[Discussion] alien.top bots

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

[Discussion] alien.top bots

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

The following is just my opinion.

First, my issues with this as a user.

The project claims to try to achieve mostly 2 things:

Get redditors to switch
Kick-start communities/subreddits

Personally, I don’t see how having a copy of your content history really helps in getting a reddit user to switch.

On kick-starting communities with content, this is debatable.

Personally, I think it instead creates somewhat of an illusion of content, a firehose of unmoderated reddit content that a lemmy user can’t really engage with because the 1M users aren’t here, not really, they’re on reddit. You could already feel like a ghost by visiting a reddit thread a few hours old, this just ensures no-one of your interactions do anything.
Plenty of those are meant to be a discussion, in this case, one which you can’t be part of.
If I wanted to lurk reddit without any way to interact with them, I’d just go to reddit or use one of the several front-ends like LibReddit.

The communities themselves are just bots talking to each other. An echo of a conversion that’s happening on reddit, with the odd lemmy not realizing they’re commenting into the void of reddit bots. I know I’ve done just that a few times before realizing the OP or commenter would never get it.

It is also somewhat difficult to deal with as a user, because even if you block alien.top in 0.19, it won’t do anything. You’d still have to stay on top of the new instances that pop-up and keep blocking the new ones.

Now, my issues with this as an admin:

This firehose is unmoderated and it is unrealistic to expect any lemmy instance to take on moderation for all the spam and gavage that inevitably comes along with it. It is openly breaking reddit ToS.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no lost love for reddit, but such flagrant infringement is bound to attract unwanted legal attention sooner or later. While “Reddit can suck it” is a vibe I don’t disagree with, I’d still rather not deal with their lawyers for hosting stolen content.

The author’s comments are also somewhat problematic in that regard, they’re claiming to be “at war with reddit”, have publicly flaunted breaking reddit ToS, not caring for either their permission nor the consequences. Even if they do implement a 2-way bridge with reddit, they’ll be insta-banned by reddit.

Seems more like a liability than a positive.

All this for 6 active users that have maybe switched.

I’d be inclined to block them at the instance level.

Jumuta@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

I think the best idea is to just defederate from them for the meantime. They haven’t asked us permission to bridge our communities or post their content in our communities and are actively destroying what makes Lemmy nice. Even if the bidirectional bridges end up working, lemmy would be the second class way of seeing that content, and would make Lemmy seem cheap, slow, old, etc compared to Reddit.

athos77@kbin.social · 1 year ago

On a personal level

They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona.

So they’re just going to impersonate me somewhere else, and then I can supposedly ‘apply’ to get the faked account back? And if I don’t ask for that account, what happens when the botmaster gets bored? Do they just abandon their network, or do they view it as an asset that they put effort into and deserve to profit from - astroturfing, selling accounts, spamming products, running troll farms, etc?

Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

I can’t find it now, but there was a long post on blahaj about it too.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

I suspect that’s a discussion most instances will end up having eventually.

nyahlathotep@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

A couple of thoughts:

More community interaction is nice, but this is like the ghost of community interaction.
I don’t really think the stated goal of getting lots of people on Reddit to move over is a great idea. I don’t have a problem with people from Reddit coming (I came from Reddit back in June), but slow organic growth is the better way to go in my opinion, rather than trying to force it.
What it really comes down to is that it’s spam. It might have been ok if there were an easy way to block it, or even if the coming update’s instance level blocking would work for it, but it won’t.

For some more personal opinions:

I’m kinda sick of hearing about Reddit. I wish those of us who’ve joined because of it would move on.
I don’t know the specific details so I may be wrong, but from what I understand this is all the work of one guy. I don’t like the idea of one person unilaterally deciding to do something that could end up heavily influencing the entire platform.

I’d vote to defederate.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Agreed.
Well put and certainly more succinct than what I wrote.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

1.1M bots

Jesus shit in my fuck. That’s too much! Bots shouldn’t be commenting except to facilitate human interaction, anyway. Stealing the posts from /r/topofreddit sounds fine, but there is absolutely no need to rehost all of Reddit on Lemmy.

corrupts_absolutely@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/6284995 want to say that for now they are disabled, so perhaps they come up with something better.
i dont mind the actual users from alien top, but the myriad of posts that dont try too much to make it clear that they are botted are frustrating and make it harder to look for actual content.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Thanks for the link.
This linked thread is so full of entitlement, I don’t know where to start.

I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit

Yes. I did. Many did. But it seems I can’t escape reddit when people insist on spamming as much of reddit as they can everywhere they go. They need to take their own advice and leave Reddit and enjoy lemmy for what it is instead of trying to make lemmy into reddit.

that people claim to be upset has more to do with their own ignorance

Holy shit, that’s the Skinners meme from the Simpsons. “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

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.

I also don’t mean entitled bot spammer as a pejorative? But words doesn’t really work like that.
Shrug.

I kinda understand where they’re coming from, I just actually quit reddit and think their efforts drive down engagement more than they help.

threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

I’d vote to defederate as well. I’m all for getting Reddit users to switch to Lemmy, but I don’t think that alien.top’s strategy is a good one.

