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.
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:
The images are actually copied to the mirrored server.
It’s not that simple to do that per user. You’d need:
Is the opt-out solution aggressive? Yes, no doubt. But I thought that this “aggression” was pointed to Reddit and therefore justifiable. The whole reason that this approach forces its hand to be able to get the data is because Reddit API changes was a clear sign that they want to treat the data from the users as their own. The protests were not effective against this, and showed to Reddit that they can win any conflict against dissenting mods. If Reddit tracked back on their policies and showed to be a good steward of one of the most vast amount of user data, I wouldn’t be putting so much effort in this project.
If you can think of any other approach to make this work and is aligned with the clear goal of the project (make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit, in a way that those that come here can already find their niche communities) I’m all for trying it.