Check out !worldnews@lemmit.online. The admin of lemmit.online has set up a bot that fetches reddit posts via RSS, making it much easier to make the switch and of course not getting any ads.
You can make requests for subs to fetch at !requests@lemmit.online.
In the end we’re just using lemmy and lemmit’s bot as a simple RSS reader, so nothing illegal or even remotely unethical happening here.
What’s to stop all 3rd party apps from doing the same thing? Or is it a read-only one-way kind of deal?
It’s read only and it doesn’t give you access to the original comments. But it works really well for stuff like news, images, etc… where the discussion is mostly not the important part.
A good idea is to create discussions on the lemmy side. What I would do is cross-post it or post it to native lemmy communities and then we can have the discussions there. For example, for news articles and stuff like that.
Of course, discussions will happen here on Lemmy. It’s just a matter of these communities federating so we can all get access to them. So far they don’t come up in my search from other instances.
So we’ll just be an extension to Reddit then?
Nah, Reddit would just be another source of stuff to share.
better this way, could be made smoother but why give them content?
Probably would work to seed small communities with subreddit data, but…the maxim of “the real LPT is always in the comments” holds true (i.e. posts without comments is not what these places are about) and until users come and interact, this isn’t a substitute for being a real community.
Def a decent idea to jumpstart communities, as long as people aren’t too put off by the post data coming from reddit.