I have just realised that alien.top seems to be mirroring reddit accounts, posts and comments, without labelling them as such. What is the point of this one way mirroring? As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave. There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.

  • rglullisAEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    without labelling them as such

    All accounts are marked as bots.

    What is the point of this one way mirroring?

    The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can “take over” their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.

    There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.

    I’m also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful… Do you know the “rule” of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)

    As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.

    I’m not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I’m seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Oh wow that’s cool, I was wondering how this would be different from Lemmit. Really cool

      How does 2 way mirroring work? How are you planning to fund / keep the instance stable?

      • rglullisAEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        How does 2 way mirroring work?

        That will depend on a few things:

        • If it’s an user that has “converted” via alien.top’s portal, we can work as a real reddit client and send message on behalf of the user.
        • If the lemmy user is not on alien.top but wants to enable a two-way bridge, then we will have to do an authentication dance and send messages with passcodes to both reddit and lemmy.
        • If the user does not want a bridge, we can still send a message to the reddit thread via another bot.

        The last one would be the easiest to implement, but I’m avoiding releasing this because it might be taken down due to spam.

        • rglullisAEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Regarding “how to fund it”. This is an open source project, so you can sponsor me via github, but the best way you can help is by signing up to my “proper” hosting service.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          I like the idea. Did notice an error in the about page though:

          We believe that the big traditional social media platforms have become *too big for their own good. Too much power concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley is leading to an internet that is closed and not with the best interests of the people in mind.

    • CameronDev@programming.devOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.

      I am aware of the 90/9/1 rule, i dont agree this is the solution.

      I may be the outlyer, but now that i am aware of it, i am blocking alien.top, and will not waste time interacting with bots.

      • rglullisAEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.

        If the accounts from alien.top you are seeing are not marked as bots, then it means that you interacted with an actual person who has taken over their account. ;)

        i dont agree this is the solution.

        Then how about help and come up with something better?

        will not waste time interacting with bots.

        Then don’t interact with the bots. You can, e.g, write the comment on Lemmy and send a DM to the original redditor, inviting them to join the instance/community. I did that to dozens of people already.

        • CameronDev@programming.devOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          None of them are marked as bots. It is possibly a problem with my instance not mirroring the bot status.

          I personally don’t think there is a solution. I don’t beleive it is possible to force growth, and trying risks turning people away. I am also not convinced that growth is essential either, reddit always felt so big that i felt like more of an observer, lemmy is nice and small that it feels more like a community.

          You obviously disagree, and i will leave you to it.

    • Neato@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Neat. just connected my account. I got “No Recommendations” for every sub. Even things like /r/comics. I didn’t see a way to submit bug requests there. Unless I should post to /c/support? It looks empty right now to me.

      • rglullisAEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, that is the other part of the challenge here. My database has now about 6000 subreddits, but I managed to map only 200 or so.

        I’m working on a website to help crowdsource this, but even then I’ll have to go on and create these communities.