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/[email protected]
https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]
https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]
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.
Well, it clearly seems that this experiment is failing, but not for any reason I was expecting…
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
You are stressing out every Lemmy instance by making so many posts and comments a minute
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
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
*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:
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.
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.
Check “All” to see all communities and subscribe to the ones that might be interesting to you.
https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E20/PChZXI_AUusv2qr-ofjGY6alRKY=.gif
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: [email protected]
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.
I accept the criticism that people were feeling flooded by the mirrored content, this is why I turned them off for now. But I fail to see how it’s worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.
First, it’s not “Reddit content”. It’s about the content from the communities. Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there. The two-way interaction is an intermediate step to make it easy for people there to know they won’t be missing out by leaving their favorite subreddits and coming here.
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.
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/[email protected] 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/[email protected] community? I saw you posting about your trips on /c/[email protected] 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.
Please don’t ever feel discouraged by contributing content to the network, if you think the contribution is positive.
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.
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?
Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?
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.
Not much I guess(sounds like Thunderbird). But what about mobile?
Not necessarily true. You can build an index and keep a cache of the N posts by each sorting method. Your data store will grow linearly with the number of sorting criteria you will have, which should be small.
We are talking about an amount of data that a sqlite database process in a breeze. My K-9 email client can handle all my 20 years of gmail…
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.
There is nothing rational about a mob attack. It will pass.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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.