I’ve posted before about my fediverser project, and I am now looking to see who is interested in participating.
The short description is that it does the following:
- it runs a lemmy instance which will be the home of bots that mirror accounts on reddit.
- The admin of this instance can choose what subreddits are going to be monitored from this instance. Let’s say that these are the “source” communities.
- For these selected subreddits, the admin can define where the posts from these subreddits should be posted in the other lemmy instances. We can, e.g, map posts from /r/selfhosted to !main@selfhosted.forum or !selfhosted@lemmy.world .
- You can choose whether to mirror the posts only or the whole thread with comments from reddit. Each of these will be authored by the account that mirrors the original reddit user.
- (WIP, optional) responses to the reddit mirror accounts will create a comment on reddit with a link to original lemmy thread.
So, now I finally got to deploy the first lemmy fediversed instance, and I’d like to know the following:
- which subreddits you still follow but would like to bring to the fediverse?
- For instance admins and community mods, what communities you would like to be the destination of the mirror posts, and would you be interested in having the posts only or the whole thread?
Bear in mind that this is NOT advised to be done for the bigger subs. The idea here is not to create a huge army of bots and overwhelm the fediverse, but mostly to create a migration path to those who rely on the more niche subreddits.
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion. We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying, and they just flood the feed with posts that people won’t engage with.
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post. Nobody wants to have a discussion about a hackernews or slashdot post. If Lemmy just looks like a place to mirror Reddit content, people will see that and just go to Reddit and engage directly.
We need more people posting to Lemmy. If this is just a place for bots to have discussions with themselves, nobody will stay here very long.
Precisely, a lot of us left that horrible place to escape all the rampant transphobia and persecution they have over there. We don’t need their kind of “content” mirrored here. My first thing I’m going to do when they allow us to block instances is to immediately block those that have mostly repost bots.
I think Lemmy as a whole should forbid any links from Reddit just protect everyone here. Is it censorship? Yes, but it’s for a good cause.
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion.
This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.
We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post.
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper. First, this is not the goal of this tool. The idea is eventually to have mirror accounts ends to work as proxys to allow for two-way bridges. Second, a lot of people know that they are not with reddit, but when they have come to lemmy they bounced back because they couldn’t find the content they were used to.
We need more people posting to Lemmy.
Agree, but If we follow the rule of 90/9/1 for lurkers/commenters/posters, this means that we can bring 90% of reddit’s userbase to the fediverse just by bringing the content here. The posters and commenters will eventually follow.
The logic is simple: unless I start breaking into people’s phones and computers, I can not force people them to post to Lemmy, but I can get their content here. A tool like this can help the intolerant minority to drive the behavior of the majority.
If we’re interacting with Reddit anyway what’s the point of using Lemmy
You won’t be interacting with Reddit. It’s the opposite. This tool is to make sure that those on the fediverse do not need Reddit, but those on Reddit start getting exposure to the Fediverse.
you’re literally building a bridge though, isn’t that interacting with reddit?
It’s one-way. You personally don’t interact with anything on Reddit.
A lifeless copy? Why would people want to engage with any of these posts or comments?
I can ask a question but will never get a reply. Why bother asking?
I understand you try to populate communities which lack activity, but this sounds like a recipe for frustration. People might learn it’s useless to comment, which could reduce activity even in actual, man-made posts and comments.
Hey I have a question because this actually interests me and contrary to popular opinionn on this sub I think this idea would work!
Since migrating I’ve found myself wanting to search Reddit dozens of times for content I needed but was too damned pissed to provide them with any traffic.
My input is: it seems that the main beef of most people here is the lack of engagement, making Lemmy seem like a ghost town. Would we be able to comment on the mirrored posts (on Lemmy) thus solving the engagement problem? I’m no techspert but feel like allowing comments underneath mirrored posts for Lemmy, not Reddit would be possible I guess? Or at least some equivalent?
