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://alien.top/post/263029

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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[–] null@slrpnk.net 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

They are meant to work for people that are signing up and encounter some content. Without them, people would join the communities and not find anything to browse, so they bounce anyway.

Not sure I follow how an unclaimed ghost account solves this problem vs. that unclaimed account being marked as a bot

[–] rglullis@communick.news -5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Imagine you are big on some niche community which exists on Reddit (let's say, e.g, /r/civ)

You want to leave Reddit, you hear about Lemmy.

You sign up.

You go to browse.feddit.de and look for Civilization communities.

You find !civ@lemmy.ca and !civ@lemm.ee, both of which with no activity in the last 3 months, and most posts are more about people trying to figure out what to talk about instead of actually talking about the thing that the community is supposed to be about. Not only this is confusing (do you need to have any relationship to either lemmy.ca and lemm.ee to join? Why are there two separate communities? If these communities are dead, should I create yet-another one?) but don't you think that the most common reaction would be simply to drop the whole effort and just go back to browsing Reddit?

Now, contrast this with the scenario where fediverser.network has compiled a comprehensive map of all these niche subreddits and can point to at least one lemmy community, and also where the mirroring is using these bots to post relevant content to all of these communities.

Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.

And if you decide to join Lemmy by using alien.top itself, all of that could be made automatically. If you had 50 subreddits, you would be automatically subscribed to all the relevant 50 Lemmy communities, you wouldn't even need to worry about having to figure out which-subreddits-map-to-which-lemmy-communities and your feed would be customized.

I don't know about you, but to me the second case seems like a much better onboarding experience and I'd be a lot more likely to stick around if that was a reality.

[–] null@slrpnk.net 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay but that doesn't answer my question. How does making a ghost account that may or may not be claimed for each post make that possible but marking that account as a bot unless it's been claimed by a human would not?

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

marking that account as a bot unless it’s been claimed by a human would not?

This is exactly how it works. Every account is marked as a bot until the redditor claims it. I'm not sure I'm understanding your question, here.

[–] null@slrpnk.net -1 points 11 months ago

Gotcha -- that wasn't clear from the info here.

In that case I don't really see the problem. Anyone can block bot-posts and most clients let you block instances now. If people don't want to see it, they can filter it out pretty easily.

[–] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.

If the posts are from a Reddit community's few actual posters and none from any of the posters on Lemmy instances, what's the incentive to switch over to Lemmy? Moreover, if someone's mainly a poster, aren't you only encouraging them to stay on Reddit and post as they know there's someone handling mirroring their posts elsewhere for them?

I've read over the discussions around this and I can sort of see where you're coming from for some of the few folks that want to lurk and browse Reddit stuff via Lemmy apps or the like, but I'm struggling to see how much it really helps different Lemmy instances draw more posters. This may help bring lurkers over, but from what I can tell, there's not much of a problem with people lurking across Lemmy, but more of a poster problem, in terms of having a greater variety of people posting and commenting.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 11 months ago

what’s the incentive to switch over to Lemmy?

The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.

Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.

This may help bring lurkers over.

By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.

Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.

As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:

By creating two-way communication (which is okay, but still works in favor of Reddit)
By promoting Lemmy as an alternative and bringing more people from Reddit (which is ideal)

The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.

The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ah, no, I’d come and see “okay, this site has a couple inactive communities about civ and one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”. Pretty unclear why you think that would be better. I’d prefer to make posts in the genuine Lemmy communities personally, not one filled with spooky clone accounts. If I wanted the reddit content, that’s what reddit is for.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

"one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”

I can point you to communities on selfhosted.forum that started completely from bots and today have hundreds of organic users. In some cases, threads that get started from a reddit mirror got carried on by users on Lemmy.

What is pissing some (not all) people off is that they only wrote because they didn't know it was a bot. While I understand the feeling of being tricked, it doesn't change the fact that a community with more content (even if mirrored) ends up attracting more real users than the desert communities that people create but do not put out content

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay, which communities are those?

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 11 months ago

Go to https://selfhosted.forum/communities and check "users per month". Bots are not counted on those.