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.
Of all criticism I am hearing, this is by far the most misguided one.
My goal with Communick is to become a mere service provider. I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves. Sure, I am doing the moderation now because they are not big enough, but if/when they become a real alternative to current subreddits, I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.
If you don’t believe me, you can go the matrix channel used by the /r/selfhosted crowd during the protests. I offered them the selfhosted.forum instance for free. They didn’t take it.
I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves.
That is painfully obvious
I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.
They are. They just aren’t at the site you want their content to be on.
I want the programming communities to be on programming.dev. I want the adult communities to be on lemmynsfw. I want the nix community to be on nix-community. I want the Brazilian communities to be on lemmy.eco.br, like the italians on feddit.it or the Germans on feddit.de…
These communities already have their place, so there is no need to recreate them. But what about the communities that don’t?
You are trying to paint my work in the worst possible light, as if I am trying to hijack the networks. Not only that is not true, it is against everything I stand for. And the really funny thing is that I already have written out quite a bit about how my “evil plan” is to get rid of ad-funded internet and that are alternative business models that can be more ethical without trying to capitalize on eyeballs.
A bit of cynicism can be good, just make sure it doesn’t become paranoia.
And what you still seem to not understand:
Those communities don’t want to be on those domains. So all you are doing is trying to force their hand because you think your desires override their autonomy.
I don’t have to “paint (your) work in the worst possible light” because… you are doing that yourself.
Can you honestly say that the communities on reddit are on reddit due to their choice and absolute free will?
I would say that I would rather they make their own decisions rather than someone decide they know better and force their hands.
There are a lot of subreddits that have set up their own Lemmy communities. There’s not much hindering them.
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.
Alien.top itself is just a standard Lemmy instance. I could believe it if you said it was timing out (as it had a 5 day outage a couple of weeks ago) but to claim there are any ads or trackers there is a simple, verifiable lie.
Are you trying to access via http or https?
If you open https://portal.alien.top, do you see the same message?
I typed “alien.top” into my safari and that is what I got.
Then why does the URL show
portal.alien.top?I honestly don’t know what to tell you. I’d like to investigate, but both Chrome and Firefox are normal.
I also have ublock installed, and it shows zero elements being blocked.
Can you simp any harder for this instance?
He is not simping, it’s his instance so ofcourse he is giving his POV
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.
If I’m not mistaken, they are going to release that feature soon on the default lemmy client.
The backend will support it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869 but I can’t find the corresponding frontend PR or issue
Oh, I wasn’t aware that was accessible to users! Cool, thanks.
Dunno when they plan on releasing it.
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.
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.
this shit is pointless. defederated
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.
If I wanted to see the front page of reddit I’d go to reddit
This is the only way to see it for now. Bridge doesn’t show “the front page of reddit”.
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.
Wow, great fearmongering.
Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.
Also in some jurisdictions it is not only unenforceable, but straight illegal(Canada?).
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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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Well, it clearly seems that this experiment is failing, but not for any reason I was expecting…
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Fediverser is first and foremost a set of tools to help people migrate away from Reddit. I was not expecting so many “if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit”. I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit, or maybe do what I am doing and only using it to spread awareness of the alternatives. I thought that it was understood that the problem with Reddit was on management, not with Reddit users. I thought that people liked the content from their niche subs, and I thought that people were willing to help others to move to a newer alternative, free of Big Tech and centralized corporate control. It doesn’t seem to be the case. For all the talk about community and all the people crying against spez, it seems that Slacktivism is still the dominant ideology of social networks.
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Fediverser is very specific about what subreddits are being mirrored and into what communities the content is going to. To talk about “spam” honestly makes very little sense to me, until I realized that there are so many people browsing via “all”. I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.
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People were feeling “tricked” into responding. That’s on me. My work on two-way communication is going a bit slower than I was hoping for and I thought that marking accounts as bots was enough, but clearly the UX is failing to make this noticeable.
With all that said, I will retire the bots until I deliver on my promise to make two-way communication work and/or I have better tools at fediverser.network to help community promotion.
I get that you saw a perceived problem and you’re trying to fix it. I get that what you’ve built is cool on a technical level and it probably feels really terrible to have people be so negative about it. So first of all, none of this is personal at all. But I feel this comment illustrates exactly where the problem lies.
