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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

  • 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 don’t like your bots at all because I, like others, browse all. Lemmy is too small and inactive to stick to little groups. They also filled my feed with a disproportionate amount of stuff I don’t care about, like selfhosted.

          The idea is genuinely interesting and the execution, especially the bridge to claim ownership of the bot account, is legitimately really cool. But until it’s not spammy— which may be never at the rate Lemmy is expanding, or lack of expansion— it’s going to meet significant resistance.

          It’s weird because I really agree with you. Lowering the barrier to entry for leaving Reddit and porting over its discussions is great. People say they don’t want Reddit content, but honestly I doubt that. Hell, even having copies of the niche Reddit content would help fill out the fediverse’s lack of content. Sadly I don’t see this working at all without two way communication (which you would probably need proxies for). I’d be pretty surprised if you ever brought it back.

          I particularly agree on the moral front. I disagree with Reddit the company and don’t care for the state of the internet. But I can’t see a barrier of entry low enough for people to actually stand up for themselves, so while I respect the effort and willingness to do something about your values, my faith in the remaining Reddit users is low enough that I really can’t see a universe where this works.

        • 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.

          The addictiveness and the inertia factor are the two main ways to hold your user base to your product, very true.

          Don't give up on what you're doing, keep working at it, refining. The vocal indigenous minority of any place don't handle change well, and tend to rescue defeat out of the jaws of victory.

          • Thank you for the encouraging words, and I hope that I can count on those like you to continue doing it.

      • 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.

        • Yes, I agree. That's what I said, a lot of people just don't want to leave. It's their choice and there's no point us getting up in arms about it.

    • 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...

      1. You are stressing out every Lemmy instance by making so many posts and comments a minute
      2. 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
      3. 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

    • 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

        • Reddit is actively working to wall their garden though.

          • That's why mentioned federatied network bridges store all bridged messages on instance with all the metadata. This is same: bridged posts and comments are stored with metadata. So even if reddit will nuke bridge, already bridged posts will stay.

            This also reduces switching cost from reddit to lemmy and turns lemmy into "continue conversation here" button. And according to guy who defined enshittification, low switching cost is how social networks gather TONS of people.

            • Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

              according to guy who defined enshittification

              Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

              I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

            • Ok but then instead of encouraging people to Lemmy you are encouraging to matrix which will have the same issue bridging to Reddit.

              Seems like another bad solution.

              • I'm not sure what you are implying. I was just saying that alien.top is just like bridge in matrix, why it is better to store data on instance instead of fetching it every time like frontend does and how it helps Lemmy get users.

      • 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 have never used Reddit so I don't know what experience it is you want, but couldn't you achieve the same thing in a better way by browsing on Teddit?

        • 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 think you are confusing people here by saying mirror. They think about it as another frontend.

          I suggest to use Matrix terms. Here what you have would be one-way bridging

          One-way bridging is rare, but can be used to represent a bridge that is bridging from the remote system into matrix. This is common when the remote system does not permit message posting, or is simply not capable of handling posting outside their system. The users bridged from the remote system often appear as virtual users in matrix, as is the case with matrix-appservice-instagram.

          • 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.

              • conscious choice to change from the default to All.

                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.

                  • there is little to no community interaction on the posts

                    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.

                    Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content

                    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.

                    • 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.

                      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.

                      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.

                      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.

                      First, it’s not “Reddit content”. It’s about the content from the communities.

                      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.

                      Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there.

                      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.

                      • The communities I want that aren’t on Lemmy are extremely niche.

                        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.

                        No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (...) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements,

                        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 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'm never on here during work. Even if I was, that point is pretty unhelpful. I think it's a normal thing for people to want an unlimited supply of content, as that's what we've gotten used to and that's what these websites are for. What's it to you, to dictate how I want to use my time? Whether this behavior is a good or bad thing is another argument. I think the limited content supply here is a concession that most people have accepted on Lemmy, but I also think that it's possible that it wouldn't have to be a concession as the platforms grow and get better.

          • Sorry, I meant it as a joke. Clearly it didn't land.

            To give you a serious answer, I think that the point is in understanding that "All" will always be an unfiltered firehose. If the issue is that you are running out of content in the communities you subscribe and that represent your interest, then we need to find ways to increase the amount of content here instead of chasing another fix by going to "All".

            In a way, this is exactly something that the mirrored content from fediverser could also help, and also another reason that I don't understand why people complain about "spam". The content from alien.top mirrored is ending up at a community that you subscribe, it is far more likely for that content to be interesting to you than a random post from a community that you do not subscribe.

            Re: "finding out new communities to follow": that's also part of the Fediverser Project. The idea is to build a crowdsourced map of Lemmy communities to be recommended as the alternative to any given subreddit.

        • work

          That's a weird way of spelling "rotating through the same 4 apps until you're too tired to stay awake"

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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!

    • 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.

312 comments