Lusamommy@alien.top · 1 year ago

As someone with an account on that instance, I picked it because it was easy to sign up coming from reddit, and it has good federation.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

To be fair I don’t really have a problem with the 6 of you who are active users, but these threads are just spam.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/10364305 140 bot comments, I might as well chat with an LLM.

Lusamommy@alien.top · 1 year ago

Lmao Jesus. Maybe it’s just because I transferred it from my banned reddit account that I don’t see any of that stuff normally

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

I mean you can always make an account here lol

We have buff sailor moon which is better company than bots?

Lusamommy@alien.top · 1 year ago

Tbh you guys have defederated too much for my personal taste in instances, and just having a bunch of separate accounts seems like it’d be annoying

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

If I may… which blocked instance from your personal tastes would be missing here?

Lusamommy@alien.top · 1 year ago

It’s the principle of it mostly.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

The current block list has only instances full of bot spam, pedophilia and lolicon. Is that principled or tasteful?

MentallySlowLoris@alien.top · 1 year ago

Same.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

Quelques communautés…
A few of them…

Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Wait they have several instances going at once? Why?

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

The generous assumption would be to spread the load.
The less generous assumption would be to mitigate blocks.

Anyway, I think they’ve paused it for the moment.
Whether they manage to deliver their 2-way bridge is a bit moot, as soon as they do that reddit will ban and sue them (and possibly us and other instances on which that content is available).

There’s a reason alternative front-ends like libreddit don’t store much and instead fetch it from reddit.
Archive sites would fall under fair use.
This doesn’t.

Stealing users from reddit? Sure.
Stealing their content? No.
The fediverse grows (or not) by being more interesting.
Floods of reddit bot content isn’t.

atzanteol@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

This isnpary of what leads me to believe their motives are more malicious than well-meaning.

If they created “redditmirror.ml” or something and just put everything there that would be one thing.

But also - they’re actively copying user-created content and impersonating the users?

Fuck 'em I say.

AvaddonLFC ☄️ 🤘@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Communick owner tries to makes money by selling instances so that is a way to advertise I guess.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Yea I totally forgot about their hosting offering. yikes.

Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 10 months ago

Removed by mod

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

The author paused their bots soon after this post was made, although probably not because of this post but likely the general backlash, not just from here.
Last I checked, they were still very much in a “no it’s the kids who are wrong” mindset.

My main problem with this is it’s actually a net negative for user engagement.
Like you said, why would anyone interact with a pool of bots?

While much less egregious, sometimes even useful, even the normal bots who post stuff from an RSS feed can get a little tiring. At least when someone posts something, there’s at least this one person who’s likely willing have a discussion about it, whereas with bots it’s far from guaranteed.

I too would be curious about the resource use coming from them, maybe if/when we purge them we can compare.

iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee · edit-2 1 year ago

Lemmy sucks more and more everyday.

It’s sucking fast. I’ve been blocking so much lately. Like …just pointless shit. Usually in communities that are irrelevant to the post.

Is it possible to block instances as a regular user?

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

It will be in 0.19, but it will only block communities on that instance, not their users.

MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 7 months ago

Removed by mod

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Yes, with a caveat.
The bots are on alien.top.
The communities are spread out in multiple instances, which do seem dedicated to that purpose.
0.19 would allow blocking of these instances as they come up, if you stay on top of it.

The author conveniently sells a hosting service for such instances, so I guess that’s how they plan to monetize this.
Money aside, I’m not sure how I feel about that much centralization in the fediverse if that ever was to take off.
Im probably biased, but so far their comments I’ve seen make me think of spez2.0

Legally speaking, it’s also a hornet’s n’est.

I think they paused it because several instances backlash, I guess we’ll see.

Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

I think that’s right. The alien.top bots are only posting on their own communities, which you won’t see if you block the instance in 0.19 or in your client. (many have had instance blocking for a while - I use Connect for Lemmy.)

imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works · 1 year ago

Not exactly. He decided to set up a bunch of other instances like hardware.watch, soccer.forum, and level-up.zone, where he groups the botted communities based on topic. So you’d have to block those instances as well, if I’m not mistaken.

I personally have experienced no issues, because I don’t browse /all and I’m not subscribed to any of the fake communities. But the decision to spread it across dozens of servers definitely makes it harder to defend, because it’s not exactly trivial to avoid the botted content if you make a habit of browsing /all.

[email protected]@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

I’m not even sure I got them all yet and I’m at 176 communities across 16 instances:

imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 1 year ago

Wow. It’s really a misleading system because the average user wouldn’t normally recognize that those are all related instances with bot content. If he had at least followed a consistent naming scheme, it’d seem more honest and easier to engage/disengage with.

That being said, I still genuinely believe that his motives are altruistic. He’s just trying too hard to force growth when it’s better to let it come organically for now.

It’s a bit rash to go ahead and create 16 instances. Maybe trying a pilot instance and seeing how people like it first would have gone over better.

CommunityLinkFixerBot@lemmings.world · 1 year ago

Removed by mod

[Discussion] alien.top bots

[Discussion] alien.top bots

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