alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam
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:
https://lemm.ee/u/pocalyuko@alien.top
https://lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top
https://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.
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.
I wonder if we could get the top admins to threaten defederation with any instance that doesn't flag automated posts as bots. This way at least the users have some visibility.
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.
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.
That is painfully obvious
They are. They just aren't at the site you want their content to be on.
I want the programming communities to be on programming.dev. I want the adult communities to be on lemmynsfw. I want the nix community to be on nix-community. I want the Brazilian communities to be on lemmy.eco.br, like the italians on feddit.it or the Germans on feddit.de...
These communities already have their place, so there is no need to recreate them. But what about the communities that don't?
You are trying to paint my work in the worst possible light, as if I am trying to hijack the networks. Not only that is not true, it is against everything I stand for. And the really funny thing is that I already have written out quite a bit about how my "evil plan" is to get rid of ad-funded internet and that are alternative business models that can be more ethical without trying to capitalize on eyeballs.
A bit of cynicism can be good, just make sure it doesn't become paranoia.
And what you still seem to not understand:
Those communities don't want to be on those domains. So all you are doing is trying to force their hand because you think your desires override their autonomy.
I don't have to "paint (your) work in the worst possible light" because... you are doing that yourself.
Can you honestly say that the communities on reddit are on reddit due to their choice and absolute free will?
I would say that I would rather they make their own decisions rather than someone decide they know better and force their hands.
I too was a libertarian once. Then I grew up.
Into a selfish authoritarian?
Also, I was not aware that not forcing human beings to talk about video games in the space you decided they should makes me a libertarian. I guess I need to rethink my life?
Who is forcing anything, dear Lord?
The spaces are being created because there are no alternatives. If they don't want to use it and decide to love somewhere else, more power to them. Unlike Reddit, I am not able to kick out moderators and keep only those that pledge loyalty to me.
You know what? I think you've made all my points for me, repeatedly. Like, if anything I owe you for making my argument better than I could. So I'll just loop back to
Feel free to continue to reiterate my points for me while pretending you are refuting them.
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.
everyone do yourself a favor and go to your settings page and uncheck the option for "Show Bot Accounts", 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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you trying to access via http or https?
If you open https://portal.alien.top, do you see the same message?
I typed “alien.top” into my safari and that is what I got.
Then why does the URL show
portal.alien.top?I honestly don't know what to tell you. I'd like to investigate, but both Chrome and Firefox are normal.
I also have ublock installed, and it shows zero elements being blocked.
Can you simp any harder for this instance?
He is not simping, it's his instance so ofcourse he is giving his POV
Defederated. What a waste of resources.
The worst part is when I spend time replying to a question, later to realize the OP will never see it.
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.
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.
God I can't wait until instance blocking because this kind of drama is just soooo very tiring.
Edit: Clients that do that are great and all but I switch between desktop and phone too often for just a client-side solution on one of them.
This exists in Sync for Lemmy. I couldn't live without it tbh.
It's doable in Boost, too.
Also Summit for Lemmy can do this too.
As does Jerboa.
And Connect for Lemmy.
If I'm not mistaken, they are going to release that feature soon on the default lemmy client.
The backend will support it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869 but I can't find the corresponding frontend PR or issue
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2144
Oh, I wasn't aware that was accessible to users! Cool, thanks.
Dunno when they plan on releasing it.
Connect client can do this
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.
Yeah, why would anyone comment in a crosspost. Feels weird when the OP is not even here. I started blocking communities that mostly crosspost.
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.
You can disable bot accounts in your settings so at least those don't show up in your feed.
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.
Yeah, understandable. On Lemmy World we defederate with those kind of instances because we know most of our users don't want that stuff.
Luckily the next version of Lemmy is around the corner and then you should be able to block those instances yourself.
I would very much like to be able to block image posts
I think the Summit client for android can do this
Very cool thanks!
hell yes it does thanks for the gold kind stranger
Where the AI redhead pussy at?
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.
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.
this shit is pointless. defederated
Thankfully lemmy.world defederated a long time ago.
Agreed, screw the person running that instance. If I wanted to see the front page of reddit I'd go to reddit. They aren't helping Lemmy grow, they're just a spammer.
This is the only way to see it for now. Bridge doesn't show "the front page of reddit".
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.
Why would one even bother?
I get it if one was trying to farm karma and seek accounts but that makes no sense, here
@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.
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?
Directly from Reddit's user agreement when you sign up for an account there.
So like it or not, they have the rights to whatever you post there already.
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.
Fair point, though just because you put something in an EULA that doesn't make it enforceable or even legal. Explicitly stating that you want to take down the company isn't going to do you any favours though.
Wow, great fearmongering.
Also in some jurisdictions it is not only unenforceable, but straight illegal(Canada?).
Not just spam, it is also using system resources as high as big instances. I just defederated from it.
I wish someone made this integration in an app, that shows both Lemmy and Reddit feed, without an instance.
I think if creating an app with a reddit feed was that simple then half of us wouldn't be here!
lol you're right 😅
But there are some illegal methods to do it; This instance (alien.top) is an example of it. Some people even still using Apollo.
The problem is, these methods are simply not ideal. You cannot put your app to the stores, possible consequences of illegal usage etc. no body wants it.
Is it illegal? Against the terms of service, sure, they can revoke your API keys and block your IP and report you to Google/Apple but I don't think they can stop you.
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 do 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.
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.
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.
I don’t like your bots at all because I, like others, browse all. Lemmy is too small and inactive to stick to little groups. They also filled my feed with a disproportionate amount of stuff I don’t care about, like selfhosted.
