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://alien.top/post/263029

https://lemm.ee/u/pocalyuko@alien.top

https://lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top

https://lemm.ee/u/CaptainCapp-n@alien.top

I strongly believe Lemmy isn’t the place for mirroring content from other websites. You can host your own alternate Reddit frontend like LibReddit, there’s no reason to spam the posts to everyone using Lemmy just because 5 people asked for it. Not to mention there are already enough instances mirroring posts, this is getting obnoxious.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    The communities I want that aren’t on Lemmy are extremely niche.

    And this is exactly the communities that fediverser wants to bring!

    Reddit’s moat is not on the popular content, it’s in the long tail. Reddit knows that people on /r/politics or /r/gifs are mostly to pad their numbers, but their real strength is that you can not find people to talk about Kerbal Space Program and Rain World outside of Reddit.

    These “extremely niche” communities are the ones that are being held by network effects. These are the communities that I’d like to have on fediverser.network, and these are the communities that I wish we could get coordinated enough to pull away from Reddit.

    No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (…) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements,

    alien.top was mirroring about 150 subreddits for two months, most of them of the niche type. The database of “1M comments” is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It’s running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.

    If we focus on the long tail, it is not that expensive. And by the time that we actually start getting bigger number of users, I’m sure that we can come up with different strategies to deal with the data. We can create a common pool of resources for shared storage, we can divide the instances in “topic-based” and “user-home” (like I’ve been doing with communick.news and the ones on !communick_news_network@communick.news), etc.

    Why shouldn’t at least try to do it?

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      The database of “1M comments” is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It’s running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.

      I guess if you just link the images from Reddit it’s not that computationally intensive. I very much doubt that Reddit is going to let this slide if Lemmy ever gets that big though.

      Why shouldn’t at least try to do it?

      Because there are things to lose, and this isn’t a risk-free process. I expanded more on my reasoning in my last paragraph:

      If this bridging was an opt-in system, I’d be fine with it. But because it’s currently an opt-out system, and an opt-out system where you have to block hundreds of accounts, I really don’t like it. Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy, and I’d be fine with these mirror/bridge bots then. This is sort of like how it works on Matrix, and I like the bridging there. But with the current circumstances on Lemmy, I don’t like the mirror/bridge bots.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I guess if you just link the images from Reddit it’s not that computationally intensive

        The images are actually copied to the mirrored server.

        Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy,

        It’s not that simple to do that per user. You’d need:

        • An actual Reddit client per user
        • A Lemmy client with OAuth support so that the bridges don’t need to hold the user’s password.
        • An “official” map of reddit-to-lemmy communities, so that we know where to point all those bridges for posts. I’m working on such map, but I really don’t want to call it official unless it gets significant community support.

        Is the opt-out solution aggressive? Yes, no doubt. But I thought that this “aggression” was pointed to Reddit and therefore justifiable. The whole reason that this approach forces its hand to be able to get the data is because Reddit API changes was a clear sign that they want to treat the data from the users as their own. The protests were not effective against this, and showed to Reddit that they can win any conflict against dissenting mods. If Reddit tracked back on their policies and showed to be a good steward of one of the most vast amount of user data, I wouldn’t be putting so much effort in this project.

        If you can think of any other approach to make this work and is aligned with the clear goal of the project (make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit, in a way that those that come here can already find their niche communities) I’m all for trying it.