alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨simple@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

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:

lemm.ee/u/pocalyuko@alien.top

lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top

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.

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Comments

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Shadow@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I personally hate all the reddit cross post stuff, and it seems like the majority of lemmy users do too. I don’t understand why people obsess over this as a way to “grow” lemmy.

It doesn’t contribute to active conversations, in fact it deters users who reply locally and then never get a response.

Just let lemmy grow organically by making good content and contributing, stop forcing it with mirrors from reddit.

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- NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.
  
  Just block communities and, where possible, instances.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Of all criticism I am hearing, this is by far the most misguided one.
    
    My goal with Communick is to become a mere service provider. I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves. Sure, I am doing the moderation now because they are not big enough, but if/when they become a real alternative to current subreddits, I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.
    
    If you don’t believe me, you can go the matrix channel used by the /r/selfhosted crowd during the protests. I offered them the selfhosted.forum instance for free. They didn’t take it.
    
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- Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yea people get drowned out by these bots and they feel less inclined to contribute. I know I was less likely to leave a comment on Reddit when there were already many comments. I was less likely to post on Reddit when a subreddit was already getting many posts. I post and comment more here on Lemmy because it doesn’t get drowned out. If we wanna grow then it needs to be natural, not via bots.
  
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  - Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    it’s unfortunate that I can’t keep the few good bots visible but there’s just too much bot spam now.
    
    As a moderator needing a daily thread created by a bot (!casualconversation@lemmy.world ) it is indeed annoying that a lot of people do not see it due to this.
    
    I got the bot banned a few weeks ago because I hadn’t flagged it as such. I could maybe reach out to the LW admins again, but got other stuff to deal with.
    
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- MamLaLiq@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I escaped Reddit some months ago. Every day the same video of trashy girls, equal rights equal fights and his wife too (and my axe).
  
  When I started I reacted on posts, but that was not a nice experience. I lurked and only downvoted posts that I thought were mean or hurtful.
  
  In a sub about knitting I found out they started here new. So I followed.
  
  I knit you not haha.
  
  I’m still shy to react, but the reactions I got were supernice and almost allways with some clausule like : “but that’s my two cents” and that feels very comforting.
  
  What I would like is more comments on posts. I would love to follow and perhaps engage with lots of people with different knowledge and views.
  
  I miss the Wiki-dive, often multiple times on 1 post.
  
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- nocturne213@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A while back I tried going to alien.top to as what the site was about and my adblocker completely blocked it. That was a sure sign I did not need to visit.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Alien.top itself is just a standard Lemmy instance. I could believe it if you said it was timing out (as it had a 5 day outage a couple of weeks ago) but to claim there are any ads or trackers there is a simple, verifiable lie.
    
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wintermute@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Defederated. What a waste of resources.

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- remotelove@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Image
  
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walden@sub.wetshaving.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The worst part is when I spend time replying to a question, later to realize the OP will never see it.

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- squiblet@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I fell for that a few times. Then I realized these were communities on instances that had like 40 million posts all from people from Alien who had a Lemmy history consisting of one post and no comments.
  
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- sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Exactly this. I didn’t notice the bot icon the first time I saw alien.top, and wasted time responding.
  
  I’ve blocked the instance from my client.
  
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Wahots@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m honestly so sick of bots on this website. Nobody even comments, it’s just junk that then dilutes the actual communities posting in c/all. I’d love to have a way to block all memes, porn, and bot posts just so I could actually discover new communities here instead of AI redhead pussy, bots crossposting stale linux memes, and old reddit help threads with 0 comments because they are asking for help on a different site.

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- jol@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, why would anyone comment in a crosapoat. Feels weird when the OP is not even here. I started blocking communities that mostly crosspost.
  
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  - Corgana@startrek.website ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Right? There is an argument to be made for bot-submitted content to be used for jumpstarting news-oriented communities (the kind that are essentially RSS feeds with comments). But anything else just feels like speaking into the void.
    
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- antik@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can disable bot accounts in your settings so at least those don’t show up in your feed.
  
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  - Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, but this also blocks helpful bots, for example link converters. I’d like to block the x-post spam but keep the utility from other bots.
    
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- Masimatutu@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can block both NSFW and bot posts in your account settings. I do the former, but I don’t want to miss out on the good bots so I just block the bad ones individually. Then, memes usually stay in the meme communities and it is quite easy to block those.
  
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  - Wahots@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Huh, good to know. I might actually do that. I usually use an app, so I dunno if those settings are exposed in-app.
    
