Comment on Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content?

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You are fixated on the bots. Don’t worry about them. The bot accounts are only needed to have a way to get people on reddit to migrate.

  The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances. It’s the admin that sets:

  • which subreddits to pull data from
  • which lemmy communities to push data to
  • what posts from what subreddits to push to.

  What people are failing to understand: the last point is not automated. The idea is not to get the firehose from reddit and unleash it on Lemmy. The idea is mostly to bring some automation to the process that I’ve been doing on all the different lemmy communities already where I was (a) browsing reddit just to seed content here and (b) sending DMs to people on reddit to let them know about the lemmy alternative.

  Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any “fediverser” instance.

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  • Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The real point here is that this tool is as spammy as the admin of mirror instances.

    I agree that technically the person using the bots is to blame, while I only ever see the bots, and never a person behind them. I don’t see what that changes about their behaviour though. You clarified the bots are not acting autonomously, a human decides how much they spam. I still have a problem with too much spam.

    Let me repeat: you will not see a flood of posts from bots coming from alien.top or any “fediverser” instance.

    How can you be so sure? We have precedent of bots making 800k posts per month. Apparently, bot admins exist who use these tools indiscriminately. Numbers go up, I guess.

    What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What measures do you as the creator take to prevent abuse? How can you prevent abuse, once another person gets their hands on it?

      It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it. But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests and (b) all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.

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      • Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it.

        Ok, so your previous assurances were completely unfounded. Maybe even worse, your reluctance to see how your tool could be misused gives little hope you would take steps to prevent that.

        all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.

        It’s still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot, or one instance. And some will not know how to, and leave Lemmy instead, which is exactly the opposite from your intent. Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse. Make the newsletter opt-in. Don’t force people to opt-out. Even more so since for each user who might enjoy that service, many more will suffer from it.

        Also, since you just clarified it’s free software and you have no power to prevent abuse, “all the bots are in the same instance” is nothing but a hope. From my point of view, it does not matter so much anyways. More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.

        But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests

        Since we already have a solid problem with spam bots, this does not seem to deter effectively. It’s strange but apparently it’s what people do with these bots.

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