Comment on alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam
rglullis@communick.news 11 months agoI guess if you just link the images from Reddit it’s not that computationally intensive
The images are actually copied to the mirrored server.
Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy,
It’s not that simple to do that per user. You’d need:
- An actual Reddit client per user
- A Lemmy client with OAuth support so that the bridges don’t need to hold the user’s password.
- An “official” map of reddit-to-lemmy communities, so that we know where to point all those bridges for posts. I’m working on such map, but I really don’t want to call it official unless it gets significant community support.
Is the opt-out solution aggressive? Yes, no doubt. But I thought that this “aggression” was pointed to Reddit and therefore justifiable. The whole reason that this approach forces its hand to be able to get the data is because Reddit API changes was a clear sign that they want to treat the data from the users as their own. The protests were not effective against this, and showed to Reddit that they can win any conflict against dissenting mods. If Reddit tracked back on their policies and showed to be a good steward of one of the most vast amount of user data, I wouldn’t be putting so much effort in this project.
If you can think of any other approach to make this work and is aligned with the clear goal of the project (make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit, in a way that those that come here can already find their niche communities) I’m all for trying it.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s really interesting, but why do you do that? Surely having the clients fetch the data from Reddit’s servers themselves would be easier?
I hate Reddit as a platform too, but I very much disagree with this philosophically. I don’t break the rules against the enemy because then the enemy would be allowed to break the rules against me. If we want to grow as a platform, we have to stay civilized. The one that fails to do that dies.
I think you misunderstood my idea about opt-out bridges. I meant that there should be a toggle for Lemmy users on Lemmy which mirrored/bridged content should be shown to them. These should be off by default, but easily changeable.
rglullis@communick.news 11 months ago
Easier? Yes. Reasonable? Not at all. Reddit wants to control all the data, the whole API fiasco started because they started to abuse their power, do you think they can trusted of stewards of social media data?
This is a fight, not a game. There are no rules. Do you think they care about rules when they started forcing moderators out of the protesting subs? Or lying about what Christian was asking during pricing negotiations? Or when they get mods working for them to do their bidding?
Let’s not be naive. They will leverage anything they have to get the upper hand. We are not going to win anything by pretending there is a higher moral ground to stand on.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The moral high ground is the ONLY thing we have. Lemmy as a platform exists to be a non-evil counterpart to Reddit. It would have no purpose to exist were it not for our better ethics.
rglullis@communick.news 11 months ago
It is the ethos of decentralized platforms (which can not by its very nature be controlled by any single entity) that makes them superior, not the individuals on it.
Also, the only way to claim what I am doing as “evil” is by accepting their premise that they own the data and that mirrors are “stealing” from them.