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simple @lemm.ee

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.

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312 comments

  • Sounds like that's a big part of the problem right there then.

    Accounts should either be claimed by real people, or be bot accounts. There shouldn't be "ghost" accounts that may or may not be claimed.

    • That’s definitely one of the most objectionable and puzzling things about this. I wouldn’t feel comfortable about someone making an account in another site using my username and cloning my content without my knowledge - surely wouldn’t give me a good impression of that site or encourage me to sign up there (using my reddit credentials to do so, also).

    • Are you familiar with the history of how Brazil got rid of hyperinflation in the 90's by creating an imaginary currency tied to the Dollar?

      Think of the ghost accounts as the intemediate step. They are meant to work for people that are signing up and encounter some content. Without them, people would join the communities and not find anything to browse, so they bounce anyway.

      • lets be honest: if someone were to post on reddit, and that webscraper copies the post and THEIR USERNAME onto an alternative service without prior consent, what is the reaction you should expect?

        a) oh wow thats helpful thank you very much i will now drop reddit forever

        or

        b) your post and account stealing crapshoot of a server can go die in a ditch for all i care

        i can assure you, most people will choose b), and even people who might have chosen a) will first hear about it from the pissed off group.

        I believe your activism comes from the right place, but i think it's actively harmful, even if you ignore that it annoys people in the fediverse itself.

        • Don't forget alternative c) the people who sign up through alien.top are not the people who are getting their content mirrored.

          Also, it's important to point out that the best way to stop the mirroring is by simply logging out and taking over their account. The process is as simple as possible, people don't even need to create a password. All they need is to claim their account.

          It is the exact same approach that Facebook did with Threads by leveraging Instagram.

          • my point stands, its bad publicity and will not help growing lemmy organically.

            Its nice that meta, the nice little family run company did that. /s

            noone asked meta to do that. it's a hostile move.

            noone asked YOU to do that. it's a hostile move too.

            you are using strategies of a megacorp with a reputation of crapping all over everything the fediverse stands for. i would recommend you start less doing and more thinking, and not on a technical level, but on the morality of your decisions. as you can see in the overwhelming negative responses (except for the ppl using you as their personal reddit-rss-feed) and the defederations, your actions already lead to the isolation of your instance, which will hurt your users too.

            ETA: just wanted you to know that do think that your service is neither GDPR-compliant nor CCPA-compliant. i don't know if you checked with your lawyer before, but i'm pretty sure you don't have a process for deletion requests, since you don't have a privacy policy posted, which is where that info should be if you had any to give. (The data you copied over is another can of problems, namely reddits lawyers, who probably reserve all rights to make your life pretty sucky)

            • will not help growing lemmy organically.

              Is it growing now? Last I checked, it lost 2/3 of its active users since the summer, and it keeps going down. For all the talk that it generated, 32k MAU is a ridiculous low number.

              it’s a hostile move.

              Hostile move towards whom?

              • Reddit Corp
              • Reddit users
              • Lemmy Admins
              • Lemmy users

              If it is against Reddit Corp, do you really care?

              All the "hostility" being perceived against Lemmy users is from those complaining they are browsing via "All". Ok, I disabled the mirrors, now what? Are you going to be happier with a feed that is getting smaller every day? Do you feel better by being part of a social network that can not attract people for longer than a month? When Reddit does go on with their IPO and tightens their control over the data even more, do you think then people will be more likely to leave?

              Do you think the protests were effective in any way? Do you think if we really want to have a space for ourselves free from corporate control we need to be ready to a proper war against Big Tech? Do you think they care about the "principles the Fediverse stands for"?

              • You are missing the point. Lemmy does not NEED to grow, since there are no profit incentives.

                Its hostile towards Reddit admins. I don't care much, but they will.

                Its hostile towards Lemmy admins, who already told you that your spamming techniques generate as much load as the largest instances. also, since your "content" gets federated to other instances, your legal liability might become theirs too.

                Its hostile towards Lemmy users, who see lots of botspam which they cannot filter currently since the users you generate have to be blocked one by one.

                Its hostile towards Reddit users, who get their created content and USERNAMES copied without given consent.

                I also use "All"! I like seeing what others in the fediverse are up to, as long as it's authentic discourse. I don't care if it gets smaller currently. The quality is fine, and since most growth in fediverse projects come in spurs, i am not even slightly worried. I have also been attracted for more than a month, and since the discourse is authentic, i engage more than i ever did on reddit.

                In my opinion, every bad move reddit makes will lead to another influx of users to the fediverse.

                Yes, they were effective. Lemmy got a fresh infusion of users, and its not even how many, but WHO we got! We got especially the people who think for themselves and who are not apathetic towards bad moves; people who cared about their communities. This also explains why you get so much pushback. It does not sit well with them (and me) because it is in line with what Meta, Reddit or Google would do.

                I don't think a "war" against big tech is Lemmys primary use case. Lemmy is there to bring people together and is doing a fine job of that, for a project that was not really ready at the time of the protest. I haven't seen people call for a war in the last months - raising awareness, yes; but ultimately the message should be a positive one - this is what makes Lemmy stand out from the "competition".

                • Lemmy does not NEED to grow, since there are no profit incentives.

                  And the point you are missing: the social media networks that do have profit incentives are destroying our society and keeping yourself isolated in a cocoon is not going to save you - nor any of your loved ones.

                  So, I really disagree with you here: given that it is unlikely that we will be able to get rid of all social media, the next best thing is to have an alternative that is not so harmful. I believe that the Fediverse needs to grow because it's the only alternative that has a chance of replacing corporate-controlled social media and that perhaps can get us free from Surveillance Capitalism.