You want to “help people migrate away from Reddit”. But I’m not sure what makes you think people need “help” at all, I mean if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform. I was a heavy Reddit user and was in plenty of tiny niche subreddits, but so what? I wanted to leave so I left.
So maybe the real problem is that so many people don’t want to leave Reddit, and that disappoints you, and you want to try and convince them that they do? This I could definitely understand, but trying to convince someone you know what they want better than they do themselves is not generally a great tactic.
Most people will just stick with whatever the “best” platform is in terms of showing them content they want to see, and are slow to move to the next thing once the one they’re on starts sucking. So if you really want to put your dev skills to use it would make more sense to get stuck in with Lemmy itself and help increase the pace of improvements. A lot of us are happy here, but a lot of people also bounced off due to the jank. And the more we can reduce that bounce rate, the more we can keep people around, the more we’re in a position to capitalise whenever the next big wave of newbies hits.
Thank you for the effort to understand my perspective. It’s much appreciated.
You are definitely right in a lot of your assessment. I am disappointed at the sheer amount of people who claimed to want to leave Reddit but never took any action about it. I am disappointed at mods who were all protesting about the changes but when push comes to shove, the large majority of them simply were afraid of giving up and losing their “power”. I absolutely agree that any approach that ends up patronizing users and telling them how awful their choices are will cause them to be more resistant to change and aligned with the status quo.
The one part that I strongly disagree is the notion that “if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform”: Social media (as we know it, with centralized control by a handful of corporations) is made to be as addictive as the most powerful drugs, and peer pressure is one of the strong behavior-regulating forces.
We can not wait until “things start to suck”, because by then people will more likely than not just move on to the next crappy corporate-controlled media. What I believe is that we need a coordinated effort and that we need to act as an intolerant minority to fight against it. And I know that I am not getting everything right off the bat, but I hope that at least I can gather enough support to make this a credible threat to the status quo.
I don’t like your bots at all because I, like others, browse all. Lemmy is too small and inactive to stick to little groups. They also filled my feed with a disproportionate amount of stuff I don’t care about, like selfhosted.
The idea is genuinely interesting and the execution, especially the bridge to claim ownership of the bot account, is legitimately really cool. But until it’s not spammy— which may be never at the rate Lemmy is expanding, or lack of expansion— it’s going to meet significant resistance.
It’s weird because I really agree with you. Lowering the barrier to entry for leaving Reddit and porting over its discussions is great. People say they don’t want Reddit content, but honestly I doubt that. Hell, even having copies of the niche Reddit content would help fill out the fediverse’s lack of content. Sadly I don’t see this working at all without two way communication (which you would probably need proxies for). I’d be pretty surprised if you ever brought it back.
I particularly agree on the moral front. I disagree with Reddit the company and don’t care for the state of the internet. But I can’t see a barrier of entry low enough for people to actually stand up for themselves, so while I respect the effort and willingness to do something about your values, my faith in the remaining Reddit users is low enough that I really can’t see a universe where this works.
The one part that I strongly disagree is the notion that “if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform”: Social media (as we know it, with centralized control by a handful of corporations) is made to be as addictive as the most powerful drugs, and peer pressure is one of the strong behavior-regulating forces.
The addictiveness and the inertia factor are the two main ways to hold your user base to your product, very true.
Don’t give up on what you’re doing, keep working at it, refining. The vocal indigenous minority of any place don’t handle change well, and tend to rescue defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Thank you for the encouraging words, and I hope that I can count on those like you to continue doing it.
Thank you.
It doesn’t seem like you understood why people are upset though. Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All. Dare I say most Lemmy users do this. Making repost bots actively harms “real” post discoverability and makes browsing content difficult. Not to mention most reposted content is very superficial, and most of these text postd have zero value when there’s no interaction.
I was not expecting so many “if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit”.
No, we’re saying if you want to see Reddit content you should host an alternate frontend like https://teddit.net/ or go to a dedicated place to view that content. Hosting it on Lemmy makes little sense because…
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You are stressing out every Lemmy instance by making so many posts and comments a minute
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There’s no way to opt-in, so a lot of these posts are making its way to people’s feeds without consent and people aren’t interested in seeing it, which is why most people are upset
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It’s actively making the new user experience worse because it feels like there’s too much botspam and someone who’s brand new won’t understand what’s going on.
