Is it illegal/poor taste to port content from Reddit over to Lemmy?

I feel like the new communities are budding just fine. I say let nature take its course.

Legal, probably. Bad taste? Yeah, definitely. I get the idea, but the people who are still posting over there having their shit just get copied over here is going to give people a bad impression of the fediverse. If the fediverse is strong enough to replace reddit, then it can stand on its own and make it's own unique stuff.

Reddit didnt create any of its content. WE did. So, ethically, I see no problem.

I know their API has rules against doing stuff like that. So you may get your API key blocked if you did it.

Also, for a long time I had a ITTT bot copying the top videos content to a Google sheets doc. I only did it for science, but it ran until they stopped supporting that.

I don't love the idea, although I understand why it might seem like a good one.

I left Reddit because of the decisions they made. I'm sure plenty of the people here did the same. We didn't like Reddit, so let's do something different, rather than just trying to make Reddit again here.

New content, new community, new infrastructure - a different setup might lead to a different, hopefully better, outcome!

Just my opinion though, and I do totally understand why more content would be a good idea!

I'd say if someone is planning to do this just create a new lemmy explicitly for this purpose. I don't think it would be healthy for existing communities if too many posts are just copied from reddit with no OP to engage with.

Nah fuckem, raid their meme stores for all they are worth

The content wasn’t made by reddit; it was made by the community. It would be good to credit the author though.

Personally I don’t like the idea.

I honestly think Lemmy should not just be a clone of Reddit (either in terms of trying to match functionality exactly or filling it up with content from Reddit).

I get where you’re coming from in terms of trying to bolster the amount of content but truly I think Lemmy will do just fine with original content.

Apart from anything else, imho the quality of posts here on Lemmy that I’ve seen so far are, generally, quite good. Reddit seems to have been going downhill and I wouldn’t be surprised if the quality on Reddit gets worse following the current issues.

As someone else mentioned, maybe an instance or community could host that content but I think it would be important that users would be able to block it if they don’t want to see it.

My thinking on the topic is that if a reddit sub/community decides to make the complete transition to lemmy, the mod team should be free to pull their content in if they choose.

I don't really see the purpose of porting old content though, unless it has historical value.

That said, anyone can definitely spin up their own instance and grab the full text dump of reddit from before PushShift was disallowed. You'd need to build some tools to do that I suspect.

Edit: clarity

I'm planning on raiding the FAQ from one group. There is info added by many users including myself.

i hope not, i don't know how else to start building up the communities i recreated

if someone recognizes a meme they made i will 100% give them credit in the post

I don't think I'd automate it, especially because going forward that content is something that whoever posted, intended the post to go to reddit, not lemmy. Especially if it's someone asking for advice or something personal like that.

However, if it's a link to a youtube video or a tiktok or a news article or something, I see no reason why you couldn't essentially cross post that. But again, I don't think I'd automate it because then if they added some sort of commentary around it, you'd be just copying them. But copy the link and add your own commentary, I think that's fine.

I dunno... Just my personal yhoughts of course but i kind of like the current situation that requires a bit of savviness and curiosity to get going with fediverse. It acts as a bit of a filter for low effort posters and commentary.

I'd be pretty keen on an automated bot that pulls in top content. Most of these posts usually link back to an article, image or video anyway so the value would be creating the post here and generating the conversation (I'd argue the real value we want to focus on here are the comments)

if it was someone manually moving their content over here but a bot sounds like a really bad idea.

I think it's a great idea for the short term growth of the fediverse

I’ve been blocking every bot that does that. All the discussion on those posts takes place on Reddit, and I’d prefer my feed to be filled with posts that I can actually view the discussion on without feeding a shitty corporation more traffic.

Given the precedent that search engines frequently return results from other search engines, then this would seem to be legal. But since Reddit actually hosts the data, they would most likely use legal means/DCMA to take down the bot. The real question is, can you afford as many lawyers as Reddit? Probably not. But maybe if the strategy is just to pull people over in the short term, it could work. I'm not going to do it, not worth the risk to myself.

I think like other posters said, it's best to keep the content separate. I feel a lot more positivity coming from Kbin/Lemmy. It's as if a million trolls cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I'm appreciating this for what it is, let's hope it stays that way.

If your not can properly pull the content of the post and post it to Lemmy as a Lemmy post, and not as a link to a reddit post, do it. Who gives a shit how Reddit feels about it. But if its just going to be a link to a reddit post witg a description in it, don't even bother, theres plenty of that going on and it's all devoid of interaction because that interaction is happening on reddit, you'd essentially just be building a funnel to move activity off Lemmy back to reddit.

I was thinking of doing something similar and think for any of the news type subs it would be a good way to fill them with useful content, but being new to the fediverse I don’t know etiquette wise whether that’s ok.

I’d like to start transferring my own content over here too.