The idea is genuinely interesting and the execution, especially the bridge to claim ownership of the bot account, is legitimately really cool. But until it’s not spammy— which may be never at the rate Lemmy is expanding, or lack of expansion— it’s going to meet significant resistance.
It’s weird because I really agree with you. Lowering the barrier to entry for leaving Reddit and porting over its discussions is great. People say they don’t want Reddit content, but honestly I doubt that. Hell, even having copies of the niche Reddit content would help fill out the fediverse’s lack of content. Sadly I don’t see this working at all without two way communication (which you would probably need proxies for). I’d be pretty surprised if you ever brought it back.
I particularly agree on the moral front. I disagree with Reddit the company and don’t care for the state of the internet. But I can’t see a barrier of entry low enough for people to actually stand up for themselves, so while I respect the effort and willingness to do something about your values, my faith in the remaining Reddit users is low enough that I really can’t see a universe where this works.
The addictiveness and the inertia factor are the two main ways to hold your user base to your product, very true.
Don't give up on what you're doing, keep working at it, refining. The vocal indigenous minority of any place don't handle change well, and tend to rescue defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Thank you for the encouraging words, and I hope that I can count on those like you to continue doing it.
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.
No, we're saying if you want to see Reddit content you should host an alternate frontend like https://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.
If there was some way to opt in it would be very cool and a great project, but the way it works now does more harm than good
*discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn't know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs (resource intensive, so to be used by admins only) can mitigate that issue
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:
That's not true. There is https://browse.feddit.de and https://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".
Until these are built into the UI, how is a user supposed to find them when they just want to start using Lemmy? They don't search for such sites, they browse all. The reason sites like reddit work is because they cater to the non-technical crowd.
You are thinking like a developer and not like someone worried about the user experience, this is not a dig but a key part of the problem. The root cause of users not coming to Lemmy in the thousands is the UX. Fix it and normies can use it and post content themselves.
By going to /communities and subscribing to the communities that might be of interest?
Seriously, there is no excuse to justify browsing by all.
Yeah but which community on which instance, seriously are you trying to seem so dense? How to make this easy for normies?
People come to lemmy.world but the best community for topic XYZ might not be here so this is the whole point of ALL.
Just because you don't do something doesn't mean there is no point, your viewpoint is obviously a minority view.
Check "All" to see all communities and subscribe to the ones that might be interesting to you.
https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E20/PChZXI_AUusv2qr-ofjGY6alRKY=.gif
You should care about the amount of downvotes on this one
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !newcommunities@lemmy.world
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.
Creators of some federated network disagree with you
Reddit is actively working to wall their garden though.
That's why mentioned federatied network bridges store all bridged messages on instance with all the metadata. This is same: bridged posts and comments are stored with metadata. So even if reddit will nuke bridge, already bridged posts will stay.
This also reduces switching cost from reddit to lemmy and turns lemmy into "continue conversation here" button. And according to guy who defined enshittification, low switching cost is how social networks gather TONS of people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
according to guy who defined enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ok but then instead of encouraging people to Lemmy you are encouraging to matrix which will have the same issue bridging to Reddit.
Seems like another bad solution.
I'm not sure what you are implying. I was just saying that alien.top is just like bridge in matrix, why it is better to store data on instance instead of fetching it every time like frontend does and how it helps Lemmy get users.
I think we're agreeing in that its not helpful for Lemmy.
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:
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.
I think you are confusing people here by saying mirror. They think about it as another frontend.
I suggest to use Matrix terms. Here what you have would be one-way bridging
The people complaining can't even understand the concept of curating their own feed, do you think they will understand if we start talking about bridges and double-puppets?
Asking someone to stop spamming is a form of curation.
First you need to make a convincing argument that this is any type of "spamming".
Then you need to explain why you can only curate your feed by looking at their firehose, when there are far more other effective filters in place.
Seems odd to claim that people don’t understand the concept of using Subscribed to filter their feed, when they’ve made a conscious choice to change from the default to All. It seems you don’t understand the concept of browsing “All” or why people would choose that.
First, the default listing is set by the instance administrator so we can't be sure of what is the default in the first place.
Second, one of the most common criticisms carried against open source developers is the tendency to provide too many configuration choices to end-users instead of streamlining the interface, which leads to creation of footguns.
Making it so easy to browse by all is one such footgun.
These "lemmy community syncing" tools is also a footgun. The people running those scripts are basically forcing all content from all communities to be copied across the instances. (curiously, if people were not running these scripts, the likelihood of them getting "hit" by alien.top would be quite small).
At least it will help against those who accidentally(or intentionally) say "just use Teddit"/other frontend.
Honestly those don't bother me so much as the one that call it "spam bots". I've spent so much time making sure that the bots only post the content that is relevant to a specific community, and I am going out of my way to make sure that no post is going to a community that does not approve of the bots, but somehow what I am doing is as bad as the script kiddie that was posting goatse-style pictures everywhere this weekend.
I understand that your bots work for your use case, but it actively harms mine, and I'd happily call it spam.
I call it spam not because the content being mirrored is low quality, but because there is little to no community interaction on the posts. I'd I wanted to just read news, I'd just go to my RSS reader. The only reason I use Lemmy is because I want to see others' opinions on the posts.
By the way, this isn't me saying that it would be better if it had bidirectional bridging. If that was implemented, Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content. I don't want that.
Also, I use the All feed for discovering content, not because I don't know about 3rd party community search tools, but because I don't know what communities I like. The All feed allows me to find new communities that interest me, and I wouldn't be able to find those communities just with those search tools.
You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.
I accept the criticism that people were feeling flooded by the mirrored content, this is why I turned them off for now. But I fail to see how it's worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.