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  - nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    there are plenty of communities with useful content that are also plagued with pointless unfunny garbage memes
    
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- nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I would very much like to be able to block any post that links to an image
  
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  - smeg@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think the Summit client for android can do this
    
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- Texas_Hangover@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Where the AI redhead pussy at?
  
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  - Wahots@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There’s a bunch in c/all, lol. Some of it okay, some just straight up not great. Eventually c/all runs out of topics and just starts injecting nsfw posts from subs.
    
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HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
God I can’t wait until instance blocking because this kind of drama is just soooo very tiring.

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- Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This exists in Sync for Lemmy. I couldn’t live without it tbh.
  
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  - LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s doable in Boost, too.
    
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- onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If I’m not mistaken, they are going to release that feature soon on the default lemmy client.
  
  The backend will support it github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869 but I can’t find the corresponding frontend PR or issue
  
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  - Salix@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2144
    
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- netburnr@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Connect client can do this
  
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rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Well, it clearly seems that this experiment is failing, but not for any reason I was expecting…

Fediverser is first and foremost a set of tools to help people migrate away from Reddit. I was not expecting so many “if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit”. I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit, or maybe to what I am doing and only using it to spread awareness of the alternatives. I thought that it was understood that the problem with Reddit was on management, not with Reddit users. I thought that people liked the content from their niche subs, and I thought that people were willing to help others to move to a newer alternative, free of Big Tech and centralized corporate control. It doesn’t seem to be the case. For all the talk about community and all the people crying against Spez, it seems that Slacktivism is still the dominant ideology of social networks.

Fediverser is very specific about what subreddits are being mirrored and into what communities the content is going to. To talk about “spam” honestly makes very little sense to me, until I realized that there are so many people browsing via “all”. I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.

People were feeling “tricked” into responding. That’s on me. My work on two-way communication is going a bit slower than I was hoping for and I thought that marking accounts as bots was enough, but clearly the UX is failing to make this noticeable.

With all that said, I will retire the bots until I deliver on my promise to make two-way communication work and/or I have better tools at fediverser.network to help community promotion.
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- thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I get that you saw a perceived problem and you’re trying to fix it. I get that what you’ve built is cool on a technical level and it probably feels really terrible to have people be so negative about it. So first of all, none of this is personal at all. But I feel this comment illustrates exactly where the problem lies.
  
  You want to “help people migrate away from Reddit”. But I’m not sure what makes you think people need “help” at all, I mean if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform. I was a heavy Reddit user and was in plenty of tiny niche subreddits, but so what? I wanted to leave so I left.
  
  So maybe the real problem is that so many people don’t want to leave Reddit, and that disappoints you, and you want to try and convince them that they do? This I could definitely understand, but trying to convince someone you know what they want better than they do themselves is not generally a great tactic.
  
  Most people will just stick with whatever the “best” platform is in terms of showing them content they want to see, and are slow to move to the next thing once the one they’re on starts sucking. So if you really want to put your dev skills to use it would make more sense to get stuck in with Lemmy itself and help increase the pace of improvements. A lot of us are happy here, but a lot of people also bounced off due to the jank. And the more we can reduce that bounce rate, the more we can keep people around, the more we’re in a position to capitalise whenever the next big wave of newbies hits.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you for the effort to understand my perspective. It’s much appreciated.
    
    You are definitely right in a lot of your assessment. I am disappointed at the sheer amount of people who claimed to want to leave Reddit but never took any action about it. I am disappointed at mods who were all protesting about the changes but when push comes to shove, the large majority of them simply were afraid of giving up and losing their “power”. I absolutely agree that any approach that ends up patronizing users and telling them how awful their choices are will cause them to be more resistant to change and aligned with the status quo.
    
    The one part that I strongly disagree is the notion that “if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform”: Social media (as we know it, with centralized control by a handful of corporations) is made to be as addictive as the most powerful drugs, and peer pressure is one of the strong behavior-regulating forces.
    
    We can not wait until “things start to suck”, because by then people will more likely than not just move on to the next crappy corporate-controlled media. What I believe is that we need a coordinated effort and that we need to act as an intolerant minority to fight against it. And I know that I am not getting everything right off the bat, but I hope that at least I can gather enough support to make this a credible threat to the status quo.
    
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- simple@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thank you.
  
  It doesn’t seem like you understood why people are upset though. Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All. Dare I say most Lemmy users do this. Making repost bots actively harms “real” post discoverability and makes browsing content difficult. Not to mention most reposted content is very superficial, and most of these text postd have zero value when there’s no interaction.
  
  I was not expecting so many “if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit”.
  
