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!
I, too, put a high value on helping discussions succeed and strongly want to avoid smothering discussion threads at such an early stage in this community’s growth. You should know that the possibility of using crossposts as you’ve suggested was explored, but unfortunately needed to be shelved.
You see, crossposts don’t actually share comment sections; users that click on the link will see the original’s comment section and users that click on the discussion button will see the crosspost’s comment section. I decided that this approach would cause confusion and only further worsen the problem and so gave up on it. What we’d need to make your crossposting suggestion work would be a special type of crosspost that has a shared comment section – this is something I’ve been actively advocating for to the developers as you can see here. If they ever agree to accept a PR, I plan to implement the code for it myself.
As for my little discussion community on ani.social: it primarily exists as a place to responsibly test and develop the bot without negatively impacting anyone else’s userbase. Yes, I’m also positioning it as a place where others can visit and discuss, but this is just my own personal hedge against the possibility of !anime@lemmy.ml becoming unviable for whichever reason. You’ll note that the subscriber count of my community is quite low and that I personally follow a strict policy of never actively mentioning/promoting it. If the situation changes so that the continued presence of my community substantially harms or otherwise steals growth from other Lemmy anime communities, you have my promise that I will shut it down – and no: simply existing as an alternative does not count as substantial in my book.