Using Reddit as a platform

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#1

Hi I was just wondering if we could use a widely populated site called Reddit (www.reddit.com) as a platform to share projects or ideas.

Reddit has a subreddit function which allows one to create a smaller forum that is still accessible to anyone and creates kind of like an online show and tell. It already has an immense amount of users and a functional base that we can utilize to show the public and each other what we can and are doing. We do not have to post everything like how to make it or the details regarding it there as this discuss site can serve that purpose, but I would like to use it as an open source idea format.

I have contacted the moderator of r/fablab(edit: the original moderator is definitely interested and on board!) and I already registered r/fabacademy a long time ago but never used until now, as I started work under a FabLab now, neither of which has not been active for very long and hope to make the subreddits more active.

#2

Hi @aloysha,

What support would you need from our team? It would be good to have another channel for sharing information.

Are you requesting help with moderation of the subreddit?

#3

For one thing, I’m not currently sure of the model we should strive for in reddit: should we emulate the current model in reddit in some subreddits and use it as a show and tell, a place to discuss projects and making them, and/or just a news site for fablab related information.

As for moderating, I’m pretty sure I’ll need some help in the future once we have a good amount of people.

#4

For discussions, Reddit is a duplicate of this forum and therefore not useful, or we could also discuss about moving all to Facebook because so many people are there… and so on. There are already several other Fab Lab groups, pages, mailing lists in several services and webs, the idea of this place is not to replace all of them of course, but at least to provide one common place for all the +12K users on Fablabs.io.

@aloysha we can add you to the list of moderators here if you’d like, let us know :slight_smile:

Regarding the documentation of projects, this is something that we are going to work a lot on in 2018, it might be very useful to learn from Reddit… what are the features that we could learn from them in terms of projects?

#5

Yeah, I don’t think replacing an already established discussion site is a good idea but I think I can see the potential of reddit being a good outreach or community website for projects. It has a decent(arguable…) search function that can search people’s projects which I thought would be great for fabacademy final projects. Beyond that there is the comment section which can provide valuable input to people’s projects from various sources. It’s also linked directly to imgur and provides a reliable free database we can use as a backup at the very least.

As for moderators, sure I’d like the chance to see and possibly improve the discussion site here as a mod.

#6

Hi I just wanted to bump this discussion because I’ve been trying to find new ways to categorize/classify final projects for documentations and wanted to use python to make an elastic search after pulling the data from the archive site. But I noticed this might violate some security or content rules that exist that I am do not know nor have authority under. I’m still interested in becoming a mod as well but would that grant permissions for me to pull the links and then post them on r/fabacademy site?

#7

You’re a moderator now! :slight_smile:

#8

We are currently in the process of upgrading the whole infrastructure of the platform, and after that we will be able to add more features and improve the existing ones. The search engine is one of the main areas for improvements. The Projects section will be also improved a lot. As for the database, we already have backup services in our servers. So these will be improved here on Fablabs.io, not on other platforms like Reddit.

#9

Yes, this will likely be copyright infringement, depending on each project license, but generally it’s not something you should do, especially if you do it for redistributing the content. As said above, we will change the Projects part and also how it works with FabAcademy projects, we’ll keep everybody updated of the progress.

#10

Being a moderator here will just grant you a stronger role in moderating the discussion here, it does not grant you any more feature or permissions, especially regarding other platforms.

We currently have no plan to work with Reddit at the moment and we cannot support anything there (our focus is on improving Fablabs.io, not other platforms), and of course you cannot redistribute content there or anywhere else unless it has a specific license that enables it (Creative Commons licenses, for example).

#11

If you are interested in testing this for learning purposes (not for publishing data somewhere else), then we can check together if there’s a way we can integrate it on Fablabs.io. As said above, we are in the process of completely changing the Projects section, and learning from this would be great!

#12

Awesome, thanks for your insight regarding the project search and our direction here; I will work on the python and send upload it here(or send via pm) and maybe it can be of use for integrating to Fablabs.io. I hope we can make this site even more useful by adding such functions and helping the user’s experience.

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#13

Even better: https://github.com/fablabbcn/fablabs.io :slight_smile:

As you can see there are several issues regarding the search engine, something we definitely need to improve.

We are also moving towards a complete dockerization, when this will be ready we will relaunch the infrastructure, and then it will be easier to add containers and more features. I’m also working on more advanced data analyses with https://github.com/fablabbcn/datavisplanner maybe we can discuss elastic search also there!

Btw, you might already know that, but Fab Academy archive uses Mercurial and Git… so maybe that could be a starting point for analysing the data…

#14

Alright! This sounds like a plan in action and I will read the links and see what kinda of input I can provide.

#15

And GitLab :slight_smile: