English message:
As some of you may have noticed, there’s an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.
I expect there are multiple valid opinions on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone’s opinion on the situation.
You might also want to read lemmy.ca’s discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.
Things that I think need to be pointed out:
- alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in.
- together they’ve made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
- That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy.
- They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona.
- alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different instances with copies of different subreddits.
I don’t have an exhaustive list of such communities, I haven’t found an official one. I’ll post a fewfrom my personal blocklist in a comment below.
And a note on the upcoming 0.19 release:
- the new user-level instance block feature will block all the communities of the blocked instances, but will not block these users’ posts or comments if they are done on another instance’s community.
My opinion isn’t any more valid then anyone else’s so I’ll put it in a comment below.
Our users’ input is welcomed.
What do you, dear users of sh.itjust.works, think about federation with them?
Thanks
Message français:
Comme certains d’entre vous l’ont peut-être remarqué, il y a une instance peuplée de 1,1M de bots qui copient ees posts et commentaires Reddit dans plein de communautés sur plusieurs autres instances.
Il y a plusieurs opinions sur le sujet et ce fil de discussion vise à prendre le pouls de l’opinion générale sur la situation.
Je vous suggères de lire la discussion chez lemmy.ca à ce sujet ici, discussion intéressante.
Quelques points qui, selon moi, doivent être soulignés :
- alien.top compte actuellement 1,1 million de robots, dont seulement 6 sont des utilisateurs hebdomadaires qui se login.
- collectivement, ils ont déjà fait 1,59 million de commentaires dans une multitude de communautés dans différentes instances.
- Ce projet proclame essayer de convertir des utilisateurs de Reddit à passer à Lemmy.
- Il existe un portail pour permettre aux utilisateurs de Reddit de prendre contrôle de leur version bot.
- alien.top a une seule communauté locale, les bots publient tous sur différentes instances, des copies de différents subreddits.
Je n’ai pas de liste exhaustive de ces communautés, à première vue, je n’en trouve pas une liste officielle. Je mettrai dans un commentaire ci-dessous quelques communautés que j’ai bloqué au niveau personnel.
Pour finir, une note sur la version 0.19 de lemmy qui s’en vient :
- La nouvelle fonctionnalité pour bloquer une instance au niveau d’un uutilisateur bloquera toutes les communautés d’une instance bloquée, mais ne bloquera pas les publications ou les commentaires de ces utilisateurs s’ils sont publiés dans une communauté d’une autre instance.
Mon opinion n’est pas meilleur qu’une autre et je mettrai plutôt dans un commentaire ci-bas.
Les commentaires de nos utilisateurs sont les bienvenus.
Que pensez-vous, cher utilisateurs de sh.itjust.works de la fédération avec eux?
Merci
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.
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.
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?
I can’t find it now, but there was a long post on blahaj about it too.
I suspect that’s a discussion most instances will end up having eventually.
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.
Agreed.
Well put and certainly more succinct than what I wrote.
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.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.
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.
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.
Quelques communautés…
A few of them…
Wait they have several instances going at once? Why?
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.Communick owner tries to makes money by selling instances so that is a way to advertise I guess.
Yea I totally forgot about their hosting offering. yikes.
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.
I see very little value in mirroring Reddit on Lemmy.
As a link aggregator, I think we’re doing fine. We seem to have no shortage of our own “Headline linking to a paywalled article no one reads” thank you very much.
As a discussion board, I think most folks will see a Reddit mirror and go “Well that’s pointless to engage with” and ignore it.
It doesn’t really help us out here, and I don’t think it makes Lemmy more attractive to Redditors, who probably haven’t noticed and might be a little alarmed at the identity theft aspect.
I’m also curious as to the load this kind of behavior puts on the rest of the Fediverse. How much bandwidth, local storage etc. of sh.itjust.works does it take to spam the All Active feed with pages of Reddit mirrors?
Aeons ago I drafted a defederation policy, which I don’t think was ever officially ratified. I’m glad to say it hasn’t come up a lot. “operated for the purpose of hosting bot accounts for the purposes of spam, scams, denial-of-service attacks, or other traffic generally unwelcome or disruptive to the Fediverse.” was number one on my list of reasons to defed from an instance.
I would call the behavior of alien.top to be spam, generally unwelcome or disruptive.
If they are keeping posts within their own instance, open the poll and I’d vote to defederate. If they have bots that are posting spam here, I actively petition to defederate.
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.
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?
It will be in 0.19, but it will only block communities on that instance, not their users.
The bots only post in their own communities, and not just random ones, no? It doesn’t really seem like an issue if so. Block those instances, and then you won’t interact with them at all?
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.)
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.