If there was some way to opt in it would be very cool and a great project, but the way it works now does more harm than good
Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
*discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn’t know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs (resource intensive, so to be used by admins only) can mitigate that issue
So far, the reasons that people claim to be upset has more to do with their own ignorance of the current state of affairs than something harmful being done by fediverser or alien.top.
And I don’t mean ignorance as a pejorative. I mean it that I have failed to communicate and educate people about the strategy and plan for fediverser.
To illustrate the point:
Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.
That’s not true. There is https://browse.feddit.de and https://fediverser.project. There are communities about new communities. You can browse an user profile to see what communities they subscribe to. All of these are better methods to find new content than browsing “all”.
That’s not true. There is https://browse.feddit.de and https://fediverser.project. There are communities about new communities. You can browse an user profile to see what communities they subscribe to. All of these are better methods to find new content than browsing “all”.
Until these are built into the UI, how is a user supposed to find them when they just want to start using Lemmy? They don’t search for such sites, they browse all. The reason sites like reddit work is because they cater to the non-technical crowd.
You are thinking like a developer and not like someone worried about the user experience, this is not a dig but a key part of the problem. The root cause of users not coming to Lemmy in the thousands is the UX. Fix it and normies can use it and post content themselves.
Until these are built into the UI, how is a user supposed to find them when they just want to start using Lemmy?
By going to /communities and subscribing to the communities that might be of interest?
Seriously, there is no excuse to justify browsing by all.
Yeah but which community on which instance, seriously are you trying to seem so dense? How to make this easy for normies?
People come to lemmy.world but the best community for topic XYZ might not be here so this is the whole point of ALL.
Just because you don’t do something doesn’t mean there is no point, your viewpoint is obviously a minority view.
which community on which instance (…) lemmy.world but the best community for topic XYZ might not be here.
Check “All” to see all communities and subscribe to the ones that might be interesting to you.
You should care about the amount of downvotes on this one
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !newcommunities@lemmy.world
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Just don’t, repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience. We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.
Creators of some federated network disagree with you
Reddit is actively working to wall their garden though.
That’s why mentioned federatied network bridges store all bridged messages on instance with all the metadata. This is same: bridged posts and comments are stored with metadata. So even if reddit will nuke bridge, already bridged posts will stay.
This also reduces switching cost from reddit to lemmy and turns lemmy into “continue conversation here” button. And according to guy who defined enshittification, low switching cost is how social networks gather TONS of people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
according to guy who defined enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ok but then instead of encouraging people to Lemmy you are encouraging to matrix which will have the same issue bridging to Reddit.
Seems like another bad solution.
I’m not sure what you are implying. I was just saying that alien.top is just like bridge in matrix, why it is better to store data on instance instead of fetching it every time like frontend does and how it helps Lemmy get users.
I think we’re agreeing in that its not helpful for Lemmy.
We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.
One of the things that I truly despise is the use of the “Royal We”. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to make it sound like your opinion and your preference is an universal truth. It’s quite simple to disprove that what you want is not necessarily what everyone else wants.
For example:
repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience.
- Thanks to mirrors, I could simply get rid of all the 40+ subreddits that I used to subscribe to lurk around. E.g, I don’t to participate in discussions on /r/soccer, but I do like to follow some of the discussions and I do like having the posts to see game highlights, match threads, etc.
- Mirrors allow us to have content protected and out of Reddit’s control. If Reddit decides to tighten up their grip on the API even more, the mirrored content will be already safe from their hands.
I have never used Reddit so I don’t know what experience it is you want, but couldn’t you achieve the same thing in a better way by browsing on Teddit?
The whole point is to leave Reddit. Just changing the frontend is not enough.
It isn’t a client, it’s a frontend. You’re not registered and you’re not contributing to traffic. If you really want to leave leave reddit so much, it seems illogical to bring it here.
The mirror is just one part of the fediverser project. The other is in getting people to migrate away from reddit by joining the corresponding communities.
