I think the title says it all. Basically, when a new comment appears on your targeted post, it sends you a PM about it.

@PostWatchBot@lemy.lol

Usage

  • Subscribe to a post: just mention the bot in the comments or send the link to the bot via PM.
  • Unsubscribe from a post: send PM to the bot with stop text and link of the post like stop https://lemmy.ml/post/1234
  • Unsubscribe completely: Send PM to the bot and add stop text to your message. It will unsubscribe you from all subscriptions.

Note: the bot sends only one notification per post. It waits for the previous notification to be marked as read for new comments.

Made with @CannotSleep420@hexbear.net’s lemmy-bot project 🙏 Tomorrow I will publish the code publicly after adding README and self-hosting guide.

  • ScrubblesEnglish
    4•11 months ago

    How does it subscribe when lemmy doesn’t have subscribing or notification apps? Does it just poll the server? (As a server owner the amount of traffic there worries me, and that could cost me depending on implementation)

    If it’s polling, how do you know to stop polling? Will it just poll a post forever?

    • @iso@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      3•11 months ago

      Its polling every 30th second only on my instance. So don’t worry, it will not make any difference for you ✌️

      • kopper [they/them]English
        4•11 months ago

        in theory as you operate both the server and the bot you could modify lemmy to tell the bot when a new comment hits a thread instead of polling, which would be more efficient (but definitely harder to do!)

        also does it handle the case where nobody from your instance is following a community? to make sure you get all the replies reliably the bot would need to subscribe to each community it’s watching a post from

        that said, great work. I may end up using it if I don’t end up forgetting about its existence :p

        • @iso@lemy.lolOPEnglish
          3•11 months ago

          I’m using a library named lemmy-bot. To achieve what you say, I need to modify both library and lemmy server. As you can guess, I can’t afford time for these 🙂

          I think it’s not using much resources anyways. 2 requests per minute is nothing compared to hundreds of ActivityPub requests per second.

          I didn’t tested non-followed community, but the bot works with mention event instead of comment. But still not sure, I’ll test this one 🙏

          • kopper [they/them]English
            1•11 months ago

            I didn’t tested non-followed community, but the bot works with mention event instead of comment. But still not sure, I’ll test this one 🙏

            oh, I meant for the actual post watching part, summoning via mention should work without any subscription

            • @iso@lemy.lolOPEnglish
              1•11 months ago

              I think to get mentioned comment, it needs to get parent post too. As I said, I need to test it. I can only assume right now.