First, it's not "Reddit content". It's about the content from the communities. Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there. The two-way interaction is an intermediate step to make it easy for people there to know they won't be missing out by leaving their favorite subreddits and coming here.
Yes, but they're fine in my opinion as they don't clutter up my All feed. I personally wish there were active Kerbal Space Program and Rain World communities, but they don't exist because there aren't sufficient members. It's just not sustainable currently, and mirrored posts would not fix it.
My reason for saying that this is worse is not because I can't talk with the original poster. it's very hard for me to word this in the exact way I want to, but it's a combination of the original poster not consenting to / willfully posting the content on Lemmy making it feel intrusive, and me appreciating the human effort behind the post, not the post itself. It's the same reason I don't talk to LLMs like ChatGPT to pass time. I just don't appreciate it for some reason.
Sure, the content is not tied to Reddit that much, but they might for example have references to other subreddits, their tags, and Reddit users. Because content on Reddit is made to be on Reddit, unless Lemmy is made exactly to mimic Reddit (which I don't want btw), you are always going to have a worse experience browsing Reddit content on Lemmy, than browsing Reddit content on Reddit. This isn't just a problem with Lemmy-Reddit bridging btw, it's also a problem with all the Matrix bridges and stuff like that.
That might be useful for some people, but it's not for me. The communities I want that aren't on Lemmy are extremely niche. No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (and I don't want this btw) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements, and so everyone's small niche communities won't be bridged. Personally, I found these mirroring bots to be a nuisance in my early days on Lemmy, and slightly reminisce for when they weren't a thing yet. So in my opinion, these bots hurt the migration experience, and Lemmy would be better without it
If this bridging was an opt-in system, I'd be fine with it. But because it's currently an opt-out system, and an opt-out system where you have to block hundreds of accounts, I really don't like it. 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, and I'd be fine with these mirror/bridge bots then. This is sort of like how it works on Matrix, and I like the bridging there. But with the current circumstances on Lemmy, I don't like the mirror/bridge bots.
Sorry for the wall of text btw, but these are my opinions and I wanted to state them clearly.
And this is exactly the communities that fediverser wants to bring!
Reddit's moat is not on the popular content, it's in the long tail. Reddit knows that people on /r/politics or /r/gifs are mostly to pad their numbers, but their real strength is that you can not find people to talk about Kerbal Space Program and Rain World outside of Reddit.
These "extremely niche" communities are the ones that are being held by network effects. These are the communities that I'd like to have on fediverser.network, and these are the communities that I wish we could get coordinated enough to pull away from Reddit.
alien.top was mirroring about 150 subreddits for two months, most of them of the niche type. The database of "1M comments" is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It's running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.
If we focus on the long tail, it is not that expensive. And by the time that we actually start getting bigger number of users, I'm sure that we can come up with different strategies to deal with the data. We can create a common pool of resources for shared storage, we can divide the instances in "topic-based" and "user-home" (like I've been doing with communick.news and the ones on !communick_news_network@communick.news), etc.
Why shouldn't at least try to do it?
I guess if you just link the images from Reddit it's not that computationally intensive. I very much doubt that Reddit is going to let this slide if Lemmy ever gets that big though.
Because there are things to lose, and this isn't a risk-free process. I expanded more on my reasoning in my last paragraph:
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?
If I ran out of content to see, I take it as a sign that I should go back to work...
I'm never on here during work. Even if I was, that point is pretty unhelpful. I think it's a normal thing for people to want an unlimited supply of content, as that's what we've gotten used to and that's what these websites are for. What's it to you, to dictate how I want to use my time? Whether this behavior is a good or bad thing is another argument. I think the limited content supply here is a concession that most people have accepted on Lemmy, but I also think that it's possible that it wouldn't have to be a concession as the platforms grow and get better.
Sorry, I meant it as a joke. Clearly it didn't land.
To give you a serious answer, I think that the point is in understanding that "All" will always be an unfiltered firehose. If the issue is that you are running out of content in the communities you subscribe and that represent your interest, then we need to find ways to increase the amount of content here instead of chasing another fix by going to "All".
In a way, this is exactly something that the mirrored content from fediverser could also help, and also another reason that I don't understand why people complain about "spam". The content from alien.top mirrored is ending up at a community that you subscribe, it is far more likely for that content to be interesting to you than a random post from a community that you do not subscribe.
Re: "finding out new communities to follow": that's also part of the Fediverser Project. The idea is to build a crowdsourced map of Lemmy communities to be recommended as the alternative to any given subreddit.
That's a weird way of spelling "rotating through the same 4 apps until you're too tired to stay awake"
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.
Hey, do you also know the /c/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world community? I saw you posting about your trips on /c/bicycle@lemmy.ca and was wondering.
Bicycles is a really nice sub though, i like the vibe, was exclusively posting there about my trips too. On reddit i never subscribed to cycling subs other than touring and bikepacking, since that really is what i'm most interested in, in cycling. So i was kinda hyped to see some traffic in the touring c and kinda switched, even though i'm unsure if it even makes sense to split the cycling subs yet, Bicycles is quite low traffic too. But i somehow ended up with mod status in the touring sub, so i feel partly responsible for it.
No, I didn't, thanks for the tip. Subbed! I might drop the other one now.
I do miss /r/bicyclingcirclejerk. I loved the absurdly fake bragging and having fun with the stereotypes. Then one day we realized quite a few of us actually ride Cannondales, and that made it even funnier.
Yeah, for the cirklejerk sub it would make a lot of sense to have its own lemmy community, since it doesn't translate to other cycling subs.
That sub certainly gave me some good laughs, but i only checked it every now and then.
