Whoever is in charge of that instance, STOP.

It’s an instance that crossposts posts from Reddit, except it also makes a new user for each Reddit account it came from. So if /u/hello123 made a post, it makes that post under a new account called hello123. That makes it impossible to block posting bots.

Not only that, it makes posts look like they’re posted by real people, with many question and text posts being copied as well. I was very confused as to what these posts were until I realized they’re crossposts.

Examples:

https://alien.top/post/263029

https://lemm.ee/u/pocalyuko@alien.top

https://lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top

https://lemm.ee/u/CaptainCapp-n@alien.top

I strongly believe Lemmy isn’t the place for mirroring content from other websites. You can host your own alternate Reddit frontend like LibReddit, there’s no reason to spam the posts to everyone using Lemmy just because 5 people asked for it. Not to mention there are already enough instances mirroring posts, this is getting obnoxious.

  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.eeEnglish
    496·
    1 year ago

    Just don’t, repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience. We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.

        • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
          34·
          1 year ago

          That’s why mentioned federatied network bridges store all bridged messages on instance with all the metadata. This is same: bridged posts and comments are stored with metadata. So even if reddit will nuke bridge, already bridged posts will stay.

          This also reduces switching cost from reddit to lemmy and turns lemmy into “continue conversation here” button. And according to guy who defined enshittification, low switching cost is how social networks gather TONS of people.

          • AustralianSimon@lemmy.worldEnglish
            22·
            1 year ago

            Ok but then instead of encouraging people to Lemmy you are encouraging to matrix which will have the same issue bridging to Reddit.

            Seems like another bad solution.

            • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
              21·
              1 year ago

              I’m not sure what you are implying. I was just saying that alien.top is just like bridge in matrix, why it is better to store data on instance instead of fetching it every time like frontend does and how it helps Lemmy get users.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      1929·
      1 year ago

      We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.

      One of the things that I truly despise is the use of the “Royal We”. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to make it sound like your opinion and your preference is an universal truth. It’s quite simple to disprove that what you want is not necessarily what everyone else wants.

      For example:

      repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience.

      • Thanks to mirrors, I could simply get rid of all the 40+ subreddits that I used to subscribe to lurk around. E.g, I don’t to participate in discussions on /r/soccer, but I do like to follow some of the discussions and I do like having the posts to see game highlights, match threads, etc.
      • Mirrors allow us to have content protected and out of Reddit’s control. If Reddit decides to tighten up their grip on the API even more, the mirrored content will be already safe from their hands.
      • Masimatutu@mander.xyzEnglish
        18·
        1 year ago

        I have never used Reddit so I don’t know what experience it is you want, but couldn’t you achieve the same thing in a better way by browsing on Teddit?

          • Masimatutu@mander.xyzEnglish
            211·
            1 year ago

            It isn’t a client, it’s a frontend. You’re not registered and you’re not contributing to traffic. If you really want to leave leave reddit so much, it seems illogical to bring it here.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              416·
              1 year ago

              The mirror is just one part of the fediverser project. The other is in getting people to migrate away from reddit by joining the corresponding communities.

              And it so happens that a lot of the people that want to migrate away from Reddit end up returning because they don’t find the content here from their niche communities. This is the part that the mirror attempts to solve.

              • Masimatutu@mander.xyzEnglish
                171·
                1 year ago

                I think the thought is good, but overall I believe in growing the Fediverse as an independent community. People will also not see the appeal if it seems like we rely on other platforms. What I do think we can do to address the content issue is to improve integration with other Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, since they are already compatible and have the necessary userbase.

      • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        52·
        1 year ago

        Mirrors allow us to have content protected and out of Reddit’s control. If Reddit decides to tighten up their grip on the API even more, the mirrored content will be already safe from their hands.

        I think you are confusing people here by saying mirror. They think about it as another frontend.

        I suggest to use Matrix terms. Here what you have would be one-way bridging

        One-way bridging is rare, but can be used to represent a bridge that is bridging from the remote system into matrix. This is common when the remote system does not permit message posting, or is simply not capable of handling posting outside their system. The users bridged from the remote system often appear as virtual users in matrix, as is the case with matrix-appservice-instagram.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          59·
          1 year ago

          The people complaining can’t even understand the concept of curating their own feed, do you think they will understand if we start talking about bridges and double-puppets?

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              23·
              1 year ago

              First you need to make a convincing argument that this is any type of “spamming”.

              Then you need to explain why you can only curate your feed by looking at their firehose, when there are far more other effective filters in place.

          • squiblet@kbin.social
            61·
            1 year ago

            Seems odd to claim that people don’t understand the concept of using Subscribed to filter their feed, when they’ve made a conscious choice to change from the default to All. It seems you don’t understand the concept of browsing “All” or why people would choose that.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              32·
              1 year ago

              conscious choice to change from the default to All.

              First, the default listing is set by the instance administrator so we can’t be sure of what is the default in the first place.

              Second, one of the most common criticisms carried against open source developers is the tendency to provide too many configuration choices to end-users instead of streamlining the interface, which leads to creation of footguns.

              Making it so easy to browse by all is one such footgun.

              These “lemmy community syncing” tools is also a footgun. The people running those scripts are basically forcing all content from all communities to be copied across the instances. (curiously, if people were not running these scripts, the likelihood of them getting “hit” by alien.top would be quite small).

          • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11·
            1 year ago

            At least it will help against those who accidentally(or intentionally) say “just use Teddit”/other frontend.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              24·
              1 year ago

              Honestly those don’t bother me so much as the one that call it “spam bots”. I’ve spent so much time making sure that the bots only post the content that is relevant to a specific community, and I am going out of my way to make sure that no post is going to a community that does not approve of the bots, but somehow what I am doing is as bad as the script kiddie that was posting goatse-style pictures everywhere this weekend.

              • Jumuta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                I understand that your bots work for your use case, but it actively harms mine, and I’d happily call it spam.

                I call it spam not because the content being mirrored is low quality, but because there is little to no community interaction on the posts. I’d I wanted to just read news, I’d just go to my RSS reader. The only reason I use Lemmy is because I want to see others’ opinions on the posts.

                By the way, this isn’t me saying that it would be better if it had bidirectional bridging. If that was implemented, Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content. I don’t want that.

                Also, I use the All feed for discovering content, not because I don’t know about 3rd party community search tools, but because I don’t know what communities I like. The All feed allows me to find new communities that interest me, and I wouldn’t be able to find those communities just with those search tools.

                • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  there is little to no community interaction on the posts

                  You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.

                  I accept the criticism that people were feeling flooded by the mirrored content, this is why I turned them off for now. But I fail to see how it’s worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.

                  Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content

                  First, it’s not “Reddit content”. It’s about the content from the communities. Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there. The two-way interaction is an intermediate step to make it easy for people there to know they won’t be missing out by leaving their favorite subreddits and coming here.