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] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Thank you.

It doesn't seem like you understood why people are upset though. Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All. Dare I say most Lemmy users do this. Making repost bots actively harms "real" post discoverability and makes browsing content difficult. Not to mention most reposted content is very superficial, and most of these text postd have zero value when there's no interaction.

I was not expecting so many "if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit".

No, we're saying if you want to see Reddit content you should host an alternate frontend like https://teddit.net/ or go to a dedicated place to view that content. Hosting it on Lemmy makes little sense because...

You are stressing out every Lemmy instance by making so many posts and comments a minute
There's no way to opt-in, so a lot of these posts are making its way to people's feeds without consent and people aren't interested in seeing it, which is why most people are upset
It's actively making the new user experience worse because it feels like there's too much botspam and someone who's brand new won't understand what's going on.

If there was some way to opt in it would be very cool and a great project, but the way it works now does more harm than good

[–] uis 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.

*discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn't know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs (resource intensive, so to be used by admins only) can mitigate that issue

[+] [email protected] -33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So far, the reasons that people claim to be upset has more to do with their own ignorance of the current state of affairs than something harmful being done by fediverser or alien.top.

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.

To illustrate the point:

Currently the only way to discover new communities and widen your network is by browsing All.

That's not true. There is https://browse.feddit.de and https://fediverser.project. There are communities about new communities. You can browse an user profile to see what communities they subscribe to. All of these are better methods to find new content than browsing "all".

[–] AustralianSimon 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That’s not true. There is https://browse.feddit.de and https://fediverser.project. There are communities about new communities. You can browse an user profile to see what communities they subscribe to. All of these are better methods to find new content than browsing “all”.

Until these are built into the UI, how is a user supposed to find them when they just want to start using Lemmy? They don't search for such sites, they browse all. The reason sites like reddit work is because they cater to the non-technical crowd.

You are thinking like a developer and not like someone worried about the user experience, this is not a dig but a key part of the problem. The root cause of users not coming to Lemmy in the thousands is the UX. Fix it and normies can use it and post content themselves.

[+] [email protected] -17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until these are built into the UI, how is a user supposed to find them when they just want to start using Lemmy?

By going to /communities and subscribing to the communities that might be of interest?

Seriously, there is no excuse to justify browsing by all.

[–] AustralianSimon 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah but which community on which instance, seriously are you trying to seem so dense? How to make this easy for normies?

People come to lemmy.world but the best community for topic XYZ might not be here so this is the whole point of ALL.

Just because you don't do something doesn't mean there is no point, your viewpoint is obviously a minority view.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

which community on which instance (...) lemmy.world but the best community for topic XYZ might not be here.

Check "All" to see all communities and subscribe to the ones that might be interesting to you.

[–] AustralianSimon 1 points 1 year ago

https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E20/PChZXI_AUusv2qr-ofjGY6alRKY=.gif

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

You should care about the amount of downvotes on this one

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]