  No, we’re saying if you want to see Reddit content you should host an alternate frontend like teddit.net or go to a dedicated place to view that content. Hosting it on Lemmy makes little sense because…
  
  You are stressing out every Lemmy instance by making so many posts and comments a minute
  
  There’s no way to opt-in, so a lot of these posts are making its way to people’s feeds without consent and people aren’t interested in seeing it, which is why most people are upset
  
  It’s actively making the new user experience worse because it feels like there’s too much botspam and someone who’s brand new won’t understand what’s going on.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So far, the reasons that people claim to be upset has more to do with their own ignorance of the current state of affairs than something harmful being done by fediverser or alien.top.
    
    And I don’t mean ignorance as a pejorative. I mean it that I have failed to communicate and educate people about the strategy and plan for fediverser.
    
    To illustrate the point:
    
    Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
    
    That’s not true. There is browse.feddit.de and fediverser.project. There are communities about new communities. You can browse an user profile to see what communities they subscribe to. All of these are better methods to find new content than browsing “all”.
    
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
    
    *discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn’t know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.
    
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- Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just don’t, repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience. We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.
    
    One of the things that I truly despise is the use of the “Royal We”. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to make it sound like your opinion and your preference is an universal truth. It’s quite simple to disprove that what you want is not necessarily what everyone else wants.
    
    For example:
    
    repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience.
    
    Thanks to mirrors, I could simply get rid of all the 40+ subreddits that I used to subscribe to lurk around. E.g, I don’t to participate in discussions on /r/soccer, but I do like to follow some of the discussions and I do like having the posts to see game highlights, match threads, etc.
    
    Mirrors allow us to have content protected and out of Reddit’s control. If Reddit decides to tighten up their grip on the API even more, the mirrored content will be already safe from their hands.
    
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Creators of some federated network disagree with you
    
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- rustyriffs@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.
  
  I typically browse subscribed until I’m seeing posts I’ve already viewed. I occasionally switch to all to see if I will find any new content/ communities to subscribe to. How do you typically do it?
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If I ran out of content to see, I take it as a sign that I should go back to work…
    
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- limelight79@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I follow a sub that’s all reposts from reddit. Occasionally I think about replying to something, but then I just go, “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.” I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else respond to any of the crossposts, either. The community is c/bicycletouring@lemmit.online if anyone is curious, which is a pretty niche topic to start with.
  
  I’m not convinced it’s adding anything to the Lemmy experience, but at least those are clearly marked as crossposts and are all posted by one account, so it’s easy enough to ignore if I wanted.
  
  On the “all” thing - remember that reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. In this mode, you’d get popular posts on subs that had opted in to allowing them to hit that page (or didn’t opt out, I don’t remember).
  
  /r/hockey is a good example - their posts usually generally stayed in the sub, but their Super Bowl post (and occasionally others) would usually hit reddit’s front page and bring in a ton of people who weren’t subbed to /r/hockey.
  
  This was a good feature of reddit, I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
  
  It’s possible I misunderstood your last goal, but if you’re planning to have Lemmy comments posted back to reddit, I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with reddit’s admins after they figure it out.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.”
    
    Please don’t ever feel discourage by contributing content to the network, if you think the contribution is positive.
    
    There are other people there. Just check the number of subscribers to get an idea of at least how many people could be reached by your post.
    
    Your comment there can act as a catalyst for other Lemmy users to join in and participate.
    
    Having content on Lemmy that is not available on Reddit creates a positive asymmetry in our favor, and it creates an incentive for people on Reddit to migrate here.
    
    reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. (…) I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
    
    I agree, and it doesn’t even need to be on Lemmy backend. I firmly believe that everything related to content filtering and even algorithmic choices should be part of the client, not the server.
    
    We can have an (mobile/web) app that takes all of the firehose and does the filtering in the client.
    
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- uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For those who downvote you I suggest to downvote Matrix too
  
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wow. Didn’t expect 5 users to actually downvote. If people who did it also claim that they came here to leave reddit and belive in fediverse, but hate Matrix - mainstream fediverse instant messaging protocol and one of default lemmy profile fields, I would like to read how they came up with such bizzare and self-contradictory combination of ideas.
    
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- SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I just want to chime in that I agree with you. The number of people who are browsing “all” on a large server like Lemmy.world and then complaining about content they don’t want to see is way too high.
  
  You don’t want to see it, don’t browse “all” or accept that someone does want to see that content.
  
  If you think it’s the “will of the people” petition your server admin to block it. Or move to a server where it’s blocked.
  
  You don’t need to shit on this guy because you don’t like their project. It’s easily avoidable.
  
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  - Surreal@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You can’t tell people to not browse all. How will small communities reach new users if new users don’t browse all?
    
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- min_fapper@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ooooh. This is exactly what I want, and I want to help you make things better!
  
