Regarding “Reddit users have no control over the mirror”. I’d argue that they do have a way to delete the content from Lemmy and it’s quite simple. Any user that has been mirrored by alien.top needs to do the following:
When Google and company do “opt-out” features that people are forced into using unless they manually opt-out (usually with long and convoluted procedures that aren’t front and centre in the docs), they are (rightly) excoriated for it.
Thankfully you don’t have long and convoluted procedures to opt out…
- Sign up via the portal to take over the bot account.
- Login to the instance using the password provided.
- Delete all their posts.
… Oops.
Rethink this if you don’t want really serious backlash. This is almost the textbook case of how not to do features.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Does the archive team ask permission from users before crawling data?
If you put a website and don’t set up a robots.txt file, does it still get indexed by Google? IOW, isn’t it “opt-out”?
If you ever posted a question on StackOverflow, did you have to give explicit permission to have your data pushed to their data exports? Can you ask to have it removed?
Google gets (rightfully) a ton of shit when they violate users privacy. What “privacy” is being violated here, when the data is on a public network and it can be crawled even without access to the API?
ttmrichter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“Other people do this obnoxious thing so it’s OK if we do this obnoxious thing” isn’t the moral killing point you seem to think it is.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
What is exactly “obnoxious” about search engines crawling public data?
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The biggest problem I see right now is with deleted and removed content.
Generally there is a reason for why someone would want to delete/remove something on Reddit.
If someone posts something that should be removed (spam, illegal content, hateful content), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here. If someone deletes a post/comment on Reddit (they’re getting harassed, they accidentally shared personal info, stalkers), it shouldn’t stay mirrored here.
A chunk of my moderation experience is from a university subreddit where stuff like that DOES happen, putting a real person at risk.
I like this idea and want it to succeed, and this is a concern for me. I don’t know about the legality/liability, but I think even Google updates their caches when stuff is deleted and tools like ceddit/removeddit/reveddit don’t let you see stuff that’s deleted by the user.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
This is a different problem than requiring opt-in to have the mirror started and I fully sympathize. The technical challenge for this is mostly the lack of bandwidth to periodically check for all the posts that ended up being mirrored. To illustrate, alien.top alone already has pushed over 1M comments since it started running a couple of months ago.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, and I think that it’s one that could be solved client-side - e.g, a modified Lemmy client could identify mirror posts and comments and check the original reddit link - or worst-case scenario we could check every day for changes in some percentage of past comments every day to see if there is anything that needs to be updated.
ttmrichter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
(Incidentally, my issue is the other direction. I don’t want my content over on Reddit. I don’t have a Reddit account. I’ve never had a Reddit account. I don’t ever want to have a Reddit account. And, get this, I don’t want my stuff showing up on Reddit.)
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Oh, no worries about that! The only part that is opt-out is on the reddit -> lemmy mirror. I will only be able to do two-way communication if there is a proper authorization from the user. :)
ttmrichter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Then perhaps make the opt-out process better and easier? Requiring people who want to opt out to sign into a completely different service and then manually delete messages fully qualifies as “obnoxious”.