Until this package came along, if you wanted a bot that responds to events, you had to manually traverse all comments/posts/whatever at a fixed interval. With this package you can actually react to events directly from the database. It's implemented in a very efficient way by connecting the package directly to the Lemmy database and using native Postgres features to get the events (LISTEN/NOTIFY if you want to get technical).

The webhooks themselves are inserted into a separate SQLite database (API is coming) and allow for both simple and complex filtering of the incoming data. The system is already in use by two of my bots, @ChatGPT@lemmings.world and @DallE@lemmings.world who now both receive the information about being tagged in a comment in seconds (the actual reply takes a little longer, but that's because of the nature of the bot).

Currently you can be notified about a post or a comment, other types are trivial to include as well.

Let me know what you think!

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No idea, I didn't do any api development with Reddit, it felt way too oversaturated already. But event subscriptions are a common thing for such use-cases, so my guess would be actually very similar to what I have created here with this package.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Fair enough, but it sounds like the subscription feature should really be built into Lemmy's API. That is, your package is a useful workaround for a shortcoming in Lemmy. It's probably worth fixing Lemmy directly