Totally agree. IMO they have a limited use to get initial content seeded and then it's over to actual members of the community to continue and develop. Other instances are focusing more on the "archive" aspect so we should let them do that.
Thanks for the notification of this post @yay@lemmynsfw.com.
I have created a script that would take the top (user-selectable) 0-1000 posts of a subreddit and post them to a Lemmy community. My plan was then to implement a vote threshold so that posts older than 48 hours and above a user-defined karma limit would be pulled in each time it was run - however the account login no longer works so I assume it and its posts were purged, so I'm here instead!
I do think that in order to get people engaged, we need content to draw them in. I noticed that once I'd posted 50 items across I immediately started getting subscribers to the community.
What I don't think is right is using bots to just replicate all the content on Reddit. As a moderator of several subs, a lot of content gets removed through moderation (hence the 48 hour limit), and a lot of junk gets through but just doesn't get upvoted (resulting in the karma threshold). Avoiding the "rubbish" would be good.
My view is that using bots/scripts to seed communities means we can kick start them into life much more quickly, and then when a critical mass of users is reached they become irrelevant and can be disabled. I don't think we're here to just copy and paste from Reddit - otherwise surely you'd just go there instead.
Edit: Just to comment on the poll itself. I don't think "bot only" communities make sense - we're not here to just copy Reddit... lemmit.online can do that. I believe we should allow bots to seed, and then let actual users take over. Unfortunately there isn't an explicit option for that so I just went with "Yes".
Getting this when trying to log in on Firefox.
No issues on Chrome.