Yeah, sometimes it got a little nasty about other people on reddit, which I was never a fan of. It was supposed to be in good fun, but sometimes people got carried away OR people would start posting every single question that was asked. (For example, I can poke fun at the people who just started riding a bike in their 20s and are now wondering about getting into a professional racing career, but sometimes people would repost what I thought were completely valid questions - no one knows everything, especially when they're new to something. Fortunately those latter posts rarely got many upvotes or comments.)
Overall though it was generally a lot of fun. And honestly they were probably the most knowledgeable, helpful group if you had a detailed cycling question.
Please don't ever feel discouraged 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.
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.
Client-side filtering? Easy. Client-side sorting? Not easy.
Why?
Why hard? Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy's existance on every discovered lemmy instances, which depending on algo you are using, might include comments metadata. To aid client-side sorting you would need server-side filtering, which will limit data avaliable to sorting algo. For example client-side trending algo would not show old trending post because it was filtered out.
So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.
Why would you need all data to build the frontpage? Why not just make a sliding window with the content from the last 24/48h?
Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?
Exactly what I'm saying. To not be super resource-intensive, client-side sorting needs to be incomplete. As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.
Not much I guess(sounds like Thunderbird). But what about mobile?
Not necessarily true. You can build an index and keep a cache of the N posts by each sorting method. Your data store will grow linearly with the number of sorting criteria you will have, which should be small.
We are talking about an amount of data that a sqlite database process in a breeze. My K-9 email client can handle all my 20 years of gmail...
I can't believe two people downvoted your comment.
You're right about contributing.
As for the filtering, I'm not sure how I feel about that - I use the web interface on my computer and an app on my phone and tablet. I'd prefer them to have similar results. But I see the point you're making; it could be curated by user instead of a massive algorithm for everyone.
Thanks for the support, but I honestly stopped caring about downvotes. I think there is a vocal minority that is already set on not liking what I am doing, so they are going to vote me down even if I post a cure for cancer.
Fucking hell you are tone deaf. Your idea is fine. Your implementation sucks ass.
Did I see in another post where you told people to stop thinking of bots as bots and imagine they are real users because they might be one day, and then redefine what a bot was? Just stop.
People are telling you time and time again what is pissing them off, and then you just try and repackage and resell what you are doing. Just stop.
Put in big bold letters at the top of the posts that "THIS IS A THREAD THAT IS COPIED FROM REDDIT TO HELP FACILITATE USER TRANSITION TO LEMMMY."
Sure, you are driving people to participate in a thread, but it's pointless and counter productive. It's pissing people off and you are poo-poo'ing it like they don't understand your grand plans.
Putting a comment at the top of the threads was being done already since Sunday. https://alien.top/comment/2114215
Makes sense, the number of downvotes on your reply here is just so strange.
There is nothing rational about a mob attack. It will pass.
I guess. Have a good day!
I had similar effect under post of linux ponies, where every comment had at least one downvote. I call it "brown marks".
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.
You have to ask the project creator if you want to add a community, they would set up the bridge.
I wasn't going to be responsible for flooding everyone's all feed even further.
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.
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.
For those who downvote you I suggest to downvote Matrix too
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.
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!
Rule 34 strikes again. :)
No matrix channel yet, but you can take a look at https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser. If you know your way around Docker it should be easy to get started.
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.
You can't tell people to not browse all. How will small communities reach new users if new users don't browse all?
Sure. But if you're going to browse all then don't bitch about what's in it. All isn't your personal curated feed. That's what subscribed is for.
The irony of it all is that everyone loved to complain about "The Algorithm", but now that the ability of curating the feed is entirely in their hands, they are "ooh, things I don't like in my timeline, make it stahp!"
You can't browse All and then get mad at the stuff in it.
The brigade is in full force. You are 100% right.
Are the fake users registered as bots?
If not, then that's a really good case for defederation. Hell, sounds like a good plan either way.
They appear as bots, that i have seen, but i cannot speak for every instance of this.
Everything is a bot with alien.top. "Posters" are bots with only one post and the "commenters" are bots as well.
It's annoying as all hell.
I believe users are bots until they decide to claim the account by proving the Reddit account belongs to them. After that, they become regular old Lemmy accounts?
That sounds great in theory. I don't think I have seen a single post where anyone transitioned, but I could be wrong.
It's just a noisy mess, IMHO.
I know of one account, but mainly because I initiated the claim process lol
I'd prefer a slower rollout while things get implemented because yea, it's a bit of a mess in the meantime. It has potential, and I'd hate for it to fall apart because some aspect of it spirals
Why would you send someone to a server "stealing" identities and offer the "victim" to "claim" it? Wouldn't it be more ethical to send them to i.e. join-lemmy.org/instances with the freedom to chose what instance and community they'd want to be part of?
No identity is being "stolen". The mirrors are not doing anything on behalf of the users, and no content is being altered.
Go to /r/redditalternatives and let me know how many people simply don't understand the concept of instances.
Or understand the concept of instances, but didn't want to bother with the process of finding out which one to choose.
Or went with the "just go to lemmy.world" approach, got burned because it was struggling to deal with the influx of people and thought "Aw, Lemmy sucks".
Or took the time to find an instance, but after signing up had no idea how to find (re-)discover all their niche communities.
Fediverser is solving most if not all these problems.
I don't see the point replying to you any more, you seemingly overlook the points I'm trying to make in a sort of "the goal justifies the means" argumentation. But others might find it interesting.
It's copying content belonging to a different entity without permission and presents them on a third party site without enough clarification to be distinguishable from the original account (many have expressed confusion at replying to "mirrored"/ghost accounts). It's not a content viewer like teddit etc. It's copying the content and presenting it for itself.
I hope people understand how it can be argued for it being a stolen identity, even if one personally doesn't agree with it.
