, would be a complete stranger.

        Anyway, as I said, the idea itself is cool. Hopefully your project can be a gateway to the Fediverse for many Redditors, as the enshittification goes on.

  • I tried it and it didn't subscribe me to any communities.

    • @Karlos_Cantana I just created an account there and I can say that it's defederated

      I can't even see any post from other instances because of that

      But even though I have an account on lemmy i still stay on kbin

    • Do you mean on your alien.top account or this one from sopuli.xyz? Because this is meant to work on the alien.top accounts only (I do not have control over your sopuli.xyz and lemmy doesn't support oauth yet)

      • I created an alien.top account by following the link posted. I signed in to my reddit account and gave it permission to access it. It said I just sign in with my Reddit name and it gave me a passord. Then I signed into my alien.top account and it said I wasn't subscribed to any communities.

        https://imgur.com/a/E7c3v6N

  • I missed whatever drama was associated with alien.top and the URL just 404s now.

    This project reminds me of when Cory Doctorow describes adversarial interoperability. Was it inspired by this?

    I think adversarial interop is a good explanation for all the permissions required.

  • I believe this can make migration a lot easier, because people will not only avoid the “how do I sign up” part, they will even login and have some content already available in their feed.

    To be honest I think if people can't handle picking an instance, clicking 'sign up' and then navigating to 'communities' and searching through the local & ALL listings like everyone else on Lemmy did then maybe those people should just stay on reddit.

    The Fediverse and Lemmy in particular is not nearly as complicated as you're trying to make it seem with this project's stated purpose. Maybe the few and extremely low barriers to entry that presently exist can serve to keep Lemmy free of people that are too lazy to even try.

    • Have you found suitable replacements for all the subreddits you used to follow? I sure didn't.

    • searching through the local & ALL listings like everyone else on Lemmy did

      That feels weird to me as a reason, that's just appeal to tradition. Yeah, you did that. And I did that. But that doesn't magically make it the best solution. That doesn't imply there cannot be a better way to discover content.

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