umbrae/serendipity

/r/serendipity is a meta-subreddit meant to broaden the perspective of its subscribers. It takes a popular entry from a random subreddit and posts it every few hours. If you want to increase your exposure to niche subreddits, or just your perspective on things on the web in general, serendipity might help you do that. But it might not. It's a bot, after all.

/r/serendipity is a meta-subreddit meant to broaden the perspective of its subscribers. It takes a popular entry from a random subreddit and posts it every few hours. If you want to increase your exposure to niche subreddits, or just your perspective on things on the web in general, serendipity might help you do that. But it might not. It's a bot, after all.

To Run

Serendipity requires a few packages, like PRAW. You'll want to install the requirements.pip dependencies into a virtualenv.

build_subreddits.py requires lxml as well, if you want to update subreddits, which is not listed in requirements as it's a pain and most people probably won't need it.

You'll likely want to stick these scripts in your cron, something to the effect of:

0 */3 * * * python /path/to/serendipity/main.py # Post a serendipity link every 3 hours
0 0 1 */3 * python /path/to/serendipity/scripts/build_subreddits.py # Rebuild subreddits list every 3 months

Todo: Mention ntlk.download (all-corpora for simplicity)

serendipity's Issues

nsfw tag

It'd be nice if the serendipity bot preserved NSFW tags from the original submission.

I started to look at how to do this, but, you know. If you updated to the modern python reddit api it'd be just a method call.

Usernames that have markdown are not escaped

Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/Serendipity/comments/2pd39f/kill_yourself_xpost_from_rmodmoments/cmw5o72?context=3

NSFW tag

Saw a closed ticket about a NSFW tag. Could be nice to have if the bot fetches a link from a subreddit like r/gross.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Serendipity/comments/2860am/got_it_caught_in_a_rebar_bender_at_work_the/

Lemmy adaption?

Will there be a lemmy (or tildes or other) version of serendipity bot? Especially in the growing and decentralised fediverse it would be great to have something putting something from outside "my" bubble into my feed sometimes.