Looks to me like it does nothing but copy across posts from Reddit, none of which seem to ever get commented on.
I’m puzzled. Seems like an odd thing to do generally - am I missing something obvious about its purpose? Some benefit it provides (other than clogging up my ‘all communities’ feed 😛 )? Is it going to just stop dead when the API changes come in on Saturday?
I have mixed feelings towards the repost bots. I see no value in pure reposts from Reddit, but I also have no issue with them IF they only post on dedicated instances and mark the account it’s posting from as a bot. Those posts have no engagement and Reddit was already archived for posterity purposes.
In lemmit.online case it just scrapes the pages without an API so it will work even aftet July 1st.
There was a lotide (software like Lemmy) instance called goldandblack a couple years back, it was an ancap instance. It was nicely set up and all, I don’t know if they created the hoot front-end, but it was nice when lotide had a much less pretty interface.
Problem was, it pulled posts from reddit. The large reddit community posts totally overwhelmed the fledgling community, and so it wasn’t worth subscribing to those because you’re not there for the news stories, you’re there for the community. You couldn’t see another person in 99.9% of stories.
So it’s a bad idea, but it doesn’t necessarily seem that way at first.
Seems confusing to me too - but yeah hoping the Reddit replication noise drops off here after the API changes (and that everyone moves to Lemmy!)
I blocked it. Seems pointless
This seems like such a worthless thing to do. You want to look at Reddit posts, go to Reddit.