I’m also interested in this because I have my own little feed I’m setting up, and it would be cool to be able to add more content very easily. I don’t really want it to be from Reddit but, just anything different I could do would be nice, and hey if there is something important I’d like to add from there or even just to take notes that’d be nice so I for one would use it.
A bridge that allows us access to reddits content, driving up their traffic (and server costs) - the whole reason for the API changes WHILE refusing them any engagement? Sounds like a win-win to me.
Okay not precisely, but we have a bot (I think it’s the one at smeargle.fans) that reposts Reddit threads and replicates all of their comments, which nobody engages with
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper.
Well that term just doesn’t apply. I’m not saying “Real Lemmy users avoid anything to do with Reddit” or anything along those lines. You asked for feedback, and I gave you my honest criticism of it.
I understand that you found a project that sounds fun to make, and it probably will be. This is what we engineers do, we get excited to build things that seem to have clever technical answers. However in my past few months on Lemmy, I have seen these ideas, and have seen the way they tend to work out so far.
The logic may be simple, but human psychology is rarely as simple as engineers wish it could be.
Feel free to build your project. All aspiring engineers should make things that they want to make. But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong. Not all solutions end up working out the way you hope, and that’s part of the engineering life. And based on prior experience, this one is likely to get the same treatment that the other repost bots get.
But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong
Sorry for the bluntness, but I did not ask for any feedback at all. I am asking very specific questions and this post is mostly to collect information from those who can be interested in using it.
What an awful way to interact with potential users. Accepting constructive criticism leads to better and more successful projects.
A simple, dismissive “Okay thank you” would have sufficed.
Even more so considering most of his ‘users’ will be in that role without consent. OP prefers to pretend his userbase only consists of those who consent. I say for every person who finds this useful, there will be 10 or more who have to take action to shut it off. For some, this action might be to leave Lemmy altogether, backfiring on the intended effect of the tool.
I don’t mind criticism. If you go take a look at my post when I first announced the project you will see that I was accepting all the concerns that people were raising.
What I do mind is being lectured by someone who constructs a bunch of strawmen (“this is just like lemmit!”, “I don’t want this, therefore no one wants this!”) and then when called out for them responds with “they were just giving feedback”.
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
lemmit.online did this and was recently defederated, partially because the one admin wasn’t able to prevent the volume of posts being generated from ending up filled with spam.
There’s a few HN bots too, but unfortunately the posts never get much engagement here, so I have to go through to HN to read some discussion about it (which I will do, but a much bigger proportion of people just don’t appear to engage with mirrored content here)
You lost me at calling the poster a gatekeeper.
We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying
Do we really? Can you point me to them?
Two examples:
I wonder if the time people had to spend for removing their spam from their feed already surpasses the time the developers have spent setting them up. I know, I know, you intend your bot to be different, so not ‘precisely’ that, but I’m worried the result might be the same. Lots of posts with zero engagement, which give people the impression Lemmy consists of bot posts, ultimately driving user engagement down.
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Ahead of you: one of the planned items to be worked on is a spam filter. ;)
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the idea is simply to reply to the comment by replying to the comment, not by notifying the user or sending a DM
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This is not implemented yet.
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it is an open source project. Instead of playing armchair software architect, feel free to contribute if you worry so much about the implementation.
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Honestly the fist thing i did after join Lemmy was to block any bot in the setting and filter off all “Reddit something” groups. Just my preference ofk.
Fair enough. One of the design reasons that I am working from a separate instance for the bots is that it makes it easy for admins to block in case they are worried about being flooded.
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they’re using are going to be flooded with mirrored Reddit
Only if someone set this up to mirror some large subreddit, which would be frankly stupid: the service still requires a reddit API key and they would quickly go over the limits of the free tier if they pulled data from the larger subs, also instances that would be flooding other communities would quickly be banned.
This is why I am being very careful about setting this up. I am not going to set these bots to any community unless I get explicit approval from the admins and mods, and I am not going to create mirrors from any subreddit with more than 250k subscribers.
