I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
They don’t exist yet. Each bot on alien.top represents a real account on reddit. If you think that their question is legit and worthy of a response, but you don’t want to give Reddit even more data, the best thing you can do is respond on Lemmy and send a message to the origjnal asker to tell them about Lemmy and help them migrate.
Please, do not feel discouraged to participate. The idea of the bots is not to be a simple mirror, but to bootstrap real conversation. The next step of Fediverser is to allow two-way communication so that Reddit users can see the Lemmy content and migrate.
The reason that alien.top content seems so overwhelming now is more to Lemmy"s losing its activity than a real “flood” of bots. My hope is that people will join in to the point of balancing out, but if this is leading to the opposite effect I will have to turn off, and that will be a shame because there are hundreds of people already using it “as intended”
it’s sort of wasting people’s effort on lemmy and not creating true engagement
Even if we don’t have two-way communication, having the content mirrored has two purposes:
it allows lurkers to move away from reddit and browse here.
it works as a prompt for conversation between “organic” subscribers.
I will add a comment to every post though (similar to how AutoModerator does) to indicate that is a mirrored comment and with general instructions on how to interact with the bots and some links to describe the project.
So, a comment like this one will be sent on every mirrored post. The only issue I see with this approach is that there is no way to pin a comment to the top of the thread…
Seems like you want to crowdsource advertising for alien.top.
Yes and no. Anyone can set up a fediverser instance, and I am certainly not going to let it grow over past 10k “organic users”. My hope is to grow alien.top enough only to validate the idea of fediverser as a migration mechanism and to have more people deploying “fediversed” instances.
I hope people set up fediverse instances instead of fediverser mirror proxies, we need people to communicate with - Not a “shadowbanned” experience for new users where nobody interacts with them.
You are missing the point. There is no need to have multiple instances doing the content mirroring, and the more people migrate from Reddit, the more I will be able to disable the mirroring.
The idea is not to get fediverser instances just to mirror more Reddit content. The idea is to get more “fediverser” instances to scale the operation of a coordinated Reddit migration. alien.top itself can not be the home of a million Reddit migrants.
There is no other “place to avoid”. If what bothers you is the alien.top mirrors, then alien.top is your only source of problems. The whole reason that I am creating the content-focused instances (selfhosted, nba, hardware.watch, etc) is to compartmentalize this.
When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a “general” instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance....
Can you DM a bit more details? Depending on their size and budget, I can help. I can host their own Mastodon/Matrix server for less than $30/month and provide the tech support to the transition.
Also, for the sake of diversity, maybe it would be better to have these conversations outside of /c/technology? The original article has been posted on !climate and !humanscale, both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic…
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
I have just realised that alien.top seems to be mirroring reddit accounts, posts and comments, without labelling them as such. What is the point of this one way mirroring? As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave. There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.
The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can “take over” their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.
There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.
I’m also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful… Do you know the “rule” of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)
As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.
I’m not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I’m seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.
They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.
If the accounts from alien.top you are seeing are not marked as bots, then it means that you interacted with an actual person who has taken over their account. ;)
i dont agree this is the solution.
Then how about help and come up with something better?
will not waste time interacting with bots.
Then don’t interact with the bots. You can, e.g, write the comment on Lemmy and send a DM to the original redditor, inviting them to join the instance/community. I did that to dozens of people already.
If it’s an user that has “converted” via alien.top’s portal, we can work as a real reddit client and send message on behalf of the user.
If the lemmy user is not on alien.top but wants to enable a two-way bridge, then we will have to do an authentication dance and send messages with passcodes to both reddit and lemmy.
If the user does not want a bridge, we can still send a message to the reddit thread via another bot.
The last one would be the easiest to implement, but I’m avoiding releasing this because it might be taken down due to spam.
Regarding “how to fund it”. This is an open source project, so you can sponsor me via github, but the best way you can help is by signing up to my “proper” hosting service.
Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last...
This is not about privacy, it’s about copyright. And pretty much like archive.org, having a site mirroring public content can be argued to be fair use.