  I’d like to brainstorm ways of making it opt-in, and making it discoverable without being spammy.
  
  What do you use to coordinate code contributors to your project? Do you have a matrix channel?
  
  PS: I don’t think you need to focus that hard on making it two way. What you’ve implemented so far is already useful. There are some porn subreddits I used to go to when I’m horny, and let me tell you that comments are absolutely not necessary!
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Rule 34 strikes again. :)
    
    No matrix channel yet, but you can take a look at github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser. If you know your way around Docker it should be easy to get started.
    
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- DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Honestly mate, you’re the worst part of the fediverse.
  
  Anyone over 16 can see that you’re actively harming the growth of lemmy communities, but you don’t want to hear that because you’ve found an audience to inflict your help on.
  
  I’m sure I’ve had this same argument with you and / or others of your ilk in the past, ad nauseam. The only solution is to support instances that defederate from you degenerates.
  
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  - Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    from you degenerates.
    
    Is this really necessary?
    
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- can@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit,
  
  I did
  
  I didn’t mind some of your bots as I theory maybe one of the communities would be useful. But none of the ones I’d have wanted seem to appear in my feed.
  
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  - Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You have to ask the project creator if you want to add a community, they would set up the bridge.
    
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- mystik@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I worry too – if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot? Given their reasons for turning the screws on API and other policy changes, they may not take kindly to having “their” content re-posted elsewhere, let alone to a system designed specifically to escape reddit.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot
    
    Then mission. fucking. accomplished..
    
    If this gets significant uptake, it will mean that the Fediverse has enough people to the point that the mirrors are not needed and network effects will be large enough to get other people interested/invested in Lemmy to the point where they will sign up even if takes some effort.
    
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ZeroCool@feddit.ch ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
User level instance blocking in Lemmy v0.19 cannot come soon enough… I hate that instance and their reddit spam. Seriously, screw the jackass running that instance. If I wanted to see the front page of reddit I’d go to reddit. You aren’t helping Lemmy grow, you’re just a spammer.

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- uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  If I wanted to see the front page of reddit I’d go to reddit
  
  This is the only way to see it for now. Bridge doesn’t show “the front page of reddit”.
  
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antik@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lemmy World defederated as soon as we became aware of this instance.

It is created by @rglullis@communick.news who said this was something requested by many but we really didn’t see the advantage of it.

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- nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As instance admins we can defederate from other instances so their content doesn’t hit our servers and vice versa.
    
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Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
this shit is pointless. defederated

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jacktherippah@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thankfully lemmy.world defederated a long time ago.

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MargotRobbie@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@rglullis@communick.news, let me break it down to you as simply as I can:

Reddit comments are copyrighted material.

Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.

Scraping and mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor, therefore, is copyright violation, and is illegal.

You don’t even have plausible deniability because you outright admitted, multiple times, that you are mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor.

Reddit’s army of lawyers can find you through your domain registrar, and will make an example out of you.

Every instance that federates with yours can also get sued for hosting copyrighted material.

Please stop.
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- smeg@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wasn’t reddit trying to claim that they own everyone’s comments pretty universally decried? As in the reason half of us are here is because they decided they owned everyone’s comments (so they could sell it to the AI trainers) and users said ‘fuck off, it’s my comment and I’ll delete it’. There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?
  
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  - MargotRobbie@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Directly from Reddit’s user agreement when you sign up for an account there.
    
    You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.
    
    So like it or not, they have the rights to whatever you post there already.
    
    There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?
    
    Because these were noninteractive front ends, none of them with a creator who is insane enough to publicly declares that they are scraping reddit to start a competitor and explicitly to harm reddit’s financial interests.
    
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- uis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wow, great fearmongering
  
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thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The person who runs this whole thing was in here recently with a new “recommended alternatives to subreddits” tool. Conveniently failing to mention that the recommended communities they’d seeded it with were full of bots. So clearly given they weren’t up front at all in that post they’re aware it’s not an appealing prospect to most people but are attempting to trick us into joining and talking into a bot-void anyway.

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iso@lemy.lol ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not just spam, it is also using system resources as high as big instances. I just defederated from it.

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remotelove@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Can you please add a note to your original comment please?

alien.top misreports its instance name and can confuse client blocks. In some cases you have to manually add “selfhosted.forum” for blocks to work correctly. I know this is an issue with Lemmy Connect specifically and I have left a note for the dev about this. If alien.top is misreporting its name, it could cause issues for other clients.

I requested my home instance (lemmy.ca) defederate from alien.top, but my cries went unanswered.

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CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Are the fake users registered as bots?

