alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam

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:

alien.top/post/263029

lemm.ee/u/pocalyuko@alien.top

lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top

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.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

@rglullis, let me break it down to you as simply as I can:

  • Reddit comments are copyrighted material.
  • Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.
  • Scraping and mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor, therefore, is copyright violation, and is illegal.
  • You don’t even have plausible deniability because you outright admitted, multiple times, that you are mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor.
  • Reddit’s army of lawyers can find you through your domain registrar, and will make an example out of you.
  • Every instance that federates with yours can also get sued for hosting copyrighted material.

Please stop.

smeg,

Wasn’t reddit trying to claim that they own everyone’s comments pretty universally decried? As in the reason half of us are here is because they decided they owned everyone’s comments (so they could sell it to the AI trainers) and users said ‘fuck off, it’s my comment and I’ll delete it’. There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Directly from Reddit’s user agreement when you sign up for an account there.

You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

So like it or not, they have the rights to whatever you post there already.

There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?

Because these were noninteractive front ends, none of them with a creator who is insane enough to publicly declares that they are scraping reddit to start a competitor and explicitly to harm reddit’s financial interests.

smeg,

Fair point, though just because you put something in an EULA that doesn’t make it enforceable or even legal. Explicitly stating that you want to take down the company isn’t going to do you any favours though.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

Wow, great fearmongering.

Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.

Also in some jurisdictions it is not only unenforceable, but straight illegal(Canada?).

Shadow,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

I personally hate all the reddit cross post stuff, and it seems like the majority of lemmy users do too. I don’t understand why people obsess over this as a way to “grow” lemmy.

It doesn’t contribute to active conversations, in fact it deters users who reply locally and then never get a response.

Just let lemmy grow organically by making good content and contributing, stop forcing it with mirrors from reddit.

I wonder if we could get the top admins to threaten defederation with any instance that doesn’t flag automated posts as bots. This way at least the users have some visibility.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.

Just block communities and, where possible, instances.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Of all criticism I am hearing, this is by far the most misguided one.

My goal with Communick is to become a mere service provider. I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves. Sure, I am doing the moderation now because they are not big enough, but if/when they become a real alternative to current subreddits, I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.

If you don’t believe me, you can go the matrix channel used by the /r/selfhosted crowd during the protests. I offered them the selfhosted.forum instance for free. They didn’t take it.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves.

That is painfully obvious

I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.

They are. They just aren’t at the site you want their content to be on.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I want the programming communities to be on programming.dev. I want the adult communities to be on lemmynsfw. I want the nix community to be on nix-community. I want the Brazilian communities to be on lemmy.eco.br, like the italians on feddit.it or the Germans on feddit.de…

These communities already have their place, so there is no need to recreate them. But what about the communities that don’t?

You are trying to paint my work in the worst possible light, as if I am trying to hijack the networks. Not only that is not true, it is against everything I stand for. And the really funny thing is that I already have written out quite a bit about how my “evil plan” is to get rid of ad-funded internet and that are alternative business models that can be more ethical without trying to capitalize on eyeballs.

A bit of cynicism can be good, just make sure it doesn’t become paranoia.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

And what you still seem to not understand:

Those communities don’t want to be on those domains. So all you are doing is trying to force their hand because you think your desires override their autonomy.

I don’t have to “paint (your) work in the worst possible light” because… you are doing that yourself.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Can you honestly say that the communities on reddit are on reddit due to their choice and absolute free will?

Masimatutu,

There are a lot of subreddits that have set up their own Lemmy communities. There’s not much hindering them.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

And there are lots that didn’t, and these are the ones that I am creating instances/communities for.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

I would say that I would rather they make their own decisions rather than someone decide they know better and force their hands.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I too was a libertarian once. Then I grew up.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

Into a selfish authoritarian?

Also, I was not aware that not forcing human beings to talk about video games in the space you decided they should makes me a libertarian. I guess I need to rethink my life?

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Who is forcing anything, dear Lord?

The spaces are being created because there are no alternatives. If they don’t want to use it and decide to love somewhere else, more power to them. Unlike Reddit, I am not able to kick out moderators and keep only those that pledge loyalty to me.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

Unlike Reddit, I am not able to kick out moderators and keep only those that pledge loyalty to me.

