I’m guessing there’s just so much money (and power) in that kind of thing that it’s simply here to stay.

Unlikely. There are a lot of badge bunnies out there.

Again, that angle is largely you seeking solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist; ICE agents aren’t trying to trick people in order to date/befriend them.

As I said, they don’t want anything to do with people who hate them.

Tons of joke answers and few actual answers, so here’s the opinion of an ex-cop:

What’s your aim? If it’s to identify ICE via speed dating or something to collect a list of local ICE agents, it’ll take weeks, months, or even years years to uncover what they do. ICE agents know quite a few people hate them, so they’re not going to wear their job on their sleeve. In that line of work it’s known as OPSEC. In my personal life, very few people know I was a cop. ICE is even less popular, so they’ll be even more tight about it. Best advice on this front is just keep your ears open for claims of being “taxi drivers,” “garbage collectors,” or other jokes cops often make to describe what they do.

If it’s to avoid dating/befriending ICE agents, all you need to do is let it be known that you hate ICE. Obviously your HR is going to come into the fray if you’re passing out “FUCK ICE” pamphlets, but feel free to get tattoos, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and whatever else you can get your hands on to express yourself, and I promise you ICE agents will avoid you like the plague, though they won’t outwardly state their reasons why.

I don’t want to hang out with people who hate me, you don’t want to hang out with people who hate you, and ICE agents don’t want to hang out with people who hate them. Not only is it unsafe, but it’s simply unpleasant.

The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.

Let’s be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don’t bother.

Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically “stealing” posts and comments to steal Reddit’s thunder don’t do it. There are other things they’d rather do, evidently.

Now that I think of it, after using the word “scrape,” it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites’ in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.

Of course not. That’s why I said “To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, […]”

To moderators. I want to say even to regular users if your comment/post gets enough traction on New Reddit, i.e. hundreds or thousands of views.

Other, similar websites also show such data to those in privileged positions as well. If they’re pretty sure you’re not a bot, they give it freely. Whatever tier above “average user” and especially “a person interested in growing the website out of self-interest” a given website has, it’ll probably be available. I’m sure you can imagine a half dozen that are on the money.

To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, it’s large, but not large in comparison to the US and India.

Here’s my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:

What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can’t pinpoint your identity as easily?)

I can’t be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there’s much less to comment on here.

My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.

Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.

No offense to Europeans because I love y’all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.

On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:

1. ACAB

2. Trump bad

3. FOSS good

4. Reddit bad

5. Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good

6. Tankies (i.e. #5) bad

Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don’t demonize them. That’s made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.