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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[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

If you want to make the community feel non-empty. Make the bot post maximum once every week or two.

Anything more than that and the community will feel empty in another way. Because it’ll just be repetitive posts from a single account with barely any upvotes or comments as far as the eye can see. Like look at communities like !beds@feddit.uk. The excessive botposting with no upvotes or comments makes it feel basically more empty than anything.

I’m not against bots to populate, but prioritise quality over quantity.

[–] PixelPilgrim@lemmings.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Hmmm 1-2 per week. I patched my open source bot to post to Lemmy. The patch is for leaderboard for which streamer has the most streams and most hours streamed in the past week/day . I decided twice a day for that.

I guess I'll do 1 a week for my cities' community.

I am trying to build up fediverse streamers (a lot of owncast and a little bit of peertube) to add fediverse engagement. So I made a bot that post to mastdon of who streams the most, etc. I just made the community for the fediverse streamers. Hopefully it's more content for fedizens to interact with