Whoever is in charge of that instance, STOP.
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://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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I get that you saw a perceived problem and you’re trying to fix it. I get that what you’ve built is cool on a technical level and it probably feels really terrible to have people be so negative about it. So first of all, none of this is personal at all. But I feel this comment illustrates exactly where the problem lies.
You want to “help people migrate away from Reddit”. But I’m not sure what makes you think people need “help” at all, I mean if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform. I was a heavy Reddit user and was in plenty of tiny niche subreddits, but so what? I wanted to leave so I left.
So maybe the real problem is that so many people don’t want to leave Reddit, and that disappoints you, and you want to try and convince them that they do? This I could definitely understand, but trying to convince someone you know what they want better than they do themselves is not generally a great tactic.
Most people will just stick with whatever the “best” platform is in terms of showing them content they want to see, and are slow to move to the next thing once the one they’re on starts sucking. So if you really want to put your dev skills to use it would make more sense to get stuck in with Lemmy itself and help increase the pace of improvements. A lot of us are happy here, but a lot of people also bounced off due to the jank. And the more we can reduce that bounce rate, the more we can keep people around, the more we’re in a position to capitalise whenever the next big wave of newbies hits.
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I don’t like your bots at all because I, like others, browse all. Lemmy is too small and inactive to stick to little groups. They also filled my feed with a disproportionate amount of stuff I don’t care about, like selfhosted.
The idea is genuinely interesting and the execution, especially the bridge to claim ownership of the bot account, is legitimately really cool. But until it’s not spammy— which may be never at the rate Lemmy is expanding, or lack of expansion— it’s going to meet significant resistance.
It’s weird because I really agree with you. Lowering the barrier to entry for leaving Reddit and porting over its discussions is great. People say they don’t want Reddit content, but honestly I doubt that. Hell, even having copies of the niche Reddit content would help fill out the fediverse’s lack of content. Sadly I don’t see this working at all without two way communication (which you would probably need proxies for). I’d be pretty surprised if you ever brought it back.
I particularly agree on the moral front. I disagree with Reddit the company and don’t care for the state of the internet. But I can’t see a barrier of entry low enough for people to actually stand up for themselves, so while I respect the effort and willingness to do something about your values, my faith in the remaining Reddit users is low enough that I really can’t see a universe where this works.
The addictiveness and the inertia factor are the two main ways to hold your user base to your product, very true.
Don’t give up on what you’re doing, keep working at it, refining. The vocal indigenous minority of any place don’t handle change well, and tend to rescue defeat out of the jaws of victory.
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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.
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
*discover already discovered communities. This is how fediverse works. Server doesn’t know about community unless someone on server interacted with it.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs (resource intensive, so to be used by admins only) can mitigate that issue
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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.
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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.
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https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E20/PChZXI_AUusv2qr-ofjGY6alRKY=.gif
You should care about the amount of downvotes on this one
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: !newcommunities@lemmy.world
Just don’t, repost bots add nothing of value to the platform in my experience. We don’t want this place to be Reddit 2.0, we want it to be it’s own thing.
Creators of some federated network disagree with you
Reddit is actively working to wall their garden though.
That’s why mentioned federatied network bridges store all bridged messages on instance with all the metadata. This is same: bridged posts and comments are stored with metadata. So even if reddit will nuke bridge, already bridged posts will stay.
This also reduces switching cost from reddit to lemmy and turns lemmy into “continue conversation here” button. And according to guy who defined enshittification, low switching cost is how social networks gather TONS of people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
according to guy who defined enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ok but then instead of encouraging people to Lemmy you are encouraging to matrix which will have the same issue bridging to Reddit.
Seems like another bad solution.
I’m not sure what you are implying. I was just saying that alien.top is just like bridge in matrix, why it is better to store data on instance instead of fetching it every time like frontend does and how it helps Lemmy get users.
I think we’re agreeing in that its not helpful for Lemmy.
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I think you are confusing people here by saying mirror. They think about it as another frontend.
I suggest to use Matrix terms. Here what you have would be one-way bridging
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Asking someone to stop spamming is a form of curation.
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Seems odd to claim that people don’t understand the concept of using Subscribed to filter their feed, when they’ve made a conscious choice to change from the default to All. It seems you don’t understand the concept of browsing “All” or why people would choose that.
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At least it will help against those who accidentally(or intentionally) say “just use Teddit”/other frontend.
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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.
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I typically browse subscribed until I’m seeing posts I’ve already viewed. I occasionally switch to all to see if I will find any new content/ communities to subscribe to. How do you typically do it?
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I’m never on here during work. Even if I was, that point is pretty unhelpful. I think it’s a normal thing for people to want an unlimited supply of content, as that’s what we’ve gotten used to and that’s what these websites are for. What’s it to you, to dictate how I want to use my time? Whether this behavior is a good or bad thing is another argument. I think the limited content supply here is a concession that most people have accepted on Lemmy, but I also think that it’s possible that it wouldn’t have to be a concession as the platforms grow and get better.
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That’s a weird way of spelling “rotating through the same 4 apps until you’re too tired to stay awake”
I follow a sub that’s all reposts from reddit. Occasionally I think about replying to something, but then I just go, “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.” I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else respond to any of the crossposts, either. The community is c/bicycletouring@lemmit.online if anyone is curious, which is a pretty niche topic to start with.
I’m not convinced it’s adding anything to the Lemmy experience, but at least those are clearly marked as crossposts and are all posted by one account, so it’s easy enough to ignore if I wanted.
On the “all” thing - remember that reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. In this mode, you’d get popular posts on subs that had opted in to allowing them to hit that page (or didn’t opt out, I don’t remember).