Sure these are issues, but I still don't think it's ethical to present "claim your account now!" to users. It comes across as borderline extortionate to me. I don't think it's ethical to apply "peer pressure" by having regular users clamor for people to claim their accounts.
How many times have I personally explained to you that it was the ddos not the influx of people. Every time you find some way to bash on LW and then you come ask for favors?
I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting the reasons, but in practice what happened is that the largest instance was constantly offline and unresponsive.
Be transparent. You claimed that the instance needed to be defederated based on the mirror bots. Now the bots are gone and real users are coming (like I said they would) and suddenly this is you "making a favor"?
Didn't you ask us to make an exception for your bots when we defederated with alien.top almost two months ago? Special treatment AKA a favor, yes.
Anyway you are always arguing in bad faith, just like when you were trying to spread the message that Lemmy World is too big and bad for the fediverse. It wasn't for the fediverse, it was to push people to your (failing) hosting company. And you are still pushing that same narrative and play dumb when confronted.
Be transparent he says.
No, my exact question was "how many real users will it take for you to stop considering it a bot-instance only".
My argument has always been that having one single instance controlling the majority of users is bad for decentralization. The fact that one of the LW mods can be so petty to the point of holding a block against another instance (when the alledged reasons for the block are no longer valid) is kinda proving my point.
You didn't see me criticizing lemm.ee, or beehaw, or programming.dev, or sdf.org, or feddit.*. None of them were working to monopolize the reddit migrants like LW. But sure, I am the one with ulterior motives.
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 like I suspect, it could cause issues for other clients.
I requested my home instance (lemmy.ca) defederate from alien.top, but my cries went unanswered.
Thank you for this. I also use Connect, so went ahead and manually added that to my block list.
I'm from lemmy.ca too, and while I'm conflicted about the project, I'd rather limit defederation unless it's about something very clearcut
After v0.19 drops, users can block instances which should fix the problem for everyone that might want it gone
Alien.top is a spam instance. This is as "clearcut" a reason to defederate as it gets.
While it likely is spam for the majority of users, I imagine the mods are looking at de-federating an instance that fulfills a specific need for a small number (keeping alien.top users updated on reddit). Because of that, it will likely have a bit of push back to de-federate entirely vs. a request to create the ability to block users/platforms. Think of it like newsletters, we need the ability to unsubscribe/block them, but we shouldn't necessarily ban them outright.
Alien.top is one-way bridge instance. If you belive(I will not say think because it will be insult to thinking) that it is spam instance, are you sure you understand what fediverse is? It lowers switching cost for reddit users since they can come here, post here, comment here and STILL be able to see content they want to see, but without ads and spyware.
In easy to understand terms: u r spam.
Spam implies it's useless but it seems I can read my content from Reddit on that instance? While also staying on a single app and getting my regular lemmy threads.
Not sure why it's a problem other than resource intensity, if the users have the option to block an instance as a whole it's fine.
I don't agree with them creating bot accounts and commenting on other instances posts though. Everything should be maintained within the instance.
Not sure why you added preserving metadata like username, pfp and timestamp(I guess ts in preserved too) and called it "creating bot accounts". And as I understand bridging communities on other instances is opt-in.
I will say that as it is 0.19 isn't going to be the holy Grail people think it is because the instance level blocking only affects communities hosted on those instances it does not hide users from those instances. So for instance is that are still Federated to hexbear it's not going to remove the hexbear user spam and it likely won't help in cases like this either.
It'll mainly help in cases where the communities on the instance and not the users are the problem. Things like the NSFW instance.
If this is true then I indeed misunderstood v0.19
All I want is to be able to block an instance completely as a user. How hard can this be? I really had my hopes up for v0.19. This needs to be built into Lemmy asap because the idiocy of some instances is getting on my nerves hardcore. I mean, why not go back to reddit if I have to take shit anyway? At least I know the communities are larger over there and if I need to suffer bullshit then by all means, I'll suffer over there. This is not good for Lemmy tbh...
How can you as user block votes from one instance?
There is no "misresporting". Selfhosted forum is a topic-based instance, like many other that set up as part of !communick_news_network@communick.news .
alien.top is a fediverser instance, which is done to help mirror content and to help people from reddit to migrate.
The whole idea of fediverser is to make migration for redditors as easy as possible and in a way that they when they migrate they have access to all the content they were used to.
Some clients see the instance name as alien.top when it is a actually selfhosted.forum. When the instance info is referenced, it's reporting back both names. Lemmy can clients see one or the other and just blocking alien.top won't stop the spammy noise.
When I try to block a post from selfhosted.forum the client sees it as alien.top. This is partially a client issue, but it is likely caused by how the instances are presented.
Nobody hates the idea of a "Reddit transition instance". We just can't stand the noise it generates and that little effort was put into identifying posts as bot generated.
You mentioned somewhere that people should comment on those posts to help bootstrap conversations. Unfortunately, that is not how this is working out and it is wasting people's time.
Again, this might be an UI/UX issue, but there is no misreporting.
What you are seeing is the homepage of selfhosted.forum, which is an instance that by itself does not take any users and is only the home of the communities, like !homelab@selfhosted.forum or !main@selfhosted.forum.
Alien.top works by being a home to accounts only (no communities) and they follow specific rules about what "which content from each subreddit should go to which lemmy community". For example, content from /r/homelab will be posted by alien.top to !homelab@selfhosted.forum.
The "about page" of selfhosted.forum contains information disclosing that the instance is part of the "Communick News Network" and promotes two alternatives for the people that want to sign up for Lemmy. Granted, it is missing information about the selfhosted instance is supposed to be about (which I have done already in other instances like level-up.zone) , but this in any way means that the "instance" is misreporting itself.
