Because none of us ever read the article anyway... autotldr bot.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Lemmygrad has a bot which detects youtube, twitter and reddit links in your post and offers links to open source front ends like invidious, nitter and libreddit. It'd be nice if we had one of those.
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A bot that would find the equivalent to a subreddit on lemmy, or correct users if they link a community incorrectly.
Definitely this. Was thinking about making a bit myself to do this as the whole direct link thing is such a pain but I donβt have any experience in making bots so Iβd be even happier if someone else manages to make one!
Something that automatically converts https://beehaw.org/c/support to [support](/c/support) so they are useable across instances.___
RemindMe bot is awesome
Beat me to it. Came here to say exactly this.
A repost detecting bot might be helpful
there was one on reddit called reportsleuthbot But isn't it a little hard to make? It might be too complex for learning python...
fair point
I've always found the ones that give a Wikipedia summary useful
Also the one that turned Wikipedia mobile links into desktop ones.
Video/image download bot would be super useful.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.
You missed the bleep-bloop!
Remindme! in 10 years
I made a couple of bots that could give you some ideas:
https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-ocr-bot
I saw someone attempt to invoke a !remindme bot in some other thread. I don't know if that's actually something that exists already, but that would probably be useful for people who use it.
Maybe features like this could actually work as plugins.
One major bot that is fediverse specific. A community syncing bot. So if two communities from different instances want to, they could have a bot that crossposts everything between each other and delete one deleted between each other. A more advanced feature to have is to have it only do certain tags, so for example !linux@lemmy.ml with a help/question and fedora tags could be auto posted to !fedora@lemmy.ml, and !linux_questions@lemmy.ml .
On that note, I'd like to see something like "crossposts" supported.
None, honestly.
Same. Bots are spam.
For some LoTR flavoring, Gandalf bot is always welcome.
Since no one mentioned it,
Stabbot - the video stabilising bot to fix videos that the uploader didn't bother with.
Songfinder bot seems handy to prevent earworms.
Plus a lot of the other ones mentioned. Just helpful bots with a distinct purpose that come in when asked to save time or educate.
This isn't necessarily a bot in and of itself...but, could function as one. It would be really cool if bots could reshare content from other fediverse sources into a group automatically, but preserve attribution to the original posters.
Would be really handy for, say, automatically sharing PeerTube videos to a community dedicated to watching them.
A bot that listens to and tallys "goodbott" and "bad bot" comments
I'm sure something like AutoMod would eventually become useful for community moderators.
I really hope it won't be needed, but we should probably have an nwordcount bot ready to go, just in case
I'll reply first on more general grounds. In my opinion, bots...
- should only reply to posts/comments when explicitly requested to, through a standard approach.
- should be properly tagged as bots, not just their username but also some interface element. And they should never behave in a way that mimics human beings.
- should have short, succinct output, that doesn't force other users to scroll past a lot of junk.
- should only have a descriptive output (it gives you info), not prescriptive (it doesn't tell you what to do).
Now, actually answering your question:
- a bot that links manga, anime and LN references to MyAnimeList, MangaUpdates etc. pages, like u/Roboragi does in Reddit.
- an unit conversion bot, like @iorale@lemmy.fmhy.ml said, that also works for cooking units. (Specially when Americans say stuff like "half cup of onions", for me it's the same as "a random amount of onion"). I volunteer myself to help out gathering units for that.
- a simple Wikipedia link bot, that gives you a short excerpt of the Wikipedia link.
GNU units to the rescue! https://www.gnu.org/software/units/
...wow.
I just installed it. I was expecting something like "ah, it knows that a cup should be a certain amount of mililitres, but what if I ask it in grams? Then I put "1 cup sugar", "grams"... and it returned 200g. It couldn't find flour so I used butter, 226g. It works!
Checking /usr/share/units/definitions.units, the devs had the insight to add a lot of cooking stuff to it. Also a way to define your own units. The syntax is an arse but I guess that the bot could handle it.
This would be great as the "guts" of a really good conversion bot.
I was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that'd make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like !bgg@bot.pls or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It'd keep it small enough to call, and make sure they're always 100% intentional.
This is mainly because I don't want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I've seen too many people annoyed at the "natural response" bots that pop in all the time on reddit.
If they're on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don't want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.
mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they'll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn't do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.
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Amputatorbot!!
Automoderator!
RemindMe was super useful
There's no bots I'm really missing hard right now, but it's worth recalling that bots are such a popular approach on Reddit specifically because the community has no way to improve reddit directly. If you want to add a feature to reddit, the ONLY way you can do it is to try to parse the text in a post/comment and the have the bot post it's own output as a comment or whatever.
With Lemmy, the code is open source and you can improve it directly. So before writing a bot to hammer the apis of an instance reading every post/comment made to a community, it's worth asking oneself if Lemmy could be improved to natively do the thing without needing a bot. Like for remind-me, what if Lemmy had a native remind-me button that direct-messaged you with a link to a post after some configurable delay. Easier to use, more efficient, no bot needed.
Now, this might be more work than writing a bot. And a bot can be a useful way to prototype some feature. It also means learning rust and JavaScript rather than python, and it means cooperating with Lemmy devs who might have concerns about performance at-scale, maintainability, or user-experience. These concerns will likely make the result better though. It's fine to do stuff via bots, but consider the possibility that directly contributing to improve Lemmy would be a better result that isn't possible in the Reddit ecosystem.
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