Replies are going to be possible in the next release
Even if you are not yet getting a reply from OP, you can get a conversation going with other subscribers in the community. It is happening already in the bigger groups like !main and !main. Instead of writing for the OP, consider writing there to bootstrap the “organic” community
Instead of complaining about the current state of the instance, let’s be optimistic about its potential. This is meant as a tool to get the people out of reddit. The biggest things stopping more people from migrating are (a) the lack of content here and (b) people not knowing where to sign up and what communities to subscribe. Alien.top and the fediverser project solves both issues. if you are still on reddit and find a comment/post from someone who you’d like to see in the fediverse, send the OP a comment or DM telling them about how easy it is to sign up.
Why care so much about getting people out of reddit?
It’s a moral imperative to me. I have kids who are still little, and I hope by the time they are teenagers we don’t have an internet dominated by the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Reddit.
Having 100s of bots posting just drowns the actual people
The bots are setup to only to work in very well-defined communities, and only in communities where the mods gave me explicit approval. Is there any community that is “flooded” by the bots?
I prefer a post with 5 genuine comments than 200 reposted comments.
I don’t know about your use case, but a lot of my reddit usage consisted of following technical subreddits where the discussion is quite productive. Given that I don’t want to use reddit anymore (unless if it is to help people get out of it), it makes sense to me that have the mirrored conversation as well just to be a lurker.
especially since the quality of those comments is debatable.
You can still downvote/report.
why would I comment in a ghost town where I know nobody will read what I type?
Even if it is a bot, it has the potential to actually be taken by the real user.
Even if it is a bot and not going to be taken by the real user, it will be seen by real people who are already subscribed to the community and it will help them to overcome their “ghost town” feeling.
Even if it is a bot and the community it is not followed by a lot of other users, people that follow you will see your response anyway.
Point is: we need to start from somewhere, and it’s easier to start with a “ghost town” than with no town at all.
I want to make my own website, like a blog where I talk about tech and tutorials and such. Something like kerkour.com and lukesmith.xyz. Any ideas for simple but modern design?
I’m yet to understand why people downvote comments like yours. Your answer was on-topic, provided a reasoning, was well-written… even if I haven’t fully recovered from the trauma of having two wordpress sites hacked, I still think your comment has merit.
So, Lemmy is sometime missing content. I don’t regret switching from Reddit to Lemmy but, expecially for niche communities, the content isn’t always here....
I’m begging people to take a look at my fediverser project, and it already does some of these things.
You can choose if you want to mirror posts from reddit or posts with comments
You can choose if you want “self posts” or link posts
You can set a rate limit of mirror posts (maximum X posts per past 24 hours)
It doesn’t mirror any post if there is already a submission in the Lemmy community with the same URL.
It wouldn’t be difficult to add something similar to RSS feeds.
But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because “that’s where most people are” and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.
You can make basically any “read” operation on reddit without an API key. The problem is rate-limiting. You can at most make only 600 requests for every 10 minutes.
for niche communities, the content isn’t always here.
What subreddits are you missing? If you join alien.top through the portal, it will give you a list of subreddits you have and the recommended Lemmy alternative.
If Lemmy is any good then people will come, if not then we will move on and that’s fine as well.
No, it’s not. This is a fight against tech companies with multi-billion dollar budgets, who profit from exploiting your data, getting you addicted for “engagement” and who won’t mind destroying any glimpse of social fabric to keep things this way.
Thinking that “community is enough” is bringing a knife to a gun fight. We need to neutralize Big Tech. We need to get as many people as possible out of the Borg. Social media works by the 1/9/90% rule, and the bots are a first step to make this place a viable alternative to the 90%.
It depends on the implementation. If all you have is a handful of bots posting all their posts on a fixed schedule, then yes, it gets quite tedious.
But I believe IMHO that the system I have going for fediverser avoids a lot of those issues. There is one “mirror bot” for each account that is posting on reddit, and they posted to lemmy’s mirror instance in near real-time. This means that the conversations basically happen in the same way they happened on reddit. This also opens up the possibility of (a) two-way communication between Lemmy and Reddit threads and (b) the mechanism for the real person to “take over” the bot account.
I think the problem with bot posts is that they can put more content in than the human community can sustain.
What you are talking about seems to the problem of the RSS bots, which I also dislike. The system I’m working on has a post-mirroring aspect to it, but that’s only one part of it. The main goal of fediverser is to let people migrate away from reddit without letting them feeling like they are missing out on the content from niche communities.