I might not be understanding the post- correctly. From my perspective using connect I can go to alien.top and then select a post that's on that instance and then the instance will change from alien.top to the self-hosted one, which is confusing to me as a user. This happens even when I tap on the alien top instance as a whole.
Is this just because the second instance is the only instance that federates with alien top? If that's the case I think it might be a good idea to merge the two for less confusion and allow better moderation for users client side
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.
I'll paste what @iso@lemy.lol (looks to be an admin) commented after you posted;
"Not just spam, it is also using system resources as high as big instances. I just defederated from it.
I wish someone made this integration in an app, that shows both Lemmy and Reddit feed, without an instance."
So seems like you were right
It's a lot of work to interact with the databases at this level, for most enthusiast and self-hosting admins it would simply be better to limit the damage by cutting off the infected appendage and wait for proper cleaning tools to come to lemmy admin.
It's usually been images that hogged the resources, but that's been due to the "steady" user base on Lemmy in the thousands or tens of thousands. Suddenly injecting... hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of accounts? We're in uncharted waters now.
I'm helping out at my home instance and talked to the admin - We've defederated as well.
This has been absolutely beyond infuriating I can't even block it properly from Connect. Agreed this is nothing but pollution spam
Server admins should block stuff like this
Which we did at LW. They started spamming some communities with this and we defederated.
pretty cool, same on feddit.de :)
FYI: https://communick.news/post/451025
The mirror bots now are disabled, how about reconsidering the block?
How about no?
So, just to be clear: the project was from the very first step meant to help people migrate from Reddit and to join Lemmy. Now that it is starting to actually achieve its goals, you now want to penalize it for its success?
If you call this thread a success you are delusional. You're condescending to everyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoints. Which isn't really new to me
The thread has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it is that today I got 90 real people signing up to alien.top via reddit and one of them is asking "hey, can we get federation with LW now"?
User counts are only for active users. You should know that quite well.
In any case, please go ahead and make it clear: if you want to act like an arbiter of success to determine if alien.top should be re-federated, how many users should it have?
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.
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?
I believe you can do it in the Lemmy account itself, try the web interface
It should work for all of Lemmy afterwards
Thanks! You're the best!
... Can I be second best?
Why not be the best at something instead? I believe in you!
I aspire to be like Eratosthenes, nicknamed "Beta" for his ability to always come second - Never first. But in basically anything he ever tried. Not too bad I'd say.
Even the helpful bots get annoying after a bit. You submit a post, and immediately get linked bots that show you five alternative sites, three units of measure you already know, and one bot that has absolutely butchered the synopsis of the article posted and left out important details that then derail the conversation.
I'm sure they mean well, but it's annoying
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.
Impressively stupid, if I'm honest. I wonder what the hell happened to make anyone on the planet think of that bit of genius.
I can say the same about your comment.
Yeah, and what a sick burn that was. Bet it must've taken quite some time and effort to come up with.
So you think creating new accounts for every post instead of just using a bot is a good idea? Why?
No. I just think the person I replied to was rude.
But that means you were being rude back 😱
Guilty as charged.
The account is meant to be taken over by the corresponding redditor. alien.top already has 100+ users who came from Reddit this way.
So every cross-post is happening after a Redditor has confirmed they want a Lemmy account in their name?
No. Separate actions.
Sounds like that's a big part of the problem right there then.
Accounts should either be claimed by real people, or be bot accounts. There shouldn't be "ghost" accounts that may or may not be claimed.
That’s definitely one of the most objectionable and puzzling things about this. I wouldn’t feel comfortable about someone making an account in another site using my username and cloning my content without my knowledge - surely wouldn’t give me a good impression of that site or encourage me to sign up there (using my reddit credentials to do so, also).
Are you familiar with the history of how Brazil got rid of hyperinflation in the 90's by creating an imaginary currency tied to the Dollar?
Think of the ghost accounts as the intemediate step. They are meant to work for people that are signing up and encounter some content. Without them, people would join the communities and not find anything to browse, so they bounce anyway.
lets be honest: if someone were to post on reddit, and that webscraper copies the post and THEIR USERNAME onto an alternative service without prior consent, what is the reaction you should expect?
a) oh wow thats helpful thank you very much i will now drop reddit forever
or
b) your post and account stealing crapshoot of a server can go die in a ditch for all i care
i can assure you, most people will choose b), and even people who might have chosen a) will first hear about it from the pissed off group.
I believe your activism comes from the right place, but i think it's actively harmful, even if you ignore that it annoys people in the fediverse itself.
Don't forget alternative c) the people who sign up through alien.top are not the people who are getting their content mirrored.
Also, it's important to point out that the best way to stop the mirroring is by simply logging out and taking over their account. The process is as simple as possible, people don't even need to create a password. All they need is to claim their account.
It is the exact same approach that Facebook did with Threads by leveraging Instagram.
my point stands, its bad publicity and will not help growing lemmy organically.
Its nice that meta, the nice little family run company did that. /s
noone asked meta to do that. it's a hostile move.
noone asked YOU to do that. it's a hostile move too.
you are using strategies of a megacorp with a reputation of crapping all over everything the fediverse stands for. i would recommend you start less doing and more thinking, and not on a technical level, but on the morality of your decisions. as you can see in the overwhelming negative responses (except for the ppl using you as their personal reddit-rss-feed) and the defederations, your actions already lead to the isolation of your instance, which will hurt your users too.
ETA: just wanted you to know that do think that your service is neither GDPR-compliant nor CCPA-compliant. i don't know if you checked with your lawyer before, but i'm pretty sure you don't have a process for deletion requests, since you don't have a privacy policy posted, which is where that info should be if you had any to give. (The data you copied over is another can of problems, namely reddits lawyers, who probably reserve all rights to make your life pretty sucky)
Is it growing now? Last I checked, it lost 2/3 of its active users since the summer, and it keeps going down. For all the talk that it generated, 32k MAU is a ridiculous low number.