And it so happens that a lot of the people that want to migrate away from Reddit end up returning because they don’t find the content here from their niche communities. This is the part that the mirror attempts to solve.
I think the thought is good, but overall I believe in growing the Fediverse as an independent community. People will also not see the appeal if it seems like we rely on other platforms. What I do think we can do to address the content issue is to improve integration with other Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, since they are already compatible and have the necessary userbase.
Mirrors allow us to have content protected and out of Reddit’s control. If Reddit decides to tighten up their grip on the API even more, the mirrored content will be already safe from their hands.
I think you are confusing people here by saying mirror. They think about it as another frontend.
I suggest to use Matrix terms. Here what you have would be one-way bridging
One-way bridging is rare, but can be used to represent a bridge that is bridging from the remote system into matrix. This is common when the remote system does not permit message posting, or is simply not capable of handling posting outside their system. The users bridged from the remote system often appear as virtual users in matrix, as is the case with matrix-appservice-instagram.
The people complaining can’t even understand the concept of curating their own feed, do you think they will understand if we start talking about bridges and double-puppets?
Asking someone to stop spamming is a form of curation.
First you need to make a convincing argument that this is any type of “spamming”.
Then you need to explain why you can only curate your feed by looking at their firehose, when there are far more other effective filters in place.
Seems odd to claim that people don’t understand the concept of using Subscribed to filter their feed, when they’ve made a conscious choice to change from the default to All. It seems you don’t understand the concept of browsing “All” or why people would choose that.
conscious choice to change from the default to All.
First, the default listing is set by the instance administrator so we can’t be sure of what is the default in the first place.
Second, one of the most common criticisms carried against open source developers is the tendency to provide too many configuration choices to end-users instead of streamlining the interface, which leads to creation of footguns.
Making it so easy to browse by all is one such footgun.
These “lemmy community syncing” tools is also a footgun. The people running those scripts are basically forcing all content from all communities to be copied across the instances. (curiously, if people were not running these scripts, the likelihood of them getting “hit” by alien.top would be quite small).
At least it will help against those who accidentally(or intentionally) say “just use Teddit”/other frontend.
Honestly those don’t bother me so much as the one that call it “spam bots”. I’ve spent so much time making sure that the bots only post the content that is relevant to a specific community, and I am going out of my way to make sure that no post is going to a community that does not approve of the bots, but somehow what I am doing is as bad as the script kiddie that was posting goatse-style pictures everywhere this weekend.
I understand that your bots work for your use case, but it actively harms mine, and I’d happily call it spam.
I call it spam not because the content being mirrored is low quality, but because there is little to no community interaction on the posts. I’d I wanted to just read news, I’d just go to my RSS reader. The only reason I use Lemmy is because I want to see others’ opinions on the posts.
By the way, this isn’t me saying that it would be better if it had bidirectional bridging. If that was implemented, Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content. I don’t want that.
Also, I use the All feed for discovering content, not because I don’t know about 3rd party community search tools, but because I don’t know what communities I like. The All feed allows me to find new communities that interest me, and I wouldn’t be able to find those communities just with those search tools.
I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.
I typically browse subscribed until I’m seeing posts I’ve already viewed. I occasionally switch to all to see if I will find any new content/ communities to subscribe to. How do you typically do it?
If I ran out of content to see, I take it as a sign that I should go back to work…
I’m never on here during work. Even if I was, that point is pretty unhelpful. I think it’s a normal thing for people to want an unlimited supply of content, as that’s what we’ve gotten used to and that’s what these websites are for. What’s it to you, to dictate how I want to use my time? Whether this behavior is a good or bad thing is another argument. I think the limited content supply here is a concession that most people have accepted on Lemmy, but I also think that it’s possible that it wouldn’t have to be a concession as the platforms grow and get better.
Sorry, I meant it as a joke. Clearly it didn’t land.
To give you a serious answer, I think that the point is in understanding that “All” will always be an unfiltered firehose. If the issue is that you are running out of content in the communities you subscribe and that represent your interest, then we need to find ways to increase the amount of content here instead of chasing another fix by going to “All”.
In a way, this is exactly something that the mirrored content from fediverser could also help, and also another reason that I don’t understand why people complain about “spam”. The content from alien.top mirrored is ending up at a community that you subscribe, it is far more likely for that content to be interesting to you than a random post from a community that you do not subscribe.
