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Comment on An alternative perspective on Alien.top and the Fediverser project

shrugal@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is a pretty simple thing imo.

I’m here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human’s knowledge or consent is not “made by a human” anymore as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse after a certain threshold, and we reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it’s fine If it attracts more people and it’s fine if it doesn’t. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns, and answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the “fake bot social network”.

So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don’t fill it with bot content just to look like the real thing on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, not only in the short term.

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HubertManne@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
this comes very close to anything I would have to say about it.

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rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
i’m here to read posts by and talk to humans

We read a lot more than we talk, or at least I hope that we do so. Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?

Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?

I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo.

That can only possibly be true if your niches are so extreme that you and your peers are ostracized by the mainstream channels or if you have no niche interest whatsoever.

Anything in between is completely non-existent in the Fediverse. Take a look at any subreddit aside after the top 250, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a corresponding Lemmy community, and even if you do manage to find them I’ll give you 100:1 odds to they dead or in a zombie state.

The maker community is non-existent here.

The technology communities have nothing but the usual stream of anti-corporate news that gets a lot of clicks but does not bring any actionable to people.

Same thing for urban planners or those interested in sustainable development. If all you care about is getting shitty memes and having a circlejerk of people saying “look at that asshole because of his big car” then sure !fuckcars will be enough for you. If you want to have a community of people to get organized to see how they can improve their cities and making more human-scale development, you are SOL.

There was an instance for researchers in ML/AL that (I believe) was run by some serious people. The instance seems to be abandoned and the admins is back at posting at Reddit.

they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.

This is the same type of gatekeeping that makes sites like lobste.rs completely irrelevant. It may have a higher SNR in relation to something like hackernews, but at the end of the day what matters is the total amount of signal if the noise can be filtered properly.

Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived.

Yes, that is indeed a problem and unfortunately I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like. But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway? At the very least, your comment might be helpful to the other “real” users accessing the community. Also, the more real people start participating, the less the feeling of “ghost town” there is.

On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?

It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” in the same sense that we talk about “Twitter bots”. Twitter bots are created by someone with the intent of misinforming or giving the impression that some opinion is shared by a larger group of people. The alien.top “bots” are nothing like that. The content created by them is actually coming from a Reddit user and I am being very diligent about not mirroring anything on the popular subs. A lot of the spam is already filtered by Reddit itself and I honestly am getting less spam reports from alien.top accounts that I got from, e.g, lemmy.blahaj.zone.

The fediverse is so small, but so small, that alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months. So far, I know of only lemmy.world that decided to defederate with it. If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.

I’ve already disabled the bots, but if alien.top gets burned because of some stigma associated with them, I can create another fediverser instance that does only automated subscription to the proper communities, or I can add it to communick.news or any of the other 15 topic-based instances that I am running. I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.
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- shrugal@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?
  
  I specifically didn’t say that. Interaction is the obvious part in a human vs bot debate, but to me it also makes a difference if a human decided to post something somewhere, or if a bot is copying it without the human’s consent. If I’d just wanted posts I’d use an automated news aggregator instead.
  
  Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?
  
  We are talking about social media here, nothing in what I said applies to or takes away from books.
  
  That can only possibly be true […]
  
  Just pointing out that you’re trying to argue away my personal experience. I specifically didn’t say that this is a general rule, I said it’s how I experience it. But judging by the feedback to my post I’m not alone with this.
  
  This is the same type of gatekeeping […]
  
  This is by definition not gatekeeping, because I’m not trying to keep anybody out. People can come here for whatever reason as far as I’m concerned. What I said was that we should not change things specifically to try to attract people who mainly search for the biggest possible audience, and that is what you’re doing. Big difference.
  
  I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like […]
  
  That’s why I suggested to you a few weeks ago that you keep it small until you ironed out the kinks, idk if you remember. Experiments like yours are completely fine imo, as long as you make sure they don’t negatively affect the wider Lemmy community. But what you’ve been doing could be described as a full-scale bot attack on the Fediverse, and an excuse like that just doesn’t cut it in that case.
  
  But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway?
  
  My goal - as I said in the beginning - is not to help you with your project! I come here to interact with real humans right now. What you are doing is deputize other Lemmy users for your plan, even if that means making their experience here worse. They didn’t sign up for this, apparently many even disagree with it like I do, but you just don’t seem to care or at least accept it as a necessary sacrifice on their part!
  
  It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” […]
  
  I’m sorry, but you can’t shit in my mouth and tell me “It helps if you stop thinking about it as shit, instead think of it as chocolate cake”. Idk what fantasy world you managed to argue yourself into, but they are bots right now! As I said, it doesn’t matter that they are impersonating real humans, if anything it makes it even worse. And I don’t share your blind optimism for this project of yours, so that doesn’t change things either.
  
  […] alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months.
  
  Because you are faking statistics with bots! Please get this in your head for gods sake! I can create an instance with 100000000 fake users and posts with the push of a button, that doesn’t create any real user engagement or value.
  
  If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.
  
  What kind of f*cked up plan is that? You want your instances to become more popular than LW and split the majority Lemmy community in two? Do you actually read what you write?
  
  I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.
  
  Great, so you just keep bombarding Lemmy with bots, and you don’t care if you harm it in the process. And the people who already signed up through those burned instances just get thrown under the bus.
  
  Honestly, it seems to me like you’re so full of yourself or obsessed with your plan that you don’t actually realize the consequences of your actions anymore. Jurassic Park comes to mind: “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    The mirroring content is targeted at specific communities. You can not call it an “an attack on the network” if you are willingly staying in the front of the firehose.
    
    The posts are useful by themselves. You talk like I am creating a random text generator. You are pissed off at the fact that the you can not interact with the people, not at the quality of what they are writing. If you really can bring 1 million “bots” that can write something nearly as good as the content from the niche subreddits, by all means do it.
    
    I am not “fine with splitting the community”. What I said is that if LW continues with the defederation even if it becomes populated with real people, then it will be on LW for keeping isolated.
    
    “Sacrificing alien.top” means stopping with the bots and just implement the migration on another instance.
    
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    shrugal@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    The mirroring content is targeted at specific communities.
    
    It’s affecting the All feed of federated instances as well, and it affects everyone who might be interested in the topics.
    
    The posts are useful by themselves.
    
    If you can’t empasize with this then please just accept that it’s not just about the content inside the posts. The fact that a human decided to post it somewhere makes a difference, even without any further interactions.
    
    What I said is that if LW continues with the defederation even if it becomes populated with real people, then it will be on LW for keeping isolated.
    
    You decided to create an instance filled with bots and then motivated new users to convert some into real accounts. You created the situation where other instances have to also ban those users if they want to get rid of all the bots. This is purely on you! You can’t set a house on fire and then blame others for the water everywhere.
    
    “Sacrificing alien.top” means stopping with the bots and just implement the migration on another instance.
    
    Yea, so everyone who converted their account until then would be left on an instance filled with bots, and banned for that by at least LW. Great job!
    
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- Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  The fediverse is so small, but so small, that alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months.
  
  That’s impressive actually
  
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  - shrugal@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s not, those are bots and content copied from reddit. It doesn’t represent any real user engagement.
    
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    Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I mean, you are correct, but what I meant is that I had forgotten how small we were compared to even a bunch of medium subreddits
    
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