I’ve wondered wtf is up with that instance. Someone floods certain communities - apple on hardware.watch for instance - with endless tech support questions, like pages and pages of them a day. Steamdeck on hardware.watch for instance has a dozen posts in the last 5 minutes, so it’s a ridiculous flood.
A few of the accounts seem more legitimate than others and actually have a history, but most just have 1 post. The questions aren’t badly written and I wonder where they come from - don’t sound like LLM, but I just don’t believe at all that 8,000 random people signed up at this Alien instance and want to ask one tech related question and then disappear. The content doesn’t seem harmful or scammy, though, they’re all things a normal person might post. Is the content copied from reddit? Is this someone’s idea of kickstarting these Lemmy communities? It’s all a bit odd.
Anyway it’s a limited number of communities these apparent bots post to, so I simply blocked those communities.
Yup, at least in some cases. In one of the home networking subs I’ve seen several questions that after a quick search were posted on reddit within an hour before they showed up here. It kind of pisses me off wasting time trying to help someone that doesn’t even exist on the fediverse.
Please, do not feel discouraged to participate. The idea of the bots is not to be a simple mirror, but to bootstrap real conversation. The next step of Fediverser is to allow two-way communication so that Reddit users can see the Lemmy content and migrate.
The reason that alien.top content seems so overwhelming now is more to Lemmy"s losing its activity than a real “flood” of bots. My hope is that people will join in to the point of balancing out, but if this is leading to the opposite effect I will have to turn off, and that will be a shame because there are hundreds of people already using it “as intended”
I read more about the project and it seems interesting. I suppose 2 way communication to sync accounts between reddit and lemmy would be interesting… would the reddit TOS allow that? Or would the reddit admins tolerate it for long? I suppose you’ve looked into it.
The problem is the current state is confusing… if you look at the communities posted in by the bots, it is a huge flood of posts, like sometimes 20 posts in 15 minutes. I guess that would be different if Lemmy was more active, but it isn’t yet. Also, it’s confusing - one has to visit alien.top and github to have any idea what’s going on, and if the account holders aren’t receiving the posts, it’s sort of wasting people’s effort on lemmy and not creating true engagement. Perhaps a disclaimer like ‘this post mirrored by Fediverser’ would help.
it’s sort of wasting people’s effort on lemmy and not creating true engagement
Even if we don’t have two-way communication, having the content mirrored has two purposes:
it allows lurkers to move away from reddit and browse here.
it works as a prompt for conversation between “organic” subscribers.
I will add a comment to every post though (similar to how AutoModerator does) to indicate that is a mirrored comment and with general instructions on how to interact with the bots and some links to describe the project.
Great, I think as my and other people’s experience illustrates it has been a bit confusing so far, being unexplained. The byline will help a lot, I think.
Sure, it’s useful as it is as long as people check into their Lemmy accounts. I suppose I would if I signed up and was aware there might be replies waiting for me on Lemmy in addition to Reddit.
So, a comment like this one will be sent on every mirrored post. The only issue I see with this approach is that there is no way to pin a comment to the top of the thread…
Seems like you want to crowdsource advertising for alien.top.
Yes and no. Anyone can set up a fediverser instance, and I am certainly not going to let it grow over past 10k “organic users”. My hope is to grow alien.top enough only to validate the idea of fediverser as a migration mechanism and to have more people deploying “fediversed” instances.
I hope people set up fediverse instances instead of fediverser mirror proxies, we need people to communicate with - Not a “shadowbanned” experience for new users where nobody interacts with them.
You are missing the point. There is no need to have multiple instances doing the content mirroring, and the more people migrate from Reddit, the more I will be able to disable the mirroring.
The idea is not to get fediverser instances just to mirror more Reddit content. The idea is to get more “fediverser” instances to scale the operation of a coordinated Reddit migration. alien.top itself can not be the home of a million Reddit migrants.
There is no other “place to avoid”. If what bothers you is the alien.top mirrors, then alien.top is your only source of problems. The whole reason that I am creating the content-focused instances (selfhosted, nba, hardware.watch, etc) is to compartmentalize this.
That’s cool, I think that will help explain it. I didn’t realize the accounts for people on reddit were being created on lemmy automatically though. Do the reddit users even know it’s happening?
Your instance is misreporting its name somehow and it was super annoying when I was trying to block it.
Is it alien.top or selfhosted.forum? Pick one please.
Also, do you manage any other instances so I can block those as well? Needless to say, I am slightly pissed off that I have replied to several posts before I saw they were bots. Some of those replies took some effort when I was trying to actually be helpful.
I had the same problem with lemmit.online, and with lemmit.online the owner said “yeah this is a bot, this whole instance is for reddit reposts, if you don’t like it defederate from me” - which .ca did.
I can’t stand bot instances or bots in general that are reposting from reddit, because it’s not valuable content for the fediverse - the OP doesn’t see what we’re saying and if we’re troubleshooting something that’s been crossposted it’s literally just on deaf ears.
The only bot I actually like is the ITNBot which is for ImproveTheNews - it posts neutral, pro-, and anti-stance information relevant to the article being posted, showing you all sides of the issue.
At least lemmit has a blurb that explains the content comes from reddit. Looking at alien.top itself, they do explain that it’s a page for “Fediverser” which posts content from reddit, but it’s sort of vague - makes it seem like people from reddit are signing up there to do this on purpose, but I’m not sure if that’s really how it works.
And yeah, it’s useless to respond to if the person asking isn’t going to get the reply. I’m not sure why people think auto-reddit spam would be a useful thing for lemmy.