Re: “finding out new communities to follow”: that’s also part of the Fediverser Project. The idea is to build a crowdsourced map of Lemmy communities to be recommended as the alternative to any given subreddit.
work
That’s a weird way of spelling “rotating through the same 4 apps until you’re too tired to stay awake”
I follow a sub that’s all reposts from reddit. Occasionally I think about replying to something, but then I just go, “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.” I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else respond to any of the crossposts, either. The community is c/bicycletouring@lemmit.online if anyone is curious, which is a pretty niche topic to start with.
I’m not convinced it’s adding anything to the Lemmy experience, but at least those are clearly marked as crossposts and are all posted by one account, so it’s easy enough to ignore if I wanted.
On the “all” thing - remember that reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. In this mode, you’d get popular posts on subs that had opted in to allowing them to hit that page (or didn’t opt out, I don’t remember).
/r/hockey is a good example - their posts usually generally stayed in the sub, but their Super Bowl post (and occasionally others) would usually hit reddit’s front page and bring in a ton of people who weren’t subbed to /r/hockey.
This was a good feature of reddit, I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
It’s possible I misunderstood your last goal, but if you’re planning to have Lemmy comments posted back to reddit, I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with reddit’s admins after they figure it out.
Hey, do you also know the /c/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world community? I saw you posting about your trips on /c/bicycle@lemmy.ca and was wondering.
Bicycles is a really nice sub though, i like the vibe, was exclusively posting there about my trips too. On reddit i never subscribed to cycling subs other than touring and bikepacking, since that really is what i’m most interested in, in cycling. So i was kinda hyped to see some traffic in the touring c and kinda switched, even though i’m unsure if it even makes sense to split the cycling subs yet, Bicycles is quite low traffic too. But i somehow ended up with mod status in the touring sub, so i feel partly responsible for it.
No, I didn’t, thanks for the tip. Subbed! I might drop the other one now.
I do miss /r/bicyclingcirclejerk. I loved the absurdly fake bragging and having fun with the stereotypes. Then one day we realized quite a few of us actually ride Cannondales, and that made it even funnier.
Yeah, for the cirklejerk sub it would make a lot of sense to have its own lemmy community, since it doesn’t translate to other cycling subs.
That sub certainly gave me some good laughs, but i only checked it every now and then.
Yeah, sometimes it got a little nasty about other people on reddit, which I was never a fan of. It was supposed to be in good fun, but sometimes people got carried away OR people would start posting every single question that was asked. (For example, I can poke fun at the people who just started riding a bike in their 20s and are now wondering about getting into a professional racing career, but sometimes people would repost what I thought were completely valid questions - no one knows everything, especially when they’re new to something. Fortunately those latter posts rarely got many upvotes or comments.)
Overall though it was generally a lot of fun. And honestly they were probably the most knowledgeable, helpful group if you had a detailed cycling question.
“What’s the point? OP isn’t here.”
Please don’t ever feel discouraged by contributing content to the network, if you think the contribution is positive.
- There are other people there. Just check the number of subscribers to get an idea of at least how many people could be reached by your post.
- Your comment there can act as a catalyst for other Lemmy users to join in and participate.
- Having content on Lemmy that is not available on Reddit creates a positive asymmetry in our favor, and it creates an incentive for people on Reddit to migrate here.
reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. (…) I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
I agree, and it doesn’t even need to be on Lemmy backend. I firmly believe that everything related to content filtering and even algorithmic choices should be part of the client, not the server.
We can have an (mobile/web) app that takes all of the firehose and does the filtering in the client.
Client-side filtering? Easy. Client-side sorting? Not easy.
Why?
Why hard? Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy’s existance on every discovered lemmy instances, which depending on algo you are using, might include comments metadata. To aid client-side sorting you would need server-side filtering, which will limit data avaliable to sorting algo. For example client-side trending algo would not show old trending post because it was filtered out.
So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.
Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy’s existance on every discovered lemmy instances.
Why would you need all data to build the frontpage? Why not just make a sliding window with the content from the last 24/48h?
So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.
Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?
