Hi all! I’m messing around with a Lemmy news bot. I’m still testing and tweaking things but I made it live on [email protected] and [email protected] as of now.
The motivation behind this is partly just that I want to mess around with constructing Lemmy bots, but also, I feel like there are some features in a “here’s what’s going on in the world” community that aren’t real well-implemented by the current model. In particular, the bot aims to:
- Batch up stories about the same topic into roughly-once-a-day roll up posts, so it’s not repeated low-urgency stories about Trump or Israel throughout the day
- Post at a consistent controlled rate unless there’s breaking news which it tries to post semi-immediately
- In the future I’d like to have it summarize the stories and provide links to background information and similar stories, Wikipedia or etc
Two questions: First off, are people okay with me doing this on SDF? The local feed seems like it has a really particular flavor, and I don’t want to be cluttering it up and crowding out the Unixy stuff, if that’s unwanted. It’s just as easy to set this up on some other instance if that’s preferable to the community.
Secondly, any feedback on the bot itself is welcomed as it starts to post (assuming people are okay with it). It’s a pretty simple thing, just scan some RSS feeds and post whatever the LLM thinks is most important, but like I say I’m trying to make it provide an improved quality-of-life for a news feed, so I’m curious what others think of the ideas.
Cheers, let me know. Thanks for the server, it’s grand.
I think it’s a bit much. Of the 20 posts on the first page of the local feed, 13 are from your bot. Even if you pare that down a bit, you’re still going to be rapidly scrolling things off the front page due to the mismatch in activity level.
I’d suggest picking a different instance that is either active enough that you won’t be significantly diluting it, or one with no activity whatsoever. Let SDF continue to be about tech nostalgia, gritty FOSS-themed cyberpunk comics, and whatever fucking surrealist honeypot Funhole is.
That said, I have no particular association with SDF, other than recently having created an account here.
Yeah, I’m sorta inclined to agree; I looked at how it works out in practice and it’s definitely a little obnoxious. I disabled it for now.
It’s tough because I’d like for it to be accessible both from the big instances like lemmy.world, and from the instances like beehaw that have defederated the big instances. So that tends to imply that a good home for it would be on one of the little instances. But, it’s not gonna sit well on the little instances if it’s making a firehose (relatively speaking) and overwhelming their local feeds.
IDK; I’ll ask around and see if I can find a good home for it. Absent some person coming in and saying “yes ruining the local feed is ok” I’m gonna conclude that that’s not SDF though.
Yeah, that makes sense. I assume that running your own instance isn’t a viable option? I know there are bot-specific instances, like lemmit.online which is dedicated to scraping content from reddit. Not sure if there are any that are intended for hosting third-party bots.
I could run my own, yeah, that’d be a fine option. I plan to at some point anyway, just trying to avoid the time investment for as long as I can postpone it. I found some likely places and DMed the admins to ask if it’d be okay; if no one’s open to the idea, I might bite the bullet though yes.