I’ve been seeing some complaints about paywalled content being posted in the rss.ponder.cat communities.

Here’s my proposal:

• Split the bot into two users: free@rss.ponder.cat and paywall@rss.ponder.cat.
• Make a rule similar to some other communities, forbidding people from posting full text or links to archive.is on the paywalled communities.
• If you like some of the paywalled content, subscribe to it. You can afford $5-10/month for one or two sources, and it’ll help them a lot. Creating good content on the internet isn’t free.
• If you don’t want the paywalled content, block the paywall bot and you won’t have to see it in your feed.
• If you don’t want any of it, block both bots or the whole instance.

It’s a real problem that Lemmy communities sometimes have paywalled content from 50 different sources, which makes it annoying to use and unreasonable to tell people to subscribe to content they want to read, because they would need 50 different subscriptions.

I think the RSS bot is a better solution than just ripping off content from all the high-quality online news sources and shrugging your shoulders if they go out of business and can’t do it anymore a year from now. Everybody wins. High quality online news can still pay their bills, and you get a good way to stay up to date on it within Lemmy.

I’m posting this here instead of in the meta community because I have a feeling that most of the people who are saying they don’t like the paywalled content are not subscribed, and I’d like to get feedback from the community as a whole.

What do people think?

Edit: I’ve implemented the proposal. There are now separate bots @free@rss.ponder.cat and @paywall@rss.ponder.cat.