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Honestly, I like this idea, just because it means I could block your instance in my app and instantly filter out that kind of content, just like how someone can block lemmynsfw to get rid of almost all porn.
I hope this feature becomes included in all views soon. Some apps support it, others do not. Web view does not, AFAIK.
Even then, I think it’s concerning. Yes, advanced users have tools to deal with the problem. But not everyone is an advanced user. Most people will have to rely on their instance admin to take care of instance blocking.
We should consider the experience of newcomers, especially since the intent of this bot seems to be to increase activity in niche communities. Newcomers are the people who can increase activity. We should aim to make Lemmy more welcoming and interesting for them, out of the box, not expect them to tweak their settings to have a bearable experience.
That’s the spirit!
These bots merely advertise for reddit. They drown the All feed in zero engagement posts, hiding actual activity.
Experienced users might be able to handle this (although the question persists why one unresponsible bot admin should be able to force thousands of users to take action), but new Lemmy users will not look for a fix. They will leave and never come back.
These bots make Lemmy a worse and shallow copy of reddit. Please stop running them, or make it in instances which do not federate their content to the rest of Lemmy.
They drown the All feed in zero engagement posts, hiding actual activity.
If I tell you that I’ve been running this system for two days already, have you noticed and/or found yourself “drowned” by anything?
Yes, every time I try to use the All feed, I’m presented with new communities which consist of nothing but zero-engagement bot-posts.
Every time, I can choose between wasting more time on blocking them or abandoning that Feed altogether.
Granted, not your bots as far as I can tell, but two days is not a long time either. Give it more time and into more hands, abuse will happen.
Why isn’t the focus aimed at creating more communities over here, that actually add to engagement & interaction…if I want to see what’s happening over there, I’ll go and take a look… I’m one of those that has bots blocked anyway, so makes little difference to me really…
Why isn’t the focus aimed at creating more communities over here, that actually add to engagement & interaction…i
Because it’s not mutually exclusive and we can do both.
if I want to see what’s happening over there, I’ll go and take a look…
Yeah, but what about those who do not want to go over there out of principle. I know I am not the only one in this case, and I’d also like to have a way those who want to migrate.
There’s an entire instance for that already - lemmit.online and it sucks. There’s no engagement, no interaction. Nobody wants it. Everyone hates it.
If you are doing this PLEASE do it on your own instance, so we can just block the instance if we want to and you don’t waste someone else’s bandwidth
Yes, all bots will be running on the same instance, and I will only send mirrored posts to communities if I get explicit approval from the mods.
thank you
I’m not a fan of mirroring Reddit, but I can’t stop you. Make sure it is easy to block (such as one bot user posting all posts but not comments) if you don’t want to be defedded from a bunch of instances.
Actually, the idea is to have all bots users on the same instance precisely to make it easy for unwelcoming admins to block or defederate it.
Edit: ignore my post below. I see the point of your project now (help bootstrap niche communities.) I just hope admins use it as intended.
You’re giving choice to admins but not to instance users with this.
Blocking nsfw communities from nsfw instances was already annoying and tedious (and I’m far from being a prude, I just don’t want to see “cum in my creampied pussy” when I’m browsing while having lunch.)
Reddit content is mostly rage bait these days. This is why many of us fled that cesspool.
Why not use some other website instead of reddit?
Just wanted you to know, I read this comment while browsing and having lunch.
I think it took me less than a minute to block the lemnit bot.
We want to grow beyond just being a Reddit clone/replacement - mirroring active discussions here just feels like stalking an ex on Facebook.
That said, in a previous discussion about about archiving good answers from Reddit, I did suggest that this would be a great use for a wiki that was integrated into Lemmy. Being about to semi-automate the retrieval and formatting would be useful. I think starting new threads for them isn’t the way to go.
mirroring active discussions here just feels like stalking an ex on Facebook.
I am not sure if that is the best analogy. We didn’t break up with the communities in the subreddits, we broke up with Reddit, Inc.
