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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[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, everything you do takes processing power. So after every insert, an event is pushed using the native postgres listen/notify mechanism

right, i was just curious how much processing this is. it gets expensive quick on a large instance, efficiency matters. might be negligible, but i watch my services like a hawk.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 11 months ago

This feels like a moot point. I promise you this is much more efficient than the rest of Lemmy is.