Hello! I wrote a simple bot that periodically checks for new reddit posts and posts them to lemmy, so that people migrating from reddit to lemmy can still be able to see their favourite posts, but familiarizing with lemmy.
currently the coments are not synced, but this may change in the future (perhaps)
Yes, it uses the Reddit API, so it will stop working on the 1st of July, but I think that then I can implement a sort of web scraper to access Reddit posts without the official API, so this may eventually keep working for a while.
this script is currently on my laptop so it will be offline most of the time, but if I get the approval I may host it somewhere to get it running 24h/24.
now the question… Is this allowed? having this bot running 24h/24 on large subreddits will mean a very high quantity of posts. will this cause any problem to Lemmy?
if you want a preview check out https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/c/reddit_memes, where I started syncing a few posts from r/memes
let me know your opinion on this!
==== EDIT
The bot is now running in https://sh.itjust.works/c/reddit_memes, let’s try to see if it work (I hope that shit just works)
I’m a bit concerned about the legality of this, if anyone has any info please tell me!
This may be against reddits TOS and may have legal consequences. But I guess mostly for the person operating the bot, and not the Lemmy instance, as long as they block the bot on request.
Do you think this may be “dangerous” for me?
I have no idea, but at least in EU you may be violating copyright by copying someone else’s database (i.e. collection of data). I am not a lawyer though…
I Read the terms of service and what I understood is that the intellectual property of the content is the users’, not reddit’s, but I asked on r/legaladvices for security (there is no equivalent community on lemmy yet)
Yeah database protection is even for stuff that you don’t own. You have then spent effort to compile the database. Which in this case is the collection of people’s posts. But maybe asks lawyer if that applies in this case.
Thanks! I’ll share any news here on lemmy
Given their recent posture and actions, I would think yes it could be an issue for you, for sure. You’d want to check their terms of service as it may violate them. If you’re doing this for fun, add a step in the middle and get ChatGPT to rephrase every post to obfuscate their source :-)
I was thinking of something like that too, but probably never would’ve gotten around to implement it myself, so thanks! Could you put your script on Github or something maybe?
Also it would be great if it could copy at least top-level comments by OP, because that’s often used for linking to a source.
