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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 solution for that can be a whole lot simpler: add these features to the browser so that it works in favor of the users. I have extensions to redirect from YouTube/medium/Twitter, so these issues do not affect me regardless of website I am visiting.
I’m trying to get out of my Python/Javascript comfort zone and start contributing to other Fediverse projects that are built in other languages. If you are already using Emacs for your dev work in any of the above languages, can you share perhaps your configuration or at least recommended packages for beginners, which...
Using Todoist as a cloud inbox for GTD in Emacs orgmode (srijan.ch)
Perkeep - A set of tools and data formats to make sure that we can be in control of our data. (perkeep.org)
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:...
Bug: people are posting paywalls & other exclusive walled gardens
The problem:...
Emacs: customize fonts (generic method and 'fontaine' package) (www.youtube.com)
Rust/Go/Elixir/Rails developers using Emacs, please share your tips.
I’m trying to get out of my Python/Javascript comfort zone and start contributing to other Fediverse projects that are built in other languages. If you are already using Emacs for your dev work in any of the above languages, can you share perhaps your configuration or at least recommended packages for beginners, which...