Hostile move towards whom?
If it is against Reddit Corp, do you really care?
All the "hostility" being perceived against Lemmy users is from those complaining they are browsing via "All". Ok, I disabled the mirrors, now what? Are you going to be happier with a feed that is getting smaller every day? Do you feel better by being part of a social network that can not attract people for longer than a month? When Reddit does go on with their IPO and tightens their control over the data even more, do you think then people will be more likely to leave?
Do you think the protests were effective in any way? Do you think if we really want to have a space for ourselves free from corporate control we need to be ready to a proper war against Big Tech? Do you think they care about the "principles the Fediverse stands for"?
Having a better understanding of what you're trying to do I think you make great points all around and it's a very noble and proactive attempt to drive users to Lemmy.
Obviously there's some communication gaps but I hope you don't let the haters get you down. Your intentions are obviously good, and you've put a lot of thought and effort into the execution to create a bridge that goes beyond just sharing content from Reddit.
I can recognize that the developer has put a lot of effort into this and has good intentions. The problem... it's just not really that great of an idea. For all the reasons people have listed already, I can't see it working out.
Not sure I follow how an unclaimed ghost account solves this problem vs. that unclaimed account being marked as a bot
Imagine you are big on some niche community which exists on Reddit (let's say, e.g, /r/civ)
You want to leave Reddit, you hear about Lemmy.
You sign up.
You go to browse.feddit.de and look for Civilization communities.
You find !civ@lemmy.ca and !civ@lemm.ee, both of which with no activity in the last 3 months, and most posts are more about people trying to figure out what to talk about instead of actually talking about the thing that the community is supposed to be about. Not only this is confusing (do you need to have any relationship to either lemmy.ca and lemm.ee to join? Why are there two separate communities? If these communities are dead, should I create yet-another one?) but don't you think that the most common reaction would be simply to drop the whole effort and just go back to browsing Reddit?
Now, contrast this with the scenario where fediverser.network has compiled a comprehensive map of all these niche subreddits and can point to at least one lemmy community, and also where the mirroring is using these bots to post relevant content to all of these communities.
Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.
And if you decide to join Lemmy by using alien.top itself, all of that could be made automatically. If you had 50 subreddits, you would be automatically subscribed to all the relevant 50 Lemmy communities, you wouldn't even need to worry about having to figure out which-subreddits-map-to-which-lemmy-communities and your feed would be customized.
I don't know about you, but to me the second case seems like a much better onboarding experience and I'd be a lot more likely to stick around if that was a reality.
Okay but that doesn't answer my question. How does making a ghost account that may or may not be claimed for each post make that possible but marking that account as a bot unless it's been claimed by a human would not?
This is exactly how it works. Every account is marked as a bot until the redditor claims it. I'm not sure I'm understanding your question, here.
If the posts are from a Reddit community's few actual posters and none from any of the posters on Lemmy instances, what's the incentive to switch over to Lemmy? Moreover, if someone's mainly a poster, aren't you only encouraging them to stay on Reddit and post as they know there's someone handling mirroring their posts elsewhere for them?
I've read over the discussions around this and I can sort of see where you're coming from for some of the few folks that want to lurk and browse Reddit stuff via Lemmy apps or the like, but I'm struggling to see how much it really helps different Lemmy instances draw more posters. This may help bring lurkers over, but from what I can tell, there's not much of a problem with people lurking across Lemmy, but more of a poster problem, in terms of having a greater variety of people posting and commenting.
The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.
Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.
By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.
Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.
As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:
The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.
The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.
Ah, no, I’d come and see “okay, this site has a couple inactive communities about civ and one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”. Pretty unclear why you think that would be better. I’d prefer to make posts in the genuine Lemmy communities personally, not one filled with spooky clone accounts. If I wanted the reddit content, that’s what reddit is for.
I can point you to communities on selfhosted.forum that started completely from bots and today have hundreds of organic users. In some cases, threads that get started from a reddit mirror got carried on by users on Lemmy.
What is pissing some (not all) people off is that they only wrote because they didn't know it was a bot. While I understand the feeling of being tricked, it doesn't change the fact that a community with more content (even if mirrored) ends up attracting more real users than the desert communities that people create but do not put out content
How did they find out about it? Are they still active? So they wonder why people keep defederating and blocking
Agreed, this should be banned..
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?
The theory is the redditors can claim the bot that was created to ease onboarding.
Whether that has ever happened I can't say.
It hasn't and the project seems abandoned.
The developer responded to a similar post here recently: https://lemmy.ml/post/8740170
Awesome, thanks.
Do bridges make Matrix into Discord, Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp, *gasp* Slack, FB Messenger, imessage, Mattermost, Mumble, *gasp* Google Chat, Instagram, Linkedin, xitter, Skype, SMTP, IRC, KakaoTalk, *heavy gasp* GroupMe, Line, Wechat, Tencent QQ and Jabber/XMPP? Phew. Or does it make entire federation into a 3rd party *insert list again* app, which *insert list except Signal, SMTP and IRC one more time* don't want and would never tolerate?
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.
Can't people just select their languages in their profile? I did it when I started seeing a lot of posts in German, I don't see any anymore
Technically yes but support for that feature is so ignored in reality most posts are tagged as unspecified. The docs even specifically say to always enable unspecified along with your languages otherwise you'll miss on a lot of content.
But that's the technicality of the example I picked, make it a meme communities instead or whatever and the point stands: it will get spammy as people start following Mastodon accounts and bots and Wordpress blogs and whatever else integrates with the fediverse.