Why would you need all data to build the frontpage? Why not just make a sliding window with the content from the last 24/48h?
Exactly what I’m saying. To not be super resource-intensive, client-side sorting needs to be incomplete. As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.
Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?
Not much I guess(sounds like Thunderbird). But what about mobile?
I can’t believe two people downvoted your comment.
You’re right about contributing.
As for the filtering, I’m not sure how I feel about that - I use the web interface on my computer and an app on my phone and tablet. I’d prefer them to have similar results. But I see the point you’re making; it could be curated by user instead of a massive algorithm for everyone.
Thanks for the support, but I honestly stopped caring about downvotes. I think there is a vocal minority that is already set on not liking what I am doing, so they are going to vote me down even if I post a cure for cancer.
Fucking hell you are tone deaf. Your idea is fine. Your implementation sucks ass.
Did I see in another post where you told people to stop thinking of bots as bots and imagine they are real users because they might be one day, and then redefine what a bot was? Just stop.
People are telling you time and time again what is pissing them off, and then you just try and repackage and resell what you are doing. Just stop.
Put in big bold letters at the top of the posts that “THIS IS A THREAD THAT IS COPIED FROM REDDIT TO HELP FACILITATE USER TRANSITION TO LEMMMY.”
Sure, you are driving people to participate in a thread, but it’s pointless and counter productive. It’s pissing people off and you are poo-poo’ing it like they don’t understand your grand plans.
Putting a comment at the top of the threads was being done already since Sunday. https://alien.top/comment/2114215
Makes sense, the number of downvotes on your reply here is just so strange.
I had similar effect under post of linux ponies, where every comment had at least one downvote. I call it “brown marks”.
I worry too – if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot? Given their reasons for turning the screws on API and other policy changes, they may not take kindly to having “their” content re-posted elsewhere, let alone to a system designed specifically to escape reddit.
if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot
Then mission. fucking. accomplished.
If this gets significant uptake, it will mean that the Fediverse has enough people to the point that the mirrors are not needed and network effects will be large enough to get other people interested/invested in Lemmy to the point where they will sign up even if takes some effort.
I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit,
I did
I didn’t mind some of your bots as I theory maybe one of the communities would be useful. But none of the ones I’d have wanted seem to appear in my feed.
You have to ask the project creator if you want to add a community, they would set up the bridge.
I wasn’t going to be responsible for flooding everyone’s all feed even further.
Ooooh. This is exactly what I want, and I want to help you make things better!
I’d like to brainstorm ways of making it opt-in, and making it discoverable without being spammy.
What do you use to coordinate code contributors to your project? Do you have a matrix channel?
PS: I don’t think you need to focus that hard on making it two way. What you’ve implemented so far is already useful. There are some porn subreddits I used to go to when I’m horny, and let me tell you that comments are absolutely not necessary!
Rule 34 strikes again. :)
No matrix channel yet, but you can take a look at https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser. If you know your way around Docker it should be easy to get started.
For those who downvote you I suggest to downvote Matrix too
Wow. Didn’t expect 5 users to actually downvote. If people who did it also claim that they came here to leave reddit and belive in fediverse, but hate Matrix - mainstream fediverse instant messaging protocol and one of default lemmy profile fields, I would like to read how they came up with such bizzare and self-contradictory combination of ideas.
Removed by mod
from you degenerates.
Is this really necessary?
I just want to chime in that I agree with you. The number of people who are browsing “all” on a large server like Lemmy.world and then complaining about content they don’t want to see is way too high.
You don’t want to see it, don’t browse “all” or accept that someone does want to see that content.
If you think it’s the “will of the people” petition your server admin to block it. Or move to a server where it’s blocked.
You don’t need to shit on this guy because you don’t like their project. It’s easily avoidable.
You can’t tell people to not browse all. How will small communities reach new users if new users don’t browse all?
Agreed. Lemmy is different from Reddit in that there are not enough users to have a self-sustaining community in every niche, and therefore we must all help preventing them all from collapsing and everything just becoming memes and shitposts.
Sure. But if you’re going to browse all then don’t bitch about what’s in it. All isn’t your personal curated feed. That’s what subscribed is for.
