Hi all! I’m not usually a fan of bots, but as per usual @[email protected] has come up with something that could be genuinely useful and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether we as a community should use it.
Basically the Lemmy Tagginator is a Mastodon bot that would respond to all posts in our community, adding hashtags (in our case, probably just the one tag #Knitting). More info on Github / in the announcement thread.
Why would this be a good thing?
Mastodon is so much bigger than Lemmy, and content from other Fediverse services genuinely does benefit from the discoverability there in my experience. Basically, more people chatting about your knitting.
Why might this be a bad thing?
You’d get a bot reply on your posts, that could be annoying for some people.
Also the dev has already added an opt-out feature to tell the bot to ignore a given post, but it’s one more thing to remember how to do.
What do you reckon?
I’m not going to go opting you into something that the majority doesn’t want, so this is your chance to yea or nay. Of course, we could always give it a whirl and stop if we don’t like it or aren’t seeing any benefit.
Community feedback, go!
Getting one bot reply is nothing! I see no problem here
I’m all for it. Could we give it a try for a month and decide after if we liked it?
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach to me. I just didn’t want to unilaterally opt us in, you know?
seems cool to me!
I’m good let’s try it!
Absolutely. Like I said I’m not usually down with the bots so wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t think it had potential. But any sign of it malfunctioning or having unintended consequences or whatever we’ll just opt back out.
Dammit you edited your comment and now mine makes no sense. Either that or I’m hallucinating due to illness lol, could go either way.
Lol I wrote it and then realized I asked what you said. 🤦♀️
We are internetting so well today
I’m bored AF at work with 35 minutes to go.
I’m good!
Never been a big fan of tags. I feel they don’t help discoverability, since I can just search for keywords and just add noise.
A post in a community called @knitting will probably have to do with, you guessed it, knitting. So why would I need a bot adding that tag in a comment?
Similarly, even if the particular project is seasonal or concerning some event, chances are the relevant terms will make it into the title or body of the post.There might be a misunderstanding here, so just to clarify. The way things get found on Mastodon is via tags. But there’s currently no way to add tags on Lemmy itself, so when a post from here federates over there it’s tagless and doesn’t show up in search. Someone on Mastodon looking at the #Knitting feed isn’t going to see it, even though it’s posted by a group called “knitting”.
It’s less about just tagging for the sake of it and more about getting things slightly closer to a format that works with the rest of the Fediverse.
Hopefully that makes sense! 😄
That makes sense. I don’t mind then 😄
Not a knitter (yet) and I just lurk here so don’t put any weight on my opinion. I’m sharing my thoughts on the bot in general.
Personally I like the idea on paper. More exposure, more interaction, more anything. I love that. The bot reply won’t be anything different than reminders to follow the rules on That Other Site.
My problem is mostly with the way Mastodon displays Lemmy content and I hope I’m wrong with this. I follow a couple of communities. I have a hard time even opening Lemmy links - could be an issue with Jerboa, Android or anywhere along the line. I usually notice a Lemmy post on Mastodon by people commenting on it and the community “boosting” the comments. If it works by adding hashtags to the post that might make it really good for discussion-based posts or commenting on general. Would it share the images as well? I don’t know how exactly the bot works and the fediverse is still a bit murky to me on some topics.
Other than my little nitpicks I’m all for it. Overall it seems like a good addition.
It’s not the greatest format over on the Mastodon side, you’re right there and there was a little bit of discussion about it in the announcement post. The bot now has an added line about how to interact with the post, to hopefully avoid a bit of that confusion.
In theory over time it’ll get better, there are a few feature requests in for incremental improvements, but for now I think the boosted links is really all we’ve got so the goal of the tagginator is to give them a bit more context until that beautiful day arrives.
(not sure about the Jerboa thing, sorry, if I open a Lemmy post link from Tusky it just opens it in the browser 🤷♀️)