Interesting initiative!
FYI, there is already https://lemmit.online/
Yeah, I know of lemmit but AFAIK it has the opposite ideas in many cases:
- It seems to be archiving the most popular instances, not so much the niche ones
- It is going to mirror posts only, not the discussion.
- All posts are created by the same bot account, so we lose information about the original content.
I wonder if the dev from lemmit would be interested in being the host of some of the “fediversed” communities, so that we can have comments as well.
You have it follow whatever instance you want it to follow. There’s a request community that you post to and it’s then added to the queue.
I don’t understand the point of this at all. Might be a fun project for you to do, but nobody wants a bunch of communication set before them that you can’t interact with. It doesn’t help this grow at all.
There’s a request community that you post to and it’s then added to the queue.
But only the posts, while I want to have all of the conversation, comments included.
Might be a fun project for you to do, but nobody wants a bunch of communication set before them that you can’t interact with.
What if I told you that I started working on this precisely because some of the people who were active on /r/emacs wanted to leave reddit but would also like to support those coming with questions? With this tool we can see the content on Lemmy, respond on Lemmy and (WIP) end up notifying the original asker on reddit.
I’ll definitely check it out if you follow through with it. I just can’t envision wanting a link to Reddit at all anymore.
And in case you want to help, everything is open source and on Github.
And if you really want to help, consider becoming a sponsor.
Something a bit similar to what lemmit is already doing, but more powerful with your addition of comments: read-only, best-of archives of really old content from popular subs.
10-5 year old askreddit posts for instance would be interesting blasts from the past to read today. Isn’t there already a ‘best of Reddit’ convention on Reddit itself that resurfaces such content from time to time?
Wait, you’re intending to use multiple bots, so users have to block multiple spammers?
You are fixated on the bots. Don’t worry about them. The bot accounts are only needed to have a way to get people on reddit to migrate.
The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances. It’s the admin that sets:
- which subreddits to pull data from
- which lemmy communities to push data to
- what posts from what subreddits to push to.
What people are failing to understand: the last point is not automated. The idea is not to get the firehose from reddit and unleash it on Lemmy. The idea is mostly to bring some automation to the process that I’ve been doing on all the different lemmy communities already where I was (a) browsing reddit just to seed content here and (b) sending DMs to people on reddit to let them know about the lemmy alternative.
Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any “fediverser” instance.
The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances.
I agree that technically the person using the bots is to blame, while I only ever see the bots, and never a person behind them. I don’t see what that changes about their behaviour though. You clarified the bots are not acting autonomously, a human decides how much they spam. I still have a problem with too much spam.
Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any “fediverser” instance.
How can you be so sure? We have precedent of bots making 800k posts per month. Apparently, bot admins exist who use these tools indiscriminately. Numbers go up, I guess.
What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?
What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?
It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it. But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests and (b) all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.
It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it.
Ok, so your previous assurances were completely unfounded. Maybe even worse, your reluctance to see how your tool could be misused gives little hope you would take steps to prevent that.
all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.
It’s still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot, or one instance. And some will not know how to, and leave Lemmy instead, which is exactly the opposite from your intent. Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse. Make the newsletter opt-in. Don’t force people to opt-out. Even more so since for each user who might enjoy that service, many more will suffer from it.
Also, since you just clarified it’s free software and you have no power to prevent abuse, “all the bots are in the same instance” is nothing but a hope. From my point of view, it does not matter so much anyways. More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.
But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests
Since we already have a solid problem with spam bots, this does not seem to deter effectively. It’s strange but apparently it’s what people do with these bots.
It’s still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot,
No, it’s an action that an instance admin can take quite easily.
Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse.
No. That completely destroys the intent of having a tool that is meant to bootstrap communities.
More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.
You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is “spam”. We have bots like @L4s@lemmy.world that take RSS feeds from tech sites and post them to relevant communities and they seem to be well received. The posts are interesting get upvoted, the ones that are not get downvoted. Do you think that these bots should be considered “spammers”?
