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.

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[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I understand that your bots work for your use case, but it actively harms mine, and I'd happily call it spam.

I call it spam not because the content being mirrored is low quality, but because there is little to no community interaction on the posts. I'd I wanted to just read news, I'd just go to my RSS reader. The only reason I use Lemmy is because I want to see others' opinions on the posts.

By the way, this isn't me saying that it would be better if it had bidirectional bridging. If that was implemented, Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content. I don't want that.

Also, I use the All feed for discovering content, not because I don't know about 3rd party community search tools, but because I don't know what communities I like. The All feed allows me to find new communities that interest me, and I wouldn't be able to find those communities just with those search tools.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

there is little to no community interaction on the posts

You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.

I accept the criticism that people were feeling flooded by the mirrored content, this is why I turned them off for now. But I fail to see how it's worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.

Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content

First, it's not "Reddit content". It's about the content from the communities. Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there. The two-way interaction is an intermediate step to make it easy for people there to know they won't be missing out by leaving their favorite subreddits and coming here.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.

Yes, but they're fine in my opinion as they don't clutter up my All feed. I personally wish there were active Kerbal Space Program and Rain World communities, but they don't exist because there aren't sufficient members. It's just not sustainable currently, and mirrored posts would not fix it.

I fail to see how it’s worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.

My reason for saying that this is worse is not because I can't talk with the original poster. it's very hard for me to word this in the exact way I want to, but it's a combination of the original poster not consenting to / willfully posting the content on Lemmy making it feel intrusive, and me appreciating the human effort behind the post, not the post itself. It's the same reason I don't talk to LLMs like ChatGPT to pass time. I just don't appreciate it for some reason.

First, it’s not “Reddit content”. It’s about the content from the communities.

Sure, the content is not tied to Reddit that much, but they might for example have references to other subreddits, their tags, and Reddit users. Because content on Reddit is made to be on Reddit, unless Lemmy is made exactly to mimic Reddit (which I don't want btw), you are always going to have a worse experience browsing Reddit content on Lemmy, than browsing Reddit content on Reddit. This isn't just a problem with Lemmy-Reddit bridging btw, it's also a problem with all the Matrix bridges and stuff like that.

Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there.

That might be useful for some people, but it's not for me. The communities I want that aren't on Lemmy are extremely niche. No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (and I don't want this btw) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements, and so everyone's small niche communities won't be bridged. Personally, I found these mirroring bots to be a nuisance in my early days on Lemmy, and slightly reminisce for when they weren't a thing yet. So in my opinion, these bots hurt the migration experience, and Lemmy would be better without it

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.

Sorry for the wall of text btw, but these are my opinions and I wanted to state them clearly.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.works 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.news 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The images are actually copied to the mirrored server.

That's really interesting, but why do you do that? Surely having the clients fetch the data from Reddit's servers themselves would be easier?

But I thought that this “aggression” was pointed to Reddit and therefore justifiable.

I hate Reddit as a platform too, but I very much disagree with this philosophically. I don't break the rules against the enemy because then the enemy would be allowed to break the rules against me. If we want to grow as a platform, we have to stay civilized. The one that fails to do that dies.

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.

I think you misunderstood my idea about opt-out bridges. I meant that there should be a toggle for Lemmy users on Lemmy which mirrored/bridged content should be shown to them. These should be off by default, but easily changeable.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Surely having the clients fetch the data from Reddit’s servers themselves would be easier?

Easier? Yes. Reasonable? Not at all. Reddit wants to control all the data, the whole API fiasco started because they started to abuse their power, do you think they can trusted of stewards of social media data?

I don’t break the rules against the enemy because then the enemy would be allowed to break the rules against me.

This is a fight, not a game. There are no rules. Do you think they care about rules when they started forcing moderators out of the protesting subs? Or lying about what Christian was asking during pricing negotiations? Or when they get mods working for them to do their bidding?

Let's not be naive. They will leverage anything they have to get the upper hand. We are not going to win anything by pretending there is a higher moral ground to stand on.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We are not going to win anything by pretending there is a higher moral ground to stand on.

The moral high ground is the ONLY thing we have. Lemmy as a platform exists to be a non-evil counterpart to Reddit. It would have no purpose to exist were it not for our better ethics.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It is the ethos of decentralized platforms (which can not by its very nature be controlled by any single entity) that makes them superior, not the individuals on it.

Also, the only way to argue that what I am doing is "evil" is by accepting their premise that they own the data and that mirrors are "stealing" from them.