The irony of it all is that everyone loved to complain about “The Algorithm”, but now that the ability of curating the feed is entirely in their hands, they are “ooh, things I don’t like in my timeline, make it stahp!”
Dude, I know I’m like a week late to the party, but to defend your project by saying that everyone is just browsing incorrectly is not a very good look.
Not everyone, but it seems like a substantial part of them. Anyway, I am saying it is only wrong in the scenario where Lemmy has a more sizeable userbase.
Still, not a justification to keep the mirrors. That’s why I disabled most of them.
You can’t browse All and then get mad at the stuff in it.
The brigade is in full force. You are 100% right.
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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?
No identity is being “stolen”. The mirrors are not doing anything on behalf of the users, and no content is being altered.
Wouldn’t it be more ethical to send them to i.e. join-lemmy.org/instances
Go to /r/redditalternatives and let me know how many people simply don’t understand the concept of instances.
Or understand the concept of instances, but didn’t want to bother with the process of finding out which one to choose.
Or went with the “just go to lemmy.world” approach, got burned because it was struggling to deal with the influx of people and thought “Aw, Lemmy sucks”.
Or took the time to find an instance, but after signing up had no idea how to find (re-)discover all their niche communities.
Fediverser is solving most if not all these problems.
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’m from lemmy.ca too, and while I’m conflicted about the project, I’d rather limit defederation unless it’s about something very clearcut
After v0.19 drops, users can block instances which should fix the problem for everyone that might want it gone
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.
Alien.top is one-way bridge instance. If you belive(I will not say think because it will be insult to thinking) that it is spam instance, are you sure you understand what fediverse is? It lowers switching cost for reddit users since they can come here, post here, comment here and STILL be able to see content they want to see, but without ads and spyware.
In easy to understand terms: u r spam.
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 don’t agree with them creating bot accounts and commenting on other instances posts though. Everything should be maintained within the instance.
Not sure why you added preserving metadata like username, pfp and timestamp(I guess ts in preserved too) and called it “creating bot accounts”. And as I understand bridging communities on other instances is opt-in.
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…
How can you as user block votes from one instance?
There is no “misresporting”. Selfhosted forum is a topic-based instance, like many other that set up as part of !communick_news_network@communick.news .
alien.top is a fediverser instance, which is done to help mirror content and to help people from reddit to migrate.
The whole idea of fediverser is to make migration for redditors as easy as possible and in a way that they when they migrate they have access to all the content they were used to.
Some clients see the instance name as alien.top when it is a actually selfhosted.forum. When the instance info is referenced, it’s reporting back both names. Lemmy can clients see one or the other and just blocking alien.top won’t stop the spammy noise.
When I try to block a post from selfhosted.forum the client sees it as alien.top. This is partially a client issue, but it is likely caused by how the instances are presented.
Nobody hates the idea of a “Reddit transition instance”. We just can’t stand the noise it generates and that little effort was put into identifying posts as bot generated.
You mentioned somewhere that people should comment on those posts to help bootstrap conversations. Unfortunately, that is not how this is working out and it is wasting people’s time.
Again, this might be an UI/UX issue, but there is no misreporting.
What you are seeing is the homepage of selfhosted.forum, which is an instance that by itself does not take any users and is only the home of the communities, like !homelab@selfhosted.forum or !main@selfhosted.forum.
Alien.top works by being a home to accounts only (no communities) and they follow specific rules about what “which content from each subreddit should go to which lemmy community”. For example, content from /r/homelab will be posted by alien.top to !homelab@selfhosted.forum.
The “about page” of selfhosted.forum contains information disclosing that the instance is part of the “Communick News Network” and promotes two alternatives for the people that want to sign up for Lemmy. Granted, it is missing information about the selfhosted instance is supposed to be about (which I have done already in other instances like level-up.zone) , but this in any way means that the “instance” is misreporting itself.
I might not be understanding the post- correctly. From my perspective using connect I can go to alien.top and then select a post that’s on that instance and then the instance will change from alien.top to the self-hosted one, which is confusing to me as a user. This happens even when I tap on the alien top instance as a whole.
Is this just because the second instance is the only instance that federates with alien top? If that’s the case I think it might be a good idea to merge the two for less confusion and allow better moderation for users client side
