It is my great pleasure to announce in collaboration with @virtualras@lemmy.world & @N3DSdude@lemmy.ml that automatic episode discussion threads will now begin posting to the !anime@lemmy.ml community starting right now!
Q&A:
What are episode discussion threads?
Simply put, they’re a place to discuss newly aired seasonal anime episodes. Here’s an example.
Why do these need to be automated?
Automation will lower the barrier to entry for discussions and help to remind everyone when new content airs. More importantly: it’s what you guys asked for! (exhibit A, exhibit B)
What technology does the bot use?
The bot uses the same code as the /r/anime subreddit known as Holo. We had to fork the bot to make it work with Lemmy, but we intend to merge our work back upstream so that we can share improvements and collaborate with them when it comes to things like code optimizations and show data.
You can follow our efforts in refining & upstreaming the Holo fork here. Please feel welcome to contribute your own improvements to the PR as well 😊 (see below known issues list for ideas)
Why fork Holo?
Two reasons:
- Building a good bot is time intensive. By forking a mature project, you guys get what you want faster and us developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
- Every season, some poor soul has to perform the grueling task of manually cataloging each airing show. By using a shared codebase, we benefit from the dedicated work of /r/anime’s data collection instead of having to do it ourselves.
Are there any known issues?
Yes:
- Links to episodes that aired prior to today will point to the wrong place. The bot is designed with the assumption that it can edit every post it links to – since the actual threads prior to today were manually created by other people, it’s impossible to incorporate those threads into the bot’s database.
- Episode polls currently have an anti-brigading feature using Reddit authentication. That’s obviously kind of a non-sensical thing to do here since 1) this isn’t Reddit & 2) nobody’s brigaded us yet. We plan to fix this soon!
- Anime subreddits currently show up in each thread’s “Show information” list, but there’s currently no such support for plugging the equivalent Lemmy communities. Eventually, we’ll need to get that set up and upstream it, too. 😉
Who’s the bot?
The episode discussion bot is named @shinobu@ani.social!
Why’s the bot hosted on ani.social?
Let’s break this into three parts:
- Why not lemmy.ml? Because new user registrations are closed for lemmy.ml 🤷
- Why not lemmy.world? Because lemmy.world is defederated by beehaw.org. In addition, smaller instances (like my own) sometimes temporarily defederate lemmy.world during heavy traffic. Obviously, we don’t want visitors missing out on episode threads just because of federation drama or a recent traffic surge!
- Why ani.social specifically? Because they’re on-topic, small enough to generally dodge defederation threats, and serious about their infrastructure.
Why “Shinobu”?
Before /r/anime’s bot was running under /u/AutoLovepon, it ran on an account named Holo. Clearly the bot’s creator was a fan of Spice & Wolf. I named the bot Shinobu because I’m a 🤮 bakemonogatari 🤮 fan. No further questions – this interview is over. I will never apologize!
Nice work! Any plans to fork other bots like Roboragi from Reddit too? Given how it’s federated it’d probably be best if it only worked by user mentions, it would also reduce bot spam. But I imagine it’s a lot of work to convert it to lemmy.
Roboragi’s kind of a doozy. It hooks itself up to the firehose and just runs forever consuming every single comment it can. I have to imagine that the hosting costs for Roboragi would be kind of high, not to mention the inherent unfairness of hammering one instance’s API to serve the whole Fediverse.
That’s not to say that Roboragi’s unsalvageable, per se… it’s just going to be a lot more invasive compared to the process of porting a passive bot like Holo. At the very least, we’d have to rip out the firehose stuff in favor of something like the mention-based system that bots like /u/RemindMe use.