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.
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.
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:
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The whole point is to leave Reddit. Just changing the frontend is not enough.
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The mirror is just one part of the fediverser project. The other is in getting people to migrate away from reddit by joining the corresponding communities.
And it so happens that a lot of the people that want to migrate away from Reddit end up returning because they don’t find the content here from their niche communities. This is the part that the mirror attempts to solve.
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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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.