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/[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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

~~It's at least opt-in for users to be mirrored (I think), but~~ it's still just creating spammy garbage.

Edit, I was wrong. It's worse than I thought.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's "opt-in" only for whoever decides to run that for a subreddit/community though.
As in someone decides to run that bot for a community and it will clone all content, they decide if they clone all the reddit comments too.

It's also annoying to deal with as a user because the bots are on alien.top, but the communities are all over the place with new ones popping up.

The new "instance block" feature in 0.19 blocks all communities from that instance, not their users when they post elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Gross, I thought it allowed a username to opt it so all of their posts were duplicated.

Time for everyone to defederate from Alien.top

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Users can supposedly "claim" their bot persona to take them over.
But... when I switched from reddit to lemmy, it wasn't a matter of losing my comment history from reddit.
In theory, the idea of kickstaryimg lemmy communities with content seems nice, but in practice it's only ghost towns with an overwhelming bot white noise.