asudox

Welp, I guess it needs some more development time.

Why not use something like Angelfish instead of Firefox?

I use Aegis on my phone.

Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn’t care about scalability.

However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.

They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who’s going to give you database access? So you’d have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I’d imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.

Another solution would be using Lemmy’s new webhook system, but I don’t know how reliable it will be.

So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:

• Make a new federated platform

With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find a suitable Lemmy instance for it or even self host one yourself.

• Stronger integration with platforms via a modular federation system

If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn’t be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn’t, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.

Not really answering your question, but I’d like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.

The platform should provide some of these out of the box, in my opinion.

I am trying to build a new activitypub powered platform just for user scriptable moderation bots, but I am stuck on the modular federation design.

This is my third attempt now.

What about servo?