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://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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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.
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.
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.
Also Summit for Lemmy can do this too.
As does Jerboa.
And Connect for Lemmy.
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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.
Yeah, understandable. On Lemmy World we defederate with those kind of instances because we know most of our users don’t want that stuff.
Luckily the next version of Lemmy is around the corner and then you should be able to block those instances yourself.
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.
They should apply everywhere :)
They do
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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
Very cool thanks!
hell yes it does thanks for the gold kind stranger
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.
this shit is pointless. defederated
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.
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As instance admins we can defederate from other instances so their content doesn’t hit our servers and vice versa.
Thankfully lemmy.world defederated a long time ago.
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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.
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
@rglullis@communick.news, let me break it down to you as simply as I can:
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Reddit comments are copyrighted material.
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Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.
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Scraping and mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor, therefore, is copyright violation, and is illegal.
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You don’t even have plausible deniability because you outright admitted, multiple times, that you are mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor.
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Reddit’s army of lawyers can find you through your domain registrar, and will make an example out of you.
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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.
Fair point, though just because you put something in an EULA that doesn’t make it enforceable or even legal. Explicitly stating that you want to take down the company isn’t going to do you any favours though.
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And you know reddit and Conde Nast will actually do this, because everyone here already knows that Steve Huffman is very, very petty.
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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.
Is it illegal? Against the terms of service, sure, they can revoke your API keys and block your IP and report you to Google/Apple but I don’t think they can stop you.
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.
I believe users are bots until they decide to claim the account by proving the Reddit account belongs to them. After that, they become regular old Lemmy accounts?
That sounds great in theory. I don’t think I have seen a single post where anyone transitioned, but I could be wrong.
It’s just a noisy mess, IMHO.
I know of one account, but mainly because I initiated the claim process lol
I’d prefer a slower rollout while things get implemented because yea, it’s a bit of a mess in the meantime. It has potential, and I’d hate for it to fall apart because some aspect of it spirals
I initiated the claim process lol
Why would you send someone to a server “stealing” identities and offer the “victim” to “claim” it? Wouldn’t it be more ethical to send them to i.e. join-lemmy.org/instances with the freedom to chose what instance and community they’d want to be part of?
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’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.
While it likely is spam for the majority of users, I imagine the mods are looking at de-federating an instance that fulfills a specific need for a small number (keeping alien.top users updated on reddit). Because of that, it will likely have a bit of push back to de-federate entirely vs. a request to create the ability to block users/platforms. Think of it like newsletters, we need the ability to unsubscribe/block them, but we shouldn’t necessarily ban them outright.
Spam implies it’s useless but it seems I can read my content from Reddit on that instance? While also staying on a single app and getting my regular lemmy threads.
Not sure why it’s a problem other than resource intensity, if the users have the option to block an instance as a whole it’s fine.
I don’t agree with them creating bot accounts and commenting on other instances posts though. Everything should be maintained within the instance.
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.
If this is true then I indeed misunderstood v0.19
All I want is to be able to block an instance completely as a user. How hard can this be? I really had my hopes up for v0.19. This needs to be built into Lemmy asap because the idiocy of some instances is getting on my nerves hardcore. I mean, why not go back to reddit if I have to take shit anyway? At least I know the communities are larger over there and if I need to suffer bullshit then by all means, I’ll suffer over there. This is not good for Lemmy tbh…
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.