/r/hockey is a good example - their posts usually generally stayed in the sub, but their Super Bowl post (and occasionally others) would usually hit reddit’s front page and bring in a ton of people who weren’t subbed to /r/hockey.
This was a good feature of reddit, I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.
It’s possible I misunderstood your last goal, but if you’re planning to have Lemmy comments posted back to reddit, I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with reddit’s admins after they figure it out.
Hey, do you also know the /c/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world community? I saw you posting about your trips on /c/bicycle@lemmy.ca and was wondering.
Bicycles is a really nice sub though, i like the vibe, was exclusively posting there about my trips too. On reddit i never subscribed to cycling subs other than touring and bikepacking, since that really is what i’m most interested in, in cycling. So i was kinda hyped to see some traffic in the touring c and kinda switched, even though i’m unsure if it even makes sense to split the cycling subs yet, Bicycles is quite low traffic too. But i somehow ended up with mod status in the touring sub, so i feel partly responsible for it.
No, I didn’t, thanks for the tip. Subbed! I might drop the other one now.
I do miss /r/bicyclingcirclejerk. I loved the absurdly fake bragging and having fun with the stereotypes. Then one day we realized quite a few of us actually ride Cannondales, and that made it even funnier.
Yeah, for the cirklejerk sub it would make a lot of sense to have its own lemmy community, since it doesn’t translate to other cycling subs.
That sub certainly gave me some good laughs, but i only checked it every now and then.
Yeah, sometimes it got a little nasty about other people on reddit, which I was never a fan of. It was supposed to be in good fun, but sometimes people got carried away OR people would start posting every single question that was asked. (For example, I can poke fun at the people who just started riding a bike in their 20s and are now wondering about getting into a professional racing career, but sometimes people would repost what I thought were completely valid questions - no one knows everything, especially when they’re new to something. Fortunately those latter posts rarely got many upvotes or comments.)
Overall though it was generally a lot of fun. And honestly they were probably the most knowledgeable, helpful group if you had a detailed cycling question.
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Client-side filtering? Easy. Client-side sorting? Not easy.
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Why hard? Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy’s existance on every discovered lemmy instances, which depending on algo you are using, might include comments metadata. To aid client-side sorting you would need server-side filtering, which will limit data avaliable to sorting algo. For example client-side trending algo would not show old trending post because it was filtered out.
So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.
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Exactly what I’m saying. To not be super resource-intensive, client-side sorting needs to be incomplete. As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.
Not much I guess(sounds like Thunderbird). But what about mobile?
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I can’t believe two people downvoted your comment.
You’re right about contributing.
As for the filtering, I’m not sure how I feel about that - I use the web interface on my computer and an app on my phone and tablet. I’d prefer them to have similar results. But I see the point you’re making; it could be curated by user instead of a massive algorithm for everyone.
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Fucking hell you are tone deaf. Your idea is fine. Your implementation sucks ass.
Did I see in another post where you told people to stop thinking of bots as bots and imagine they are real users because they might be one day, and then redefine what a bot was? Just stop.
People are telling you time and time again what is pissing them off, and then you just try and repackage and resell what you are doing. Just stop.
Put in big bold letters at the top of the posts that “THIS IS A THREAD THAT IS COPIED FROM REDDIT TO HELP FACILITATE USER TRANSITION TO LEMMMY.”
Sure, you are driving people to participate in a thread, but it’s pointless and counter productive. It’s pissing people off and you are poo-poo’ing it like they don’t understand your grand plans.
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Makes sense, the number of downvotes on your reply here is just so strange.
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I had similar effect under post of linux ponies, where every comment had at least one downvote. I call it “brown marks”.
I worry too – if this gets any significant uptake, what’s stopping Reddit from shutting off the spigot? Given their reasons for turning the screws on API and other policy changes, they may not take kindly to having “their” content re-posted elsewhere, let alone to a system designed specifically to escape reddit.
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I did
I didn’t mind some of your bots as I theory maybe one of the communities would be useful. But none of the ones I’d have wanted seem to appear in my feed.
You have to ask the project creator if you want to add a community, they would set up the bridge.
I wasn’t going to be responsible for flooding everyone’s all feed even further.
Ooooh. This is exactly what I want, and I want to help you make things better!
I’d like to brainstorm ways of making it opt-in, and making it discoverable without being spammy.
What do you use to coordinate code contributors to your project? Do you have a matrix channel?
PS: I don’t think you need to focus that hard on making it two way. What you’ve implemented so far is already useful. There are some porn subreddits I used to go to when I’m horny, and let me tell you that comments are absolutely not necessary!
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For those who downvote you I suggest to downvote Matrix too
Wow. Didn’t expect 5 users to actually downvote. If people who did it also claim that they came here to leave reddit and belive in fediverse, but hate Matrix - mainstream fediverse instant messaging protocol and one of default lemmy profile fields, I would like to read how they came up with such bizzare and self-contradictory combination of ideas.
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Is this really necessary?
I just want to chime in that I agree with you. The number of people who are browsing “all” on a large server like Lemmy.world and then complaining about content they don’t want to see is way too high.
You don’t want to see it, don’t browse “all” or accept that someone does want to see that content.
If you think it’s the “will of the people” petition your server admin to block it. Or move to a server where it’s blocked.
You don’t need to shit on this guy because you don’t like their project. It’s easily avoidable.
You can’t tell people to not browse all. How will small communities reach new users if new users don’t browse all?
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Sure. But if you’re going to browse all then don’t bitch about what’s in it. All isn’t your personal curated feed. That’s what subscribed is for.
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You can’t browse All and then get mad at the stuff in it.
The brigade is in full force. You are 100% right.