All it takes is a single user that follows one of those and it's on everyone's All page.
I'm part of a non-English speaking instance, we got reminded several times to tag our content appropriately. I think I reminded other non-English instances too.
Meme communities are usually block by people who don't like them. That's the same for every other content.
The All feed is useful to discover new content, especially with Scaled sort. If you have an alt on lemmy.ml you should try it, it's quite good to bring content from niche but active communities.
I use All pretty much exclusively and don’t have any problems like that. It moves faster some times of day but I’m not sure I’m seeing what you describe about “a bot that subscribes to everything” (actually have no idea what you mean by that). If there’s something I don’t wish to be seeing, I block the user or community.
Interesting. Thanks.
Or One App To See Them All. Two. Matrix client and mastodon client.
Agreed it's just pollution
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. I'm happy with how I have things set up for myself, but looking at some instance front pages anonymously I see significantly more spam, people won't want to sign up for that.
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. We still need to have standards so that limited volunteer and donation-based resources are used effectively.
Bots need to:
instead of the majority of users having to create blocks (multiple opt-outs) couldn't this be set up so users that want bot posts sign up or opt-in somehow?
You can already toggle a setting that hides all bot accounts/content. But that's rather heavy handed and not very nuanced.
It's better than banning instances wholesale. Like Lemmit.online, alien.top etc.
Yeah I would like these things to be opt-in, but such a feature is not implemented yet. In Mastodon you follow people that you want to hear a lot from, but Lemmy works differently by design that you can't follow people.
Can't you just block the communities? There are only a few
Lemmit.online has a bunch of communities, but at least you can curtail that by just blocking one bot user.
Have a look at nba.space, style.land, gearhead.town, hi-fi.community, poweruser.forum, on and on and on. Every post to all the communities on there is an alien.top bot with some Reddit username. How do you block that from the user or community level?
The list of communities is listed here in the sidebar: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network
I think Lemmy 0.19 instance blocking will make it easier but it's still 18 instances. From the communities there appears to be about a dozen communities per instance. you'd need to go and visit each one and block them, or just wait for the latest spam from one of them to appear and block them, more than 100 times.
The point being, that even if they are useful, bot accounts and automated Reddit reposts flooding people's "All" feeds reduces the quality of the Fediverse network, and leaving it up to users to go through an opt-out process that's harder than opting out of individual cookie vendors is not conducive to a healthy online community.
Good point, I thought there were less because it's always the same that come up. Wouldn't Lemmy 0.19 allow to block them all by blocking alien.top, as all bots are from that instance?
That's valid, but on the other hand, if it were to actually work and bring people to Lemmy, then it would be positive for the community.
I find the Fediverser communities more useful than something like Lemmit for instance, because Lemmit doesn't add the comments, which are usually why people are on Reddit
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !communick_news_network@communick.news
There are only a few communities (650+ that I know of) dedicated to mirroring reddit content to the Lemmyverse. This is part of a bigger problem, not just this specific user's system.
If bots started spamming fediverse@lemmy.world I don't agree that the best course of action would be for users to block the community.
I was talking specifically about the ones in Fediverser. In this case, it's quite simple to block the communities.
That's indeed another issue, and I agree with you that bots shouldn't be able to spam there.
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.
That's AFAIK already implemented, 0.19 just isn't out, yet.
There will always be the people who try to police others. Just look how even on Mastodon seemingly every instance has blocked Threads despite the fact that A.) users can block instances on their own and B.) Threads doesn't even have federation, yet.
My instance upgraded to 0.19.0-rc and I am so excited to clear out my blocked communities and block the whole lot instead. Can't wait to see how it goes without the hexbear and .ml nonsense.
I think we need that anyway.
Having 10-20% of posts on Voyager in non English language is a pest. So many things to block.
You can select languages you want to see in your account settings
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.
Thanks for letting me know, I'll block that instance
The bots have been disabled for two days already.
Can't you just block the instance
It's at least opt-in for users to be mirrored (I think), butit's still just creating spammy garbage.Edit, I was wrong. It's worse than I thought.
It's "opt-in" only for whoever decides to run that for a subreddit/community though.
As in someone decides to run that bot for a community and it will clone all content, they decide if they clone all the reddit comments too.
It's also annoying to deal with as a user because the bots are on alien.top, but the communities are all over the place with new ones popping up.
The new "instance block" feature in 0.19 blocks all communities from that instance, not their users when they post elsewhere.
Gross, I thought it allowed a username to opt it so all of their posts were duplicated.
Time for everyone to defederate from Alien.top
Users can supposedly "claim" their bot persona to take them over.
But... when I switched from reddit to lemmy, it wasn't a matter of losing my comment history from reddit.
In theory, the idea of kickstaryimg lemmy communities with content seems nice, but in practice it's only ghost towns with an overwhelming bot white noise.
Matrix appservice happened
What if lemmy starts dumping its posts on reddit? That might be interesting
As long as we do it nicely, it could make communities better for everyone!
Some subreddits have friendly relationships with Lemmy, and understand why things are the way they are. I'd rather focus on those (reposting good quality relevant posts) and ignoring the ones that want nothing to do with the fediverse.
Perhaps it's the app I'm using but I'd like to be able to block instances from my feed
We've got that already on Kbin.social. :)
oh nice! Thank you!
You can see some more discussion about the implementation on a past !fediverse@lemmy.world thread here:
https://lemmy.ca/post/10085786
Thank you
“whoever is in charge of that instance”
Did you try contacting them?
abuse@alien.top? Or just block the instance? Or just ignore them?Maybe you could start a gofundme and a petition!