Lemmy Deep Lighthouse
I built a Firefox extension to help people bring their own Reddit posts over to Lemmy.
It lets you map subreddits you post in to Lemmy communities, review queued posts before publishing, and post through your own Lemmy account. Settings and credentials stay in your browser; there is no hosted service.
This is intended for republishing your own work, not scraping or reposting other people’s content. The goal is to make moving from Reddit to Lemmy less tedious while keeping authors in control.
Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
Source and releases: https://codeberg.org/sanitation/lemmy-deep-lighthouse
That is fair, and I agree the ghost-account/comment mirroring approach is bad.
This is intentionally narrower: it only posts through the user’s own Lemmy account, only for content they choose/configure, with review before publishing by default. It does not mirror commenters, create fake accounts, or copy discussions.
The goal is not to flood Lemmy, but to make it easier for people who already write useful posts on Reddit to start publishing them on Lemmy instead while also ensuring people that only comment at least can comment on some lemmy posts. sometimes lemmy communities are just dead - no content, no nothing. at least lets have content.
Lemmy communities that start and stay dead are generally because there isn’t broad interest in that community and it’s about the math, unfortunately.
Reddit has about 765,000,000 active monthly users so even if 0.001% of those users have an interest in a niche topic (7,650), and only 25% of those users participate (1,912), you can still have a fairly active community. (You really only need about 5-6 active users posting content to drive broader participation. It just “feels” more organic and people tend to prefer that.)
I don’t know current Lemmy stats, but there are roughly between 100k and 200k monthly active users, discounting lurkers. If a topic only has 0.001% interest, that is a total of one user that cares at all, assuming I didn’t fuck up my decimal places too badly.
Add multiple instances that host identical but independent communities, the small user base may become even more fragmented. This is problematic since Lemmy users have the ability to completely block instances or admins can completely defederate instances as well. (I don’t disagree with blocking/defederation, but it does hurt communities, unfortunately.)
So for now, at least, Lemmy is likely better served by users contributing to larger communities. Content variety does get limited a hair, but it prevents a new user from getting let down by what effectively are ghost communities.
If you don’t see things this way, that is totally cool. I 100% support any contribution to Lemmy that attempts to expand the user base regardless if I agree or not.