If not, then that’s a really good case for defederation.

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amio@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It’s an instance that crossposts posts from Reddit, except it also makes a new user for each Reddit account it came from.

Impressively stupid, if I'm honest. I wonder what the hell happened to make anyone on the planet think of that bit of genius.

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LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Agreed, this should be banned…

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farcaster@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I hope instance admins can clean up their databases from this stuff, because I suspect these Reddit mirroring bots take up enormous amounts of database storage on popular instances once all those posts get pushed there.

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Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This has been absolutely beyond infuriating I can’t even block it properly from Connect. Agreed this is nothing but pollution spam

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Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You can copy and cross post from reddit but it should be done by a person. If I see something cool on reddit I can post it here but I’m not going to post 100 things from reddit and dominate a community like a bot would.

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mojo@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m sure they mean well, but it’s annoying

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Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ultimately that will always be the case. This is just one example, but there’s a million ways things can end up mirrored from various services. There will be torrent instances and porn instances and whatnot. With the way the fediverse works, you have to protect yourself from spam and bad content. The problem is the inability to filter it out, which thankfully Lemmy 0.19 now has: you can now block whole instances as a user.

But also generally, don’t use All. It will always have random crap you don’t want, especially as some instances use a bot to subscribe to everything. My test community has 74 subscribers, 72 of which are those bots. This means my random test crap ends up on All of lemmy.world and there ain’t much I can do about that other than marking it NSFW so it doesn’t show up to guests. The All listing sounds appealing at first and maybe it made some sense on Reddit, but on Lemmy it kinda doesn’t work. Especially when non-english communities will take off, a good chunk of All may end up being in a language you can’t even read.

Honestly a better fix for this would be custom feeds, or a way for admins to curate the contents of All without having to pull out the nuclear weapons and defederate.

I can see why some people would actually want a readonly Reddit mirror. Like, maybe there’s a community you used to follow but never write to but don’t want to have to use the Reddit app for. I understand why that’d be a minority of users, but clearly there’s enough demand for it that it’s a thing and there’s even plans for implementing two-way bridging. Or if anything, tinkering with such a thing is a very fediverse thing to do. We shouldn’t blame the instance for existing but the lack of tools to manage their existence.

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InquisitiveApathy@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally I just block the entire community if all posts are made up of Reddit mirrors. If that’s all the posts that are there, that’s probably all there ever will be. It just clutters up my feed otherwise. There are a handful of lower post volume communities that I have mild interest in that I’ve let slide but it seems to have worked well so far.

All the options are pretty much all or nothing at this point. You can block the community the bot is posting to or disable bot posts being visible in entirety in your settings.

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Yukito01@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I was fine with the helpful bots here and there, but if someone is going to abuse it like this may as well just ignore them all. This is why we can’t have good things.

I remember reading in some other post there was a global setting in the Voyager app to block all bots, but I cannot find it now. Does anyone know where?

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squiblet@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The author of Fediverser says that eventually it will be a 2-way crossposter between reddit and Lemmy, but I don't see the use in that - so it makes lemmy into reddit? Or like the entire site into a 3rd party reddit app, which reddit doesn't want and would never tolerate? For now I was like okay, it sounded like the posts were from people who explicitly signed up, but then it seems that no, they automatically make accounts for posts on subs they're duplicating which is like, what?? The people on reddit don't even know that their posts are being duplicated to lemmy, so how does that help?

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Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Agreed it’s just pollution

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kpw@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I like it. I was looking for a Reddit client anyways. Now let's give users the ability to block domains like on Mastodon and everyone is happy.

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Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Agreed. I really dislike the Reddit spam, but I’ll give credit to whoever made it for trying. The creator’s intentions were noble, like trying to recreate how facebook got big, by making people feel not disconnected from MySpace.

However the fact it’s only one way integration (and the wrong direction), it’s a resource headache for all federating instances for little genuine interaction, it’s difficult to block due to being from many users (until the 0.19 instance blocking feature arrives) is all very problematic.

It singlehandedly makes Lemmy feel like a place devoid of any real community from the outside, and just a Reddit mirror.

Bots and even Reddit reposter bots have a place (@reddit_sales_repost_bot@lemmy.ca is one I am very glad to have to not miss any sales, feel free to block). We still need to have standards so that our limited volunteer resources are used effectively.

Bots need to:

Have a targeted and specific purpose

Be easy to block for anyone not interested
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TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thanks for letting me know, I’ll block that instance

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Sanyanov@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think a defederated instance could be made containing all of that. Lemmy makes it extremely easy to switch accounts between instances, so those in need of Reddit on Lemmy can use another profile without spamming all of Lemmy.

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