Update time! I’ll put the tl;dr up front:
- The bot can now include links to related communities on the fediverse for shows that it makes posts for. So, please share with me the related communities that should be included in rikka’s posts.
- Sequential episode discussion threads made by rikka should no longer show up as crossposts.
- There is a discord server here that @NineSwords@ani.social is nice enough to run and extend an invitation to the rest of the community.
Bot Updates
There are two main things that I have recently added our resident bot, @rikka@ani.social:
Inclusion of Related Communities
rikka can now include links in her posts that link out to other fediverse communities that are relevant to the show/movie that the post is about. A recent example is that The Apothecary Diaries episode discussion posts now include a link to !theapothecarydiaries@ani.social in the body of the post. Neat! Go forth and spread activity through the fediverse!
The catch with this is that I need to manually add the related communities for each show. I am but one man and cannot survey the entire fediverse for active communities. So, this is a call to action from me to you. If there is an actively airing show and it has an active community somewhere on the fediverse, please let me know and I can make sure it is linked in rikka’s posts. At the end of this post I have included a table of the communities I have added so far.
Crosspost Deduplication
Sequential episode posts should no longer show up as crossposts. With the way that certain fediverse software platforms and apps handle crossposts, it was leading to cases where the comments from multiple episodes’ posts were being merged together. This is obviously not great for preventing spoilers or even having a coherent discussion. This specifically came to my attention after Piefed made some updates to do this.
However, one of the Piefed devs also pointed me in the direction of the solution. By appending unused url parameters onto the end of the image url that rikka posts with, lemmy and other software will no longer detect the posts as crossposts. So, hopefully this one is solved going forward.
Discord Server
I am on record as never wanting to be in the position of moderating a real-time chatroom like Discord. However, for those of you that are interested in such a place, @NineSwords@ani.social has made one. It was originally made for just the !lightnovels@ani.social community, but they have created channels with topics for anime, manga, games, etc., and is more than happy to help facilitate other rooms if there is demand.
Come on over and check it out! I am hanging out over there! Also, I swear that I will never be a mod on discord, so if you want to complain about me, there is nothing I can do about it!
Reference Table of Related Communities for Spring 2025
Please let me know if there are more out there that I can include!
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It may be a bad idea to encourage users to interact with lemmy.ml communities as it will cause confusion. Due to it not being federated with ani.social.
I kind of went back and forth with that myself too. A lot of the members of this community are based on ani.social, but due to federation, a lot aren’t as well and could still interact with a community on ml. You bring up a good point though that lemmy is happy to make local versions of a community even if it won’t federate out. So, you could go to the local version of the MHA community and make posts all day, but only ani.social users could see it. Federation is confusing enough for people, I think that you are right, I will remove the ml community.
Honestly, I wrote and rewrote that paragraph half a dozen times convincing myself of both sides while doing so. I don’t want to be in the position of putting a thumb on the scale of picking community winners and losers. That is why I have both gundam communities listed for example, as they are both somewhat active, even if I do moderate one of them. So, in the future, if there is a community that is clearly most active on the ml instance, I would likely include it. I can make a slight change to the bot to mention that it would be inaccessible from the ani.social instance though.
Very good updates. Thanks for the work you do!
Very cool
I plan on keeping this pinned for a couple days at most. I don’t really like having three pinned posts at the same time, so if people aren’t really engaging with it any longer, I will unpin with prejudice.
![[Meta] Bot Updates, Related Communities, and Discord](https://ani.social/pictrs/image/21554b3f-110c-4ca9-9fcf-593c323a1cf5.webp){kind=link}