It is my great pleasure to announce in collaboration with @[email protected] & @[email protected] that automatic episode discussion threads will now begin posting to the [email protected] 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 @[email protected]!
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!
Hi, thanks for reporting this issue! I was able to verify that shinobu’s posts aren’t populating on kbin, which is certainly not an ideal situation. After doing a little research, it appears that kbin.social currently completely refuses to federate content from any bot (see kbin-core#350 @ CodeBerg).
I couldn’t seem to find any official comment on this behavior, so I can’t comment on if this is by design or simply some oversight. I tried searching the kbin codebase for hints as to what might be going on, but nothing at all comes up in relation to the federated
bot_accountflag. I’m truly stumped 🤷It is technically possible to bypass this through incorrectly marking shinobu as a human, but I won’t agree to do that as it sabotages the experience of users who specifically choose not to see bot content. At this point, I’m afraid that the only remaining course of action is for you to follow up on the aforementioned CodeBerg issue with your report and wait for an update from earnest.
I had no idea kbin refuses to see bots. I’ll bug the creator about that. I assume it’s a safety thing that was set to prevent the servers from being overloaded too quickly, since kbin was struggling hard those first few days of the reddit blackout/migration.