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.
It’s at least opt-in for users to be mirrored (I think), but it’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.
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.
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.
I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves.
That is painfully obvious
I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.
They are. They just aren’t at the site you want their content to be on.
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.
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.
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.
The worst part is when I spend time replying to a question, later to realize the OP will never see it.