Let’s leave at this: if you ever see any flood of content coming from alien.top, then I’ll have no qualms in revising the policies and making adjustments to the system. But for now your arguments are inching closer and closer to concern trolling.
Love the idea for subreddits I can’t find a Lemmy sub for. But I don’t want all the rest. I specifically went out of my way to block seeing bots on Lemmy. I don’t think there is a way to opt in to seeing just one and even if there was I don’t see how I would transition that into only seeing bots for the subs on reddit I’d still want to engage with. I don’t understand how you’re planning to manage this?
I am not sure what you mean by “this” that I am supposed to manage. If you don’t want to follow bots, you won’t see the mirrored account.
Right. But what I am saying is that even if I turned the setting off and was seeing the bots how would I only see the bits and pieces I wanted from reddit and not the whole of the reddit website mirrored?
You are never going to see all of reddit mirrored. Please read the description again. There is already a mechanism that lets admins create a mapping between specific subreddits and Lemmy communities, and only those subreddits gets pulled.
So, correct me if I’m wrong. But does that mean there has to be a Lemmy community that is synchronous to the subreddit in order to be mirrored?
Exactly. The main purpose is to help bootstrap the niche communities here who still don’t have enough people to make it sustainable by bringing the content and eventually the redditors as well.
Does this include past posts or just new posts being mirrored from reddit to Lemmy?
At the moment it’s only going to pull posts from the last 12 hours but it can be changed to get farther into the past. The problem to do this is that it will require a lot of API requests, which means having to pay reddit.
Ah. Then it’s basically not as useful as the use case I was expecting. Sorry about that. I misunderstood.
I think the use case you have in mind (creating mirror instances of niche sub) can be achived with this system, but then you’d have to run your own lemmy instance - or at least use one where you can create communities and the instance admins are welcoming to bots…
I see what you’re trying to accomplish and congratulate you for trying to make Lemmy a better place, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. As many people here I’ve blocked @bot@lemmit.online precisely because it just posts Reddit content and floods my feed, with what is basically spam. Also many people came here just to avoid Reddit and to try and make something better. Sure, when 0.19.0 comes out and people will be able to block instances, lemmings will have a choice if they want to see that instance, but what about new users, or people just checking Lemmy out? Do we really want them to see reposted reddit content? Because they can already do this on reddit. What we need is to stop being so invested in “our ex” and just grow as a community, in a natural way.
The argument can be made that bots measuring the content are no better than some random dude on the Internet reposting shit they like. Situation becomes worse when that same “bot” doesn’t credit the author proper.
Memes are meant to be shared, and it’s a great way to grow small communities. Karma whoring is not that big here since reputation points are not shown (at least in the webUI). So a person will post a few memes and could start a conversation, something a bot can’t do.
Whether the meme is meant to be shared in some other context or not, I think, is the decision that should be based on the sum of copyright liberation and how generalistic the contents are. Today, I can’t bear a thought of reposting some stranger’s niche meme on social media without at least attaching a source or creator, because I’m most likely making one more point where engagement with the same meme ends - and reposting full works doesn’t qualify as commentary/criticism/research, so it’s not a fair use, to begin with.
That’s why we are correct of assuming the worst from the bots: programming any fair use considerations is left to gather dust, as it’s ultimately something that human has to decide.
it just posts Reddit content and floods my feed
Wait, how come does it flood “your” feed if the lemmit bot only posts to their own instance/communities? If you are browsing with the “all” view, it’s not really your feed.
Apologies for the “you’re holding it wrong” response, but maybe it would be better if you just start browsing the specific communities that you want to follow?
It’s seems like you ignored my point entirely just to argue on a technicality. As I asked, should Reddit content reposted by bots be something a new user should see?
Also browsing /all is a great way to discover new communities, but even if you don’t browse it bot communities find their way into the discover communities tab, which makes it more difficult for people find the communities that they want to follow.
