I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
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.
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”
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.
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.
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
Replies are going to be possible in the next release
Even if you are not yet getting a reply from OP, you can get a conversation going with other subscribers in the community. It is happening already in the bigger groups like !main and !main. Instead of writing for the OP, consider writing there to bootstrap the “organic” community
Instead of complaining about the current state of the instance, let’s be optimistic about its potential. This is meant as a tool to get the people out of reddit. The biggest things stopping more people from migrating are (a) the lack of content here and (b) people not knowing where to sign up and what communities to subscribe. Alien.top and the fediverser project solves both issues. if you are still on reddit and find a comment/post from someone who you’d like to see in the fediverse, send the OP a comment or DM telling them about how easy it is to sign up.
Why care so much about getting people out of reddit?
It’s a moral imperative to me. I have kids who are still little, and I hope by the time they are teenagers we don’t have an internet dominated by the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Reddit.
Having 100s of bots posting just drowns the actual people
The bots are setup to only to work in very well-defined communities, and only in communities where the mods gave me explicit approval. Is there any community that is “flooded” by the bots?
I prefer a post with 5 genuine comments than 200 reposted comments.
I don’t know about your use case, but a lot of my reddit usage consisted of following technical subreddits where the discussion is quite productive. Given that I don’t want to use reddit anymore (unless if it is to help people get out of it), it makes sense to me that have the mirrored conversation as well just to be a lurker.
especially since the quality of those comments is debatable.
You can still downvote/report.
why would I comment in a ghost town where I know nobody will read what I type?
Even if it is a bot, it has the potential to actually be taken by the real user.
Even if it is a bot and not going to be taken by the real user, it will be seen by real people who are already subscribed to the community and it will help them to overcome their “ghost town” feeling.
Even if it is a bot and the community it is not followed by a lot of other users, people that follow you will see your response anyway.
Point is: we need to start from somewhere, and it’s easier to start with a “ghost town” than with no town at all.
Your points are valid, but turns out that the practice is showing different results:
the original asker is not here to get the answer.
I’m working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.
It’s frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.
This is not what is happening at the selfhosted communities. Turns out that a lot of the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy already.
The point is not just to mirror posts, it’s also to create a clear migration path for people who are still using reddit because the niche communities have not achieved critical mass here.
Besides, those who are on lemmy.world have nothing to worry about because the LW admins have defederated from alien.top.
Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.
The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be. The goal is to get the majority to switch and re-center in a place that is determined by the intolerant minority.
As though, all the good content is on reddit but we’re all camped out here on lemmy.
Which is true, if we are being honest. And if we are being even more honest with ourselves, most of the people that came to Lemmy are going back to Reddit because there is no content for the niche communities here. I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?
We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.
Our problem should not be with the people on reddit, but reddit itself. Instead of pretending that we don’t care about the people there, we should try to find ways to bring them here.
Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?
The comment would not be coming from a bot account, it would come from the redditor who have used the “Fediverser portal” to connect the accounts (and given permission to send comments) so it would also be “organic”.
completely drop reddit without losing access to its content and the communities that are there.
create a migration path for the people who are on reddit and don’t want to give it away because there is no real alternative.
I’m also one that comments, I just don’t want to do that on reddit anymore. I want to be able to do that on Lemmy, and have the two-way bridge until the community here is self-sustainable. This is how I think this tool can be helpful.
That’s exactly what I am doing for lots of communities that have no reddit equivalent, and what I did for !main when it was clear that !selfhosted was already somewhat active. Regarding these, go take a look at the usage numbers for both, tell me which is going up and which is going down…
An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum.
Agree, 100%.
The thing is, you can’t force it.
Agree, 100%.
The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.
That’s where we disagree. Not because I don’t think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I don’t think this is enough.
The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of “1/9/90” of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.
I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldn’t get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should “go read some books so I can ask questions”?
No, I’m sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.
The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It won’t be “forced”, but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say “it’s fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmy”.
Sorry, your comment is just rehashing all the arguments that I had in many other discussions:
If I want reddit posts, I will go on reddit
The idea is to not give more traffic to reddit and to help people get out of it. By having the content mirrored here, not only we have a method to consume the content from there, we also ensure that the majority of people (a.k.a, the 90% of lurkers) can find on Lemmy the content they are used to consume from Reddit, thus facilitating the migration and fueling network effects.
with missing comments
My system also mirrors the comments, so you won’t be missing anything.
but people will leave a community that spams their feed.
I’m not talking about mirroring posts from communities that are super popular. The idea is to get the content from the long tail of niche communities. There won’t be a “flood” of spam because we are talking about communities that have a handful of posts and comments per day.
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
The user numbers in Lemmy communities don't add up (jemmy.jeena.net)
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
deleted_by_author
Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here?
Arguments to support the idea:...