we are defederated from lemmit.online as the bots there was just far too much already but I'm curious about whether we should do the same for alien.top and or its sister instances (there's a lot).
If you aren't aware of what that is, it's a site ran by another instance that mirrors reddit content over into ghost subs and mirrors the comments as well.
Personally? I'm not a fan. Like, at all. I understand the desire but I feel like its not only asking for Reddit to throw down with a legal fit but also feels just... annoying. We don't need a critical mass of content, we need QUALITY content. More does not equal better.
I detest bot content in general, and bot reposts of Reddit content is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It's not just tedious and unimaginative and unengaging - I honestly find it creepy, like someone stalking an ex-lover.
I’m not a fan and I don’t think it drives user engagement. What’s the point of commenting and interacting if I know it’s never going to be seen by the original user?
The only thing that bothers me are the tags people add to them like [Stolen from Reddit] or w/e.
If it's content that might be interesting to folks here, fuggit, post it. But don't point back to Reddit when you do it - that just directs traffic back to that shithole and kills the conversation here cuz no one wants to engage with anything that has a big neon REDDIT sign hanging on it.
One of the things I like of lemmy is the limited content. I can keep up with all the posts and comments of the communities I like. So being flooded with copied content odd counterproductive in my opinion. And copping the comments as well feels creepy and morally dubious.
I agree that it’s annoying and not productive to have content mirrored from Reddit. I’d be in favor of defederating from instances that relay too much of their content.
Some of the ebookdeals I post come from an rss feed I watch from r/ebookdeals. But I just use that as a trigger to post them in my own style and definitely don’t repost all of them by far.
I think generally I’m against straight up mirroring though. Especially the concept of mirroring comments, I expect to be able to interact with commenters.
Mirroring comments sounds awful and not worth engaging with.
Linking to Reddit also seems like a bad idea. If I wanted to engage with Reddit, I'd be on Reddit.
Cross-posting links that were popular on Reddit into relevant communities here seems like a fine idea, though. I DO want quality links here, and for discussion to grow organically around those links here, on Lemmy. For example, a community like !ebookdeals@literature.cafe is built around links. If there's a similar active community on Reddit, I would indeed appreciate it if someone cross-posted the good deals here.
I think there is value in users cross-posting from Reddit, but bots doing it indiscriminately seems spammy, and could well destroy a community.