So I purposed that for Lemmy and mastdon a bot that post links to YouTube videos and news articles relevant the city I live in, and I got push back on suggesting the idea. I suggesting this bot because my city isn't big enough to pump out content everyday and the links would seed content for a Lemmy community so that its not empty.

I have looked into city subReddit and for my city links to news stories are basically non existent and big city like NYC news article links are rare, but do get engagement.

I have been told that link bots don't help with empty communities and something about redundancy.

I do look at politics community and that's nothing but links.

I'm asking for general perspective from both sides

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[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have one running in !beds@feddit.uk as otherwise there would be nothing in it other than the odd article I'd post manually. The idea is that I will remove it if the community grows enough that the bot is just adding noise. At the moment there's minimal engagement, but I find it useful as I see the local news rather than looking for it elsewhere and having to post it.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

This looks pretty ideal in my opinion.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 3 points 17 hours ago

It runs off of RSS feeds. Here if you want to look/use as inspiration: https://github.com/chris-y/rsstolemmy I'm not sure if that's the latest version but it should do the job.