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] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (12 children)

Agreed. I really dislike the Reddit spam, but I'll give credit to whoever made it for trying. The creator's intentions were noble, like trying to recreate how facebook got big, by making people feel not disconnected from MySpace.

However the fact it's only one way integration (and the wrong direction), it's a resource headache for all federating instances for little genuine interaction, it's difficult to block due to being from many users (until the 0.19 instance blocking feature arrives) is all very problematic.

It singlehandedly makes Lemmy feel like a place devoid of any real community from the outside, and just a Reddit mirror. I'm happy with how I have things set up for myself, but looking at some instance front pages anonymously I see significantly more spam, people won't want to sign up for that.

Bots and even Reddit reposter bots have a place -- @reddit_[email protected] is one I am very glad to have to not miss any sales. We still need to have standards so that limited volunteer and donation-based resources are used effectively.

Bots need to:

Have a targeted and specific purpose
Be easy to block for anyone not interested
Be limited in how many posts it can make in an hour.

[–] Dedh 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

instead of the majority of users having to create blocks (multiple opt-outs) couldn't this be set up so users that want bot posts sign up or opt-in somehow?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You can already toggle a setting that hides all bot accounts/content. But that's rather heavy handed and not very nuanced.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah I would like these things to be opt-in, but such a feature is not implemented yet. In Mastodon you follow people that you want to hear a lot from, but Lemmy works differently by design that you can't follow people.

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