Fediverser looks like a project that’s supposed to ease the onboarding process from reddit, looks like you can sign up with a reddit account to have access to Lemmy, but I am not entirely sure.
I don’t really mind the size of the community these days; I feel like if we start getting more and more people from reddit we’re going to get the people we wanted to avoid by leaving the place. Right now it feels like there’s not a ton of content, but there’s a decent amount of discussion, and it’s of high quality. I feel like an easier entrance to the platform is going to degrade the experience, as shitty as that sounds.
Yeah, I didn’t really understand the description. You sign up by authenticating with reddit, and then it automatically connects you with the same subs you have on reddit?
I see “Your account will be activated and you will be subscribed to Lemmy communities that have a reddit counterpart.” but also “create bot accounts to mirror the original accounts on a corresponding fediverse-enabled server”. Hmm.
Right, I mean, I don’t think we’d want Lemmy to just become a clone of reddit with all the same people. Not being ran by a lame corp would still be an advantage but for now I think discourse on Lemmy is higher quality and I hope it stays that way.
They don’t exist yet. Each bot on alien.top represents a real account on reddit. If you think that their question is legit and worthy of a response, but you don’t want to give Reddit even more data, the best thing you can do is respond on Lemmy and send a message to the origjnal asker to tell them about Lemmy and help them migrate.
I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:
It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.
Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.
A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.
And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.
As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.
Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.
This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.
You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).
So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.
Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.
And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.
What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:
the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.
e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.
IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]
NOTES:1. Since this is already a huge wall of text I didn’t go deep on each of those claims, but I can do so if desired/requested. 2. It’s sweet but poisonous. 3. Because in Reddit you can’t “migrate your sub to another Reddit instance”, and the only instance there happens to be administered by arsehats who give no fucks about you or your sub. It’s a dirtier situation that warrants dirtier solutions. 4. Anecdote exemplifying this claim: from 2020~22 I had multiple trolling accounts in Reddit, to shitpost in cooking subs (for some puzzling reason they’re cesspools). Guess how many times this sort of “you need more karma to post here” barrier locked me out? Zero. It’s simply too easy to comment some shitty one-line in a big community (I used r/askreddit for that) and amass 500, sometimes 2k karma points in a single go. 5. If instance admins do not have access to the IPs of the users engaging with their instances, regardless of where they registered in, that should be fixed.
Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg: Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.
You’re already on .ml, so they’d have them disabled given it’s run by the devs who have removed the data from the API, so nothing would change for you.
The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it. The removal of the scores from the API seems heavy-handed and feels like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.
Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg:
Already addressed - a lot of those issues will still affect you, even if you don’t use the karma system.
Let’s say that instances A (karma disabled) and B (karma enabled) federate. A users won’t get the karma system itself, but they’ll still get: less varied and less interesting content, stronger echo chambers, and higher concentration of users in oversized and unruly comms. Because they use the same comms as the B users and thus the behaviour of B users affect A.
Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.
Downvotes are a mixed feature, with pros and cons.
Karma looks good from a distance, but upon closer inspection it’s only cons. (Including enabling shitty=assumptive mod practices.)
You’re already on .ml, so…
I am clearly not talking about my individual usage here. I’m talking about users in general and the Lemmyverse as a whole.
The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it.
I’m not sure on what’s supposed to be the [ipsis digitis] “whole shtick of Lemmy”, and I’m not assuming it.
The removal of the scores from the API seems [for me] heavy-handed and feels [for me] like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.
For me it looks like a sensible decision that takes into account its impact into users and the Lemmyverse.
EDIT: I’ll go further. Dunno if the devs agree with this or not, but I believe that “user aggregate score” = karma also attracts and retains users with the wrong mindset - who are not here to share, contribute or be part of something social and collective; but instead to farm virtual e-peen points for the sake of their individual egos. And I believe that this “it’s all about MEEE! ME! ME!” mindset is part of what makes Reddit such a dumpster fire.
Sure doesn’t seem like it. I went to a lot of effort to make the best of the mod API calls that are available and they go and remove a useful chunk of it. 😒
As someone who is against use aggregate scores and pleased to see it removed I can understand the desire to make it available to admins/moderators to assist in their actions.
I think making the numbers available only for admins/mods would make sense, though I also feel it starts to get to be an arbitrary divide.
I also have to wonder if an admin/mod couldn’t simply use the view of the user’s posts/comments we all have access to along with the various sorts available. Want to know if a user posts generally well received stuff … look at their posts and sort by “Top all time”. Want to know if they’re regularly posting stuff that is poorly received, sort by “Controversial” (which is new) or just “New”. I’d suspect that in the end integrating this sort of lookup into the moderation tooling so that it’s easier/quicker to do would be more worthwhile than persisting with user aggregates.
You can also have a look at how other people did it. There should be a button somewhere to view the source text of any post or comment. In the Lemmy web-interface this button is hidden behind the three dots icon.
Try select * from instance where domain = ‘popular.instance’; and see the last time it was updated via the updated column. I’ve been having to update that column with update instance set updated = now(); because once that timestamp becomes older than 3 days your instance assumes it’s “dead”.
I checked a few instances and they were all last updated on November 18th. I ran that query and updated the updated field to now for all rows, but they aren’t continuing to update after that, and no traffic is coming through.
My workflow is tap “Hide read” which will restrict only new content to show. Then I scroll for a while until I’m getting light on content. Then I refresh and tap “hide read” to surface new content and repeat.
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