I created a new migration tool for Reddit users moving to Lemmy!

Emerald@lemmy.emerald.show to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 130 points –
GitHub - peterwilli/lemmemovetolemmy: It will send your posts to any given Lemmy Instance or Community
github.com

This tool lets you migrate your own posts from any subreddit to any Lemmy community you want, I made it because I couldn't find anything else that did it the way I wanted to. I'm super happy how it turned out, I managed to get 9 years worth of posts over this way...

The GitHub link shows how to use it in case you want to!

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❗ Word of warning

Using this tool in beehaw will get you banned for spamming. If you choose to use this in an instance you do not own, be sure you get explicit permission from the admins + mods of the target community before you do so.

Even if a community is meant for this sort of archiving, be sure to ask first. They might have a specific set of rules on choosing what they want to archive.

Please use this tool with care.

Hm, not too sure how I feel about this. I like it for preserving archival posts and moving community mod posts over, but it has the potential to really spam communities if done en masse by regular non-mod users. Lemmy really has succeeded the most so far at focusing on quality over quantity.

Yeah I agree, but in my case I really wanted my posts to lemmy as I often look back at them and since reddit is now blocking third party apps its basically useless. That's why I wanted to move my posts over!

Wait, if I used the this, wouldn't I just spam a shitload of posts to Lemmy in an instant?

I have a LONG user history on Reddit.

How does it choose what communities to post to, to match each subreddit?

Not only that, these presumably would all be old posts/comments being re-posted with current date/time. Maybe best to make sure the specific community or instance you're sending this to accepts old Reddit content.

Interestingly this could be a use-case for Lemmy users having their own self named communities where they can dump old post/comment data into if they wish. e.g. for you it would be https://sopuli.xyz/c/MentalEdge (if it had existed).

This isn't really about the tool but the general idea of what to move. Like many I don't feel most of my posts alone were that valuable, but what was lost was the chain of conversation that they were part of. I had requested and received my data from Reddit after a while and looking through it I realized this. I suppose I could weed through the Excel file (!!) and grab longer comments that I've made in ten years of discussion, and it's always there to search if a memory is sparked, but I see no personal reason to dump it somewhere else.

I guess this is more a caution to not use a tool to mass spam just because you can. Not all posts are worth repetition, especially out of context.

I totally agree, I just wanted to keep my posts because they mean a lot to me, I used it on my own community which at the time was empty as I just moved to lemmy.

I was a bit excited after making this, and will update the Readme with a word of warning!

This is very interesting. What date will show up in Lemmy for the post? The current date/time or the original?

It will keep the current date due to users not being able to override a timestamp, but the top part of a post shows the original date and link to the original post: https://lemmy.emerald.show/post/764

Nice workaround!

Thanks! I also felt it was the most ethical thing to do. This way you can refer to any comments made to your post, but we don't copy comments over ourselves (which potentially can violate users privacy if they don't want their comments to leave Reddit)

This is a really cool tool if used correctly. It seems much of the concern comes from spam. Forgive me if this is already a feature or planned, but maybe setting a timer per batches of posts might be helpful? That way you could select what you want moved and each x hours/days if copies a set amount of posts over.

It was an idea indeed. Like a daily post per user, or even go as far as to synchronize it across users (so each user has a moment to post a new post). This is interesting, and I'm thinking about how to do it!