Okay, I am starting to realize that most people are looking at the word “bot” and stop reading the rest of the description.
The point of fediverser is not about creating an army of bots or a fully automated content firehose. The point of fediverser is to have a tool that gives a way for humans to bring content that they want to have on the fediverse. The mirrored instance and the bot accounts are just a mechanism to (1) facilitate the curating process, (2) automate the posting of content that has been curated and (3) to keep a bridge with Reddit which can help redditors to signup to Lemmy in a frictionless-way.
All this work started because I spent almost 3 months bootstraping !emacs@communick.news by doing the following:
- checking /r/emacs.
- Manually posting one or two links that I found there to the lemmy community
- Realizing that the majority of content on the community is from “self posts” with questions
- sending DMs to the authors of these self-posts, telling them about the community and inviting them to join my instance.
- Having about 10% of successful positive rate.
- The people who joined start asking “ok, now what? I can post here, but if the majority of people are still on reddit, what is the point? How about we have the reddit comments as well, so that we can start the conversation from here?”
At no point the idea is to:
- pull content automatically from reddit to lemmy
- use bots to flood the lemmy communities
- ignore the people that already joined lemmy.
I’ve repeated multiple times in this thread and in the original announcement, but I can do it yet again: the main usage of fediverser is for people that do not want to use reddit but still are interested in interacting with niche communities.
What if I don’t want the content I post to Reddit mirrored on Lemmy? How can individual users opt out?
The plan is to let users authenticate to the mirror instance with the mirrored account, which would cause the bot to be disabled. But that is not implemented yet.
Isn’t this like stealing, guys? No, not from Reddit - from authors. Ask for a consent before mirroring anything, for the love of Fediverse. Cheers!
The better question would be whether this constitutes fair-use. Because it’s certainly not stealing.
TINLA: factors for fair use don’t seem to align, though.
- Such use does not characterize commentary, parody, etc. and is not transformative.
- Post may prove to be substantial on its own, especially if it’s an art piece.
- Most of the work (individual post) or crucial parts being used.
- Since there is most likely no thorough link to the author’s website or profile, they lose the audience - nobody will go to look up the same post twice, not through Google and Google Images, especially.
About that last point: solvable by manually gathering authors’ links or making a hyperlink to respective Reddit profiles.
Adding a link to the original profile is quite easy and it would help alleviate the issue.
Also, keeping in mind that one of the goals of such a tool is to get people on reddit to be aware of the alternatives… the easiest way to let people on reddit to file a claim and/or to remove copy they don’t want copyrighted would be to let simply let they taking over their mirrored instance by proving they own their reddit account. And if this tools becomes popular enough to the point that redditors start signing up to the fediverse because the copied instance is getting significant viewership, then mission. fucking. accomplished.
It does not merit a verification of the author, when you hold their content encaged somewhere they did not approve yet. You say it’s to increase registrations on Fediverse and for the brighter future, but please remember to deal with this ethically. Creator deserves to know first that your mirror (or whatever ends up being) intends to seek engagement with their piece.
Linking to original, as we both proposed, is an aftermath. Top three factors also need to be addressed if you claim fair use.
As an alternative, asking for consent and delaying repost is not a rocket science.
you hold their content encaged somewhere they did not approve yet.
I’m failing to see how their content is “encaged” anywhere, and I’m failing to see how this would be any different from what, e.g, the Internet Archive does.
You only need to recall where it took the Internet Archive, no matter the intent it has. But let’s presume for a minute that a lot of it is educational: does unsolicited art reposting constitute an educational purpose, commentary, criticism, news, or a parody? If all that fails to meet, at least work with the portions that you’re taking.
This is silly.
This is a great use case for a lot of public health related subreddits and for niche advise subreddits like bdsmadvice, askdoctors, masks4all, etc.
I really hope the bridge feature is implemented soon!
niche advise subreddits like bdsmadvice, askdoctors, masks4all, etc.
One of those things are not like the others… XD
Yeah, thank you. Any type of support helps.