Instead of bots we’re probably better off just doing our part to make more posts and comments.
I’ve said in another thread, this is important but only goes so far. I was subscribed to ~40 subreddits, but I was actively participating in maybe 5-6 of them. For the other 85% of subs, I just wanted to keep a pulse on the discussion but didn’t have the time, energy or expertise to contribute. In my case, there was maybe a handful of communities that I could contribute on Lemmy but about 35 communities that I “wished” there was more content but the people are simply not here yet.
So, what am I to do? I don’t want to be on reddit, but I can bring the content from reddit into these communities. And I completely understand that it might be annoying for those that actually want the interaction, but to those I’d say: please subscribe to the mirror anyway because we are going to “fake til we make it”. The more content we have (even if mirrored) the easier it will be to convince people to migrate and the easier it will be for them to think “if I can follow the same content on both networks, I might as well just move to the place that is not run by a big corp that exploits me and my data”.
So what if people don’t want their answers being mirrored back to Reddit because it’s a greedy company,
Good question. The way that I am designing it at the moment will actually ask for consent. The idea is that if you reply to a reddit mirrored comment, you get a bot telling you “hey, this poster is on reddit, connect your reddit account to if you want to bridge the conversation”.
or redditors don’t want their comments on Lemmy?!
Then it works by opt-out. By logging to the fediverser instance, the reddit -> lemmy mirror is automatically disabled.
So for someone who doesn’t want to use Reddit (probably quite a lot on Lemmy) these posts are gonna be filled with comments that they can’t really anwers to. That’s exactly what I mean by surreal ghost town.
There is an asymmetry here.
Judging by MAU, we have currently ~35k people on Lemmy because they are against Reddit. We have 300 million people on reddit who are on reddit because “it is where everyone else is”.
If the mirrors are creating 250k new mirror accounts per day, and if one fediverser instance can convert 0.1% of these per day, it’s 250 new users who “don’t care”. In one week, these ~1500 converted users will be in conversation on both networks, which will increase the number of non-bots in mirrored threads and be enough to stop the “ghost town” feeling.
I’m not talking hypotheticals. It is happening already some of the communities where I set this up.
I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in many places.
I’m pretty sure you are wrong. The archive project does not need consent from the users (or reddit) to archive their content. Mirror sites from twitter exist for years already, none of them have faced charges. The worst that Reddit can do is to revoke the keys by claiming violation of the terms of service.
All of them are getting a lot of “bot” activity and increased usage by real subscribers. And it is because of the positive results that I started looking at some of dead communities around and started asking other mods if they would like to have the alien.top accounts working there.
Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?...
If we are going down that route: why Kofi or Patreon? Just use bank transfers. Payment via SEPA is commonplace, FedNow is already a thing. Even “third-world”, “backwards” countries like Brazil and India have digital payment networks.
Neither does Patreon, Ko-Fi, or any payment processor out there. ;)
Ah, I see. You are making the case for cryptocurrency by trying to justify on the general exception instead of the practical rule… I tried that before, didn’t go so well.
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
Suggestion: prioritize topic-based instances as the recommended lemmy communities.
When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a “general” instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance....
get updates from facebook group without facebook ?
Hey, I hope this is the right community for this question :))...
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles (arstechnica.com)
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com)
The user numbers in Lemmy communities don't add up (jemmy.jeena.net)
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
Does alien.top do anything other than mirror reddit comments?
I have just realised that alien.top seems to be mirroring reddit accounts, posts and comments, without labelling them as such. What is the point of this one way mirroring? As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave. There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.
Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?
Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last...
Bots copy pasting Reddit - is there a method to block them all?
I’ve noticed we have bots copy pasting Reddit submissions. Is there a method to block them all?...
deleted_by_author
Open Source Is Struggling And It’s Not Big Tech That Is To Blame (medium.com)
Simple but modern website
I want to make my own website, like a blog where I talk about tech and tutorials and such. Something like kerkour.com and lukesmith.xyz. Any ideas for simple but modern design?
An idea for more content on Lemmy (and the fediverse): Relly (Relay+Lemmy)
So, Lemmy is sometime missing content. I don’t regret switching from Reddit to Lemmy but, expecially for niche communities, the content isn’t always here....
Bandcamp... What now?
Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?...