Hello! I’m excited to share that I’ve built a service that bridges Discord forum channels with the Fediverse, particularly with Lemmy communities!
In short: with the bot, you can either subscribe a Discord forum channel to an existing Fediverse community, or create a new federated community and assign a forum channel to it. Posts and comments are then synchronized between Discord and the Fediverse via ActivityPub.
Please note that the project is at a very early stage.
You can try it on your own on a dedicated Discord server I created:
If you find it useful or interesting, or if you have any concerns about it, I am open to your feedback. Financial support for further development would also be very appreciated.
I have also created a dedicated community for this project, so you can write something there and the messages will be synchronized between Discord and the Fediverse:
!discord_fediverse_bridge@bridge.nachitima.com
To learn how the service works in more detail, you can read the README on the repository page:
https://github.com/denikryt/discord-fediverse-bridge
And by the way, this post was created in Discord 🙂
Exactly! Replies are also supported 🙂
Do you really think this is a good idea? Have you considered the amount of traffic will be generated and the amount of data storage this will require?
Most Discord forums don’t have much traffic. Even in a popular Discord, people usually stick to chat channels not forums. Besides, the amount of data doesn’t beat what any boring bot could already do, so this is not a new or unique problem.
You mean storage for the bridge to maintain state or storage in terms of fediverse content?
The latter. Any instance that has at least one user following the bridge will have to process and store every message coming from the bridge discord room.
The same works with other genuine federated platforms,doesn’t it? The amount of content in the fediverse would inevitably gradually increase over time as people become more aware of it
Well, yes, but a bridge to Discord could be bringing traffic from order of magnitude more people than we currently have, and we do not have the infrastructure for it yet.
Well, technically, it is possible to flood fedi instances with a huge amount of noisy content but it is always up to an instance admins whether to keep such data and continue federating with such instances. So as long as the bridge instance is not producing tons of unrelated content, it is ok for everyone, I believe. In the end, situations could be different.
Also, motivating people to use this bridge is not a very easy task, by the way 🙂
But that’s a scale problem for the fediverse, not this bridge. I would expect the fediverse already has the architecture to scale to that. If not, then it should, and that’s a fediverse/lemmy bug. (What happens if you have that many regular users posting, without the bridge?)
I haven’t considered any of it, because I just wanted to build it to use it on my own 🙂 If someone in the world also finds it useful, then implementing some optimizations would not be a huge deal I believe. At least for personal use it is a working tool already
Short of pruning the data every once in a while (and losing all history) there is nothing that can be done to optimize it. It may work as a proof-of-concept or if you want to run on your own, but I really don’t think it is a good idea to promote it.