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1y ago

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://alien.top/post/263029

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.

312 comments

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.
- 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.

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.
- 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
- 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.
- You can block both NSFW and bot posts in your account settings. I do the former, but I don't want to miss out on the good bots so I just block the bad ones individually. Then, memes usually stay in the meme communities and it is quite easy to block those.
  
  Huh, good to know. I might actually do that. I usually use an app, so I dunno if those settings are exposed in-app.
  
  there are plenty of communities with useful content that are also plagued with pointless unfunny garbage memes. it seems that there's no way to filter image posts on any client that I've seen. I don't know if it's an issue with Lemmy as a platform but it seems kind of strange to me since the client knows which posts are image and non-image links
- I would very much like to be able to block image posts
  
  I think the Summit client for android can do this
- 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

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.
- If I wanted to see the front page of reddit I'd go to reddit
  This is the only way to see it for now. Bridge doesn't show "the front page of reddit".

Thankfully lemmy.world defederated a long time ago.

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

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 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.
  That's not the case for most people. Most people will go where the content they're looking for is.
- 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.
  I was not expecting so many "if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit".
  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
  
  Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
  *discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn't know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.
  
  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:
  Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
  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".
- 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
  
  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:
  repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience.
  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 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.
  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 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.
  
  “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.”
  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.
  reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. (...) I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
  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.
- I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit,
  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 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.
  
  if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?

@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.
  You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.
  So like it or not, they have the rights to whatever you post there already.
  There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?
  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.
- Wow, great fearmongering.
  Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don't have the rights to these comments.
  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.

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.

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
  
  I’d rather limit defederation unless it’s about something very clearcut
  Alien.top is a spam instance. This is as "clearcut" a reason to defederate as it gets.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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.

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!
- 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.

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'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.

Agreed, this should be banned..

It’s an instance that crossposts posts from Reddit, except it also makes a new user for each Reddit account it came from.
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?

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.
- 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.
- 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.
  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.
  
  News to me, I've just been blocking foreign language instances because I like browsing All.
- 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.
- 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.
  Interesting. Thanks.
  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.
  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:
Have a targeted and specific purpose
Be easy to block for anyone not interested
Be limited in how many posts it can make in an hour.
- 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.
  
  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.
- difficult to block
  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?
  
  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.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll block that instance
- The bots have been disabled for two days already.

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.

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.
- Now let’s give users the ability to block domains like on Mastodon
  That's AFAIK already implemented, 0.19 just isn't out, yet.
  and everyone is happy.
  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

~~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

Can't you just block the instance

Matrix appservice happened

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!

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.

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!

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