There was a little bump in users, and the LemmyWorld admins posted this, but the included apps guide was out of date. I went to ask about it and saw the account that made the post is no longer active (moved instances). I then tried to update it myself and made progress, but got overwhelmed.
Two parts of my suggestion:
Part 1) Have a repository to pull from
Users don’t like to go off site, which is why a pinned post with the resources works well. However, pinned posts go out of date, and it’s a lot of ask for one person to manually edit it and keep it updated.
Instead, why not make a repository with a collection of markdown files containing the post body contents. Then there would be one source of truth that everyone can update.
The post contents would also include:
- Link to the contribution page, so it’s easy to suggest changes
- Last updated date, so that if a post goes out of date the users can ask it to be updated or just go to the source.
Whenever the post needs to be updated, the OP can paste in the newest contents.
Part 2) A nicer list of resources
I guess this is more of a ‘nice to have’ feature, but it would be nice if we had a site that was easier to navigate, ‘prettier’, and more accessible to casual users. We have this for our community/Subreddit, and it’s pretty easy to keep updated: https://ubcwiki.ca/index.html. It runs open source mdBook
Right now Lemmy has awesome-lemmy and [awesome-lemmy-instances](Owner avatar awesome-lemmy-instances). But they’re not the nicest to look at, and it’s a bit annoying to find content (especially awesome-lemmy) because of the format. There’s a lot of text on one page, and little variation in spacing/text size.
The new site could have the same contents, a lot could be copy and pasted over, and it could be updated from the same repo. Only difference is that it would be nicer to use.
Why not have the best of both worlds? Set up a repo with all the information, then run a bot that periodically updates a pinned post with the data from the repo.
That would be the best, I’d need help with the bot side of things but I like it. :)
We could also then create a process to request a page / post type. But at some point we might as well just implement wikis on Lemmy
It’s more complicated than what you need, but you can look at my NHL game day thread bot if you need inspiration on how to make a bot that keeps a basic sqlite database of post IDs then after a sleep runs through a loop to update the posts in the database with new info.
It can already be run in docker. The repo even contains a script to build the docker container from source and run it and has a run configuration for it in pycharm. All you need to do is select the config and press the play button. Once running with docker, it will run forever until it receives the signal to shut down.
https://github.com/dandroid126/lemmy-nhl-gdt-bot
i’d suggest using the CI built into whatever git host you choose: commit a change and CI runs automatically and updates posts
less bot per se, but definitely easier than webhooks or scraping to sync