alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Agreed, this should be banned..

This has been absolutely beyond infuriating I can't even block it properly from Connect. Agreed this is nothing but pollution spam

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.

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.

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.

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'm sure they mean well, but it's annoying

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?

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.

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.

Agreed it's just pollution

Thanks for letting me know, I'll block that instance

You can see some more discussion about the implementation on a past !fediverse@lemmy.world thread here:

https://lemmy.ca/post/10085786

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.

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.

Can't you just block the instance

Matrix appservice happened

What if lemmy starts dumping its posts on reddit? That might be interesting

“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!

Perhaps it's the app I'm using but I'd like to be able to block instances from my feed