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://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.

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Jumuta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

          • Jumuta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            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.