                  We got especially the people who think for themselves

                  There has to be a name for this type of fallacy... Do you really think that the people that joined now are somehow better than the average redditor?

                  If I am being completely objective, every time I'm opening Lemmy it feels like a extreme version of Reddit's political echo chamber and none of the people who participate in anything remotely productive/entertaining/positive that you can find in the long tail of Reddit's niche communities. With very few exceptions, it feels like just one long stream of negativity and "Two Minutes Hate" displays. It's depressing and mentally draining. With the mirrors from my usual subreddits, I could at least make the experience here bearable. But now that the mirrors are disabled, it just makes more apparent how sterile this place currently looks.

                  And all of this drama just because people can not be bothered to curate their own feeds and learn to browse by subscribe. It's ridiculous...

                  • my last response, and then i give up, because you are narrowmindedly chasing down your warpath and are not open to other views. the only one who is forcing something here is you, take your feedback seriously, or you are no better than what you are fighting. other than that, best of luck in your endeavors.

                    • Seriously, this dude has a contrary response for everything. Even the concession speech was “well, you are all wrong but…”

                    • I have no doubt that this has become a Quixotic quest. It's just that I am so tired of the endless talk about the "dangers of social media" and the general apathy from people, I don't know how to stop even if I tried.

          • Having a better understanding of what you're trying to do I think you make great points all around and it's a very noble and proactive attempt to drive users to Lemmy.

            Obviously there's some communication gaps but I hope you don't let the haters get you down. Your intentions are obviously good, and you've put a lot of thought and effort into the execution to create a bridge that goes beyond just sharing content from Reddit.

            • I can recognize that the developer has put a lot of effort into this and has good intentions. The problem... it's just not really that great of an idea. For all the reasons people have listed already, I can't see it working out.

              • I don't agree -- I haven't really seen anything put forward here that marks it as a bad idea, just a bad execution with poor communication.

      • They are meant to work for people that are signing up and encounter some content. Without them, people would join the communities and not find anything to browse, so they bounce anyway.

        Not sure I follow how an unclaimed ghost account solves this problem vs. that unclaimed account being marked as a bot

        • Imagine you are big on some niche community which exists on Reddit (let's say, e.g, /r/civ)

          You want to leave Reddit, you hear about Lemmy.

          You sign up.

          You go to browse.feddit.de and look for Civilization communities.

          You find !civ@lemmy.ca and !civ@lemm.ee, both of which with no activity in the last 3 months, and most posts are more about people trying to figure out what to talk about instead of actually talking about the thing that the community is supposed to be about. Not only this is confusing (do you need to have any relationship to either lemmy.ca and lemm.ee to join? Why are there two separate communities? If these communities are dead, should I create yet-another one?) but don't you think that the most common reaction would be simply to drop the whole effort and just go back to browsing Reddit?

          Now, contrast this with the scenario where fediverser.network has compiled a comprehensive map of all these niche subreddits and can point to at least one lemmy community, and also where the mirroring is using these bots to post relevant content to all of these communities.

          Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.

          And if you decide to join Lemmy by using alien.top itself, all of that could be made automatically. If you had 50 subreddits, you would be automatically subscribed to all the relevant 50 Lemmy communities, you wouldn't even need to worry about having to figure out which-subreddits-map-to-which-lemmy-communities and your feed would be customized.

          I don't know about you, but to me the second case seems like a much better onboarding experience and I'd be a lot more likely to stick around if that was a reality.

          • Okay but that doesn't answer my question. How does making a ghost account that may or may not be claimed for each post make that possible but marking that account as a bot unless it's been claimed by a human would not?

            • marking that account as a bot unless it’s been claimed by a human would not?

              This is exactly how it works. Every account is marked as a bot until the redditor claims it. I'm not sure I'm understanding your question, here.

              • Gotcha -- that wasn't clear from the info here.

                In that case I don't really see the problem. Anyone can block bot-posts and most clients let you block instances now. If people don't want to see it, they can filter it out pretty easily.

          • Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.

            If the posts are from a Reddit community's few actual posters and none from any of the posters on Lemmy instances, what's the incentive to switch over to Lemmy? Moreover, if someone's mainly a poster, aren't you only encouraging them to stay on Reddit and post as they know there's someone handling mirroring their posts elsewhere for them?

            I've read over the discussions around this and I can sort of see where you're coming from for some of the few folks that want to lurk and browse Reddit stuff via Lemmy apps or the like, but I'm struggling to see how much it really helps different Lemmy instances draw more posters. This may help bring lurkers over, but from what I can tell, there's not much of a problem with people lurking across Lemmy, but more of a poster problem, in terms of having a greater variety of people posting and commenting.

            • what’s the incentive to switch over to Lemmy?

              The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.

              Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.

              This may help bring lurkers over.

              By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.

              Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.

              As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:

              • By creating two-way communication (which is okay, but still works in favor of Reddit)
              • By promoting Lemmy as an alternative and bringing more people from Reddit (which is ideal)

              The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.

              The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.

          • Ah, no, I’d come and see “okay, this site has a couple inactive communities about civ and one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”. Pretty unclear why you think that would be better. I’d prefer to make posts in the genuine Lemmy communities personally, not one filled with spooky clone accounts. If I wanted the reddit content, that’s what reddit is for.

            • "one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”

              I can point you to communities on selfhosted.forum that started completely from bots and today have hundreds of organic users. In some cases, threads that get started from a reddit mirror got carried on by users on Lemmy.

              What is pissing some (not all) people off is that they only wrote because they didn't know it was a bot. While I understand the feeling of being tricked, it doesn't change the fact that a community with more content (even if mirrored) ends up attracting more real users than the desert communities that people create but do not put out content

312 comments