I’m not even sure I got them all yet and I’m at 176 communities across 16 instances:
https://academy.garden/c/askastronomy
https://academy.garden/c/askscience
https://academy.garden/c/astrophysics
https://academy.garden/c/cosmology
https://academy.garden/c/datasets
https://academy.garden/c/machinelearning
https://blockchained.world/c/bat
https://blockchained.world/c/ethereum
https://blockchained.world/c/ipfs
https://blockchained.world/c/loopring
https://blockchained.world/c/polygon
https://blockchained.world/c/solana
https://blockchained.world/c/storj
https://blockchained.world/c/thegraph
https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network
https://communick.news/c/emacs
https://communick.news/c/fediverser_network
https://communick.news/c/humanscale
https://communick.news/c/lisp
https://communick.news/c/makers
https://communick.news/c/mastodon
https://communick.news/c/meta
https://gearhead.town/c/bikebuilders
https://gearhead.town/c/bmw
https://gearhead.town/c/cars
https://gearhead.town/c/easyriders
https://gearhead.town/c/electricvehicles
https://gearhead.town/c/mazda
https://gearhead.town/c/mechanic_advice
https://gearhead.town/c/mercedes
https://gearhead.town/c/motorcycleporn
https://gearhead.town/c/porsche
https://gearhead.town/c/toyota
https://hardware.watch/c/amd
https://hardware.watch/c/apple
https://hardware.watch/c/buildapc
https://hardware.watch/c/fairphone
https://hardware.watch/c/framework
https://hardware.watch/c/gadgets
https://hardware.watch/c/hardware
https://hardware.watch/c/intel
https://hardware.watch/c/laptops
https://hardware.watch/c/pcmods
https://hardware.watch/c/remarkable
https://hardware.watch/c/samsung
https://hardware.watch/c/steamdeck
https://hardware.watch/c/system76
https://healthy.community/c/fit_meals
https://healthy.community/c/meal_prep_sunday
https://healthy.community/c/paleo
https://healthy.community/c/running
https://level-up.zone/c/3ds
https://level-up.zone/c/atlus
https://level-up.zone/c/civ
https://level-up.zone/c/dota2
https://level-up.zone/c/falcom
https://level-up.zone/c/gaming
https://level-up.zone/c/leagueoflegends
https://level-up.zone/c/linuxgaming
https://level-up.zone/c/minecraft
https://level-up.zone/c/news
https://level-up.zone/c/overwatch
https://level-up.zone/c/rainbow6
https://metacritics.zone/c/90dayfiance
https://metacritics.zone/c/bojackhorseman
https://metacritics.zone/c/books
https://metacritics.zone/c/dailyshow
https://metacritics.zone/c/gakinotsukai
https://metacritics.zone/c/invincible
https://metacritics.zone/c/movies
https://metacritics.zone/c/southpark
https://metacritics.zone/c/tedlasso
https://nba.space/c/blazers
https://nba.space/c/bucks
https://nba.space/c/bulls
https://nba.space/c/cavaliers
https://nba.space/c/celtics
https://nba.space/c/clippers
https://nba.space/c/grizzlies
https://nba.space/c/hawks
https://nba.space/c/heat
https://nba.space/c/hornets
https://nba.space/c/jazz
https://nba.space/c/kings
https://nba.space/c/knicks
https://nba.space/c/lakers
https://nba.space/c/magic
https://nba.space/c/mavericks
https://nba.space/c/nba
https://nba.space/c/nets
https://nba.space/c/nuggets
https://nba.space/c/pacers
https://nba.space/c/pelicans
https://nba.space/c/pistons
https://nba.space/c/raptors
https://nba.space/c/rockets
https://nba.space/c/sixers
https://nba.space/c/spurs
https://nba.space/c/suns
https://nba.space/c/thunder
https://nba.space/c/timberwolves
https://nba.space/c/wizards
https://nfl.community/c/49ers
https://nfl.community/c/bears
https://nfl.community/c/bengals
https://nfl.community/c/bills
https://nfl.community/c/broncos
https://nfl.community/c/browns
https://nfl.community/c/buccaneers
https://nfl.community/c/cardinals
https://nfl.community/c/chargers
https://nfl.community/c/chiefs
https://nfl.community/c/colts
https://nfl.community/c/commanders
https://nfl.community/c/cowboys
https://nfl.community/c/dolphins
https://nfl.community/c/eagles
https://nfl.community/c/falcons
https://nfl.community/c/fantasyfootball
https://nfl.community/c/giants
https://nfl.community/c/jaguars
https://nfl.community/c/jets
https://nfl.community/c/lions
https://nfl.community/c/nfl
https://nfl.community/c/packers
https://nfl.community/c/panthers
https://nfl.community/c/patriots
https://nfl.community/c/raiders
https://nfl.community/c/rams
https://nfl.community/c/ravens
https://nfl.community/c/saints
https://nfl.community/c/seahawks
https://nfl.community/c/steelers
https://nfl.community/c/texans
https://nfl.community/c/titans
https://nfl.community/c/vikings
https://poweruser.forum/c/cubase
https://poweruser.forum/c/hugo
https://poweruser.forum/c/localllama
https://poweruser.forum/c/steamos
https://poweruser.forum/c/techsupport
https://selfhosted.forum/c/datahoarder
https://selfhosted.forum/c/docker
https://selfhosted.forum/c/homeautomation
https://selfhosted.forum/c/homelab
https://selfhosted.forum/c/homenetworking
https://selfhosted.forum/c/main
https://selfhosted.forum/c/meta
https://selfhosted.forum/c/portainer
https://selfhosted.forum/c/pro
https://selfhosted.forum/c/show
https://soccer.forum/c/ajax
https://soccer.forum/c/bundesliga
https://soccer.forum/c/corinthians
https://soccer.forum/c/fcbayern
https://soccer.forum/c/gunners
https://soccer.forum/c/main
https://soccer.forum/c/premierleague
https://soccer.forum/c/seriea
https://soccer.forum/c/talk
https://style.land/c/fragrance
https://style.land/c/makeup
https://style.land/c/makeupaddiction
https://style.land/c/malefashionadvice
https://style.land/c/mechanical_keyboards
https://style.land/c/nike
https://style.land/c/shoes
https://style.land/c/sneakers
https://style.land/c/streetwear
https://style.land/c/vans
https://style.land/c/watches
https://viewfinder.pro/c/itookapicture
https://viewfinder.pro/c/photography
https://viewfinder.pro/c/pixelfedWow. 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.
Removed by mod
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 spez2.0Legally speaking, it’s also a hornet’s n’est.
I think they paused it because several instances backlash, I guess we’ll see.