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.

  • 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.