I have created some software that is capable of synchronising posts from Reddit to Lemmy. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it works as a such:
People can request new subreddits to be mirrored on !requests@lemmit.online. A bot (open source) will monitor the threads there, and if it finds a new request for a subreddit, it will make a new community on the Lemmit server, and add it to its monitored list. It will then make periodic checks to see if any new posts (it doesn’t copy any comments) have been posted on reddit, and copy those over.
Users can then subscribe to those communities from their own lemmy instance, and from there federation will pick it up. Or at least, that’s the theory. At the moment, federation is not working awesomely, and that is where my lack of fediverse knowledge comes in. Maybe it needs more time, or something is not so properly - I don’t know.
Furthermore: registrations on this server are closed. The point of this service is not to become a community on its own, but to deliver, ehh, “original” content to all the rest of the Fediverse while it’s going through a ramp-up phase. Besides, the instance is running on a pretty small vps, and I rather have this thing manage itself. There is a !about@lemmit.online community for further questions about the project itself though, in case people want to discuss it further.
So ehm… Let me know what you think :)
Just to be clear, what if there is already a community on Lemmy that coincides with a subreddit? Will it make another community on your instance? Or will it use the existing community?
Yeah, the bot only operates on its own instance. So you can have !bestof@lemmit.online and !bestof@lemmy.ml.
Makes perfect sense. Thanks.
It sounds as if this will run on its own instance, so as long as this instance is purely dedicated to mirrored subreddits there will be no conflict with communities on other instances. Community names can be reused on multiple instances and they are treated as separate communities.
There is no such thing as already the same community on another instance on current Lemmy. As of now all Lemmy instances can have e.g. a /c/cooking community, and they are all guns be individual communities.