Most importantly that the bot no longer crashes (and does nothing all night while I sleep 😛) when trying to create a community that has already been requested.

Furthermore mostly making the code prettier and adding tests.

retry

Try again, you lazy bot.

Fixed a couple of bugs today:

• Nasty one that made the bot get stuck in an infinite when trying to add a post by a deleted user, which kept the bit offline for most of last night.
• Another creative one that, when posting certain links, would actually work, but the lemmy gateway would respond with a timeout. It only happens on certain links, but consistently. Which would make the bot think it was unsuccessful, which would make it try to post again the next time. Causing a duplicate post each time (technically it was a cross post to itself... Which is interesting in a whole new way).

TLDR: right now there is a workaround in place that assumes a timeout post to lemmit was actually successful. This might cause it to drop posts in the future, but seeing that the server is barely breaking a sweat at this time, it should be good until a better fix is implemented.

Also got some great feedback from users, which I added to the TODO.

I have created some software that is capable of synchronising posts from Reddit to Lemmy. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it works as a such:

People can request new subreddits to be mirrored on !requests@lemmit.online. A bot (open source) will monitor the threads there, and if it finds a new request for a subreddit, it will make a new community on the Lemmit server, and add it to its monitored list. It will then make periodic checks to see if any new posts (it doesn't copy any comments) have been posted on reddit, and copy those over.

Users can then subscribe to those communities from their own lemmy instance, and from there federation will pick it up. Or at least, that's the theory. At the moment, federation is not working awesomely, and that is where my lack of fediverse knowledge comes in. Maybe it needs more time, or something is not so properly - I don't know.

Furthermore: registrations on this server are closed. The point of this service is not to become a community on its own, but to deliver, ehh, "original" content to all the rest of the Fediverse while it's going through a ramp-up phase. Besides, the instance is running on a pretty small vps, and I rather have this thing manage itself. There is a !about@lemmit.online community for further questions about the project itself though, in case people want to discuss it further.

So ehm... Let me know what you think :)

For old times' sake