You know what? I think you’ve made all my points for me, repeatedly. Like, if anything I owe you for making my argument better than I could. So I’ll just loop back to

It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.

Just block communities and, where possible, instances.

Feel free to continue to reiterate my points for me while pretending you are refuting them.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

You highlighting the passage that says the complete opposite of what you are implying shows that you are not interested in honest conversation and just want to confirm your worldview.

Have a good one.

nocturne213, (edited )

A while back I tried going to alien.top to as what the site was about and my adblocker completely blocked it. That was a sure sign I did not need to visit.

https://i.imgur.com/fWjKbVw.png

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Alien.top itself is just a standard Lemmy instance. I could believe it if you said it was timing out (as it had a 5 day outage a couple of weeks ago) but to claim there are any ads or trackers there is a simple, verifiable lie.

nocturne213,

Can you simp any harder for this instance?

antik, (edited )
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

He is not simping, it’s his instance so ofcourse he is giving his POV

nocturne213,

https://i.imgur.com/fWjKbVw.png

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Are you trying to access via http or https?

If you open portal.alien.top, do you see the same message?

nocturne213,

I typed “alien.top” into my safari and that is what I got.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

Then why does the URL show portal.alien.top?

I honestly don’t know what to tell you. I’d like to investigate, but both Chrome and Firefox are normal.

This is the portal page

This is alien.top

I also have ublock installed, and it shows zero elements being blocked.

MamLaLiq,
@MamLaLiq@lemmy.world avatar

I escaped Reddit some months ago. Every day the same video of trashy girls, equal rights equal fights and his wife too (and my axe).

When I started I reacted on posts, but that was not a nice experience. I lurked and only downvoted posts that I thought were mean or hurtful.

In a sub about knitting I found out they started here new. So I followed.

I knit you not haha.

I’m still shy to react, but the reactions I got were supernice and almost allways with some clausule like : “but that’s my two cents” and that feels very comforting.

What I would like is more comments on posts. I would love to follow and perhaps engage with lots of people with different knowledge and views.

I miss the Wiki-dive, often multiple times on 1 post.

Die4Ever,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

yea people get drowned out by these bots and they feel less inclined to contribute. I know I was less likely to leave a comment on Reddit when there were already many comments. I was less likely to post on Reddit when a subreddit was already getting many posts. I post and comment more here on Lemmy because it doesn’t get drowned out. If we wanna grow then it needs to be natural, not via bots.

everyone do yourself a favor and go to your settings page and uncheck the option for “Show Bot Accounts”, it’s unfortunate that I can’t keep the few good bots visible but there’s just too much bot spam now.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

it’s unfortunate that I can’t keep the few good bots visible but there’s just too much bot spam now.

As a moderator needing a daily thread created by a bot (!casualconversation ) it is indeed annoying that a lot of people do not see it due to this.

I got the bot banned a few weeks ago because I hadn’t flagged it as such. I could maybe reach out to the LW admins again, but got other stuff to deal with.

TheBlue22,

Thanks for letting me know, I’ll block that instance

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

The bots have been disabled for two days already.

Flax_vert,

Can’t you just block the instance

Sanyanov,

I think a defederated instance could be made containing all of that. Lemmy makes it extremely easy to switch accounts between instances, so those in need of Reddit on Lemmy can use another profile without spamming all of Lemmy.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

Matrix appservice happened

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

I’m honestly so sick of bots on this website. Nobody even comments, it’s just junk that then dilutes the actual communities posting in c/all. I’d love to have a way to block all memes, porn, and bot posts just so I could actually discover new communities here instead of AI redhead pussy, bots crossposting stale linux memes, and old reddit help threads with 0 comments because they are asking for help on a different site.

Masimatutu,

You can block both NSFW and bot posts in your account settings. I do the former, but I don’t want to miss out on the good bots so I just block the bad ones individually. Then, memes usually stay in the meme communities and it is quite easy to block those.

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

Huh, good to know. I might actually do that. I usually use an app, so I dunno if those settings are exposed in-app.

Masimatutu,

They should apply everywhere :)

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

They do

nutsack,

there are plenty of communities with useful content that are also plagued with pointless unfunny garbage memes. it seems that there’s no way to filter image posts on any client that I’ve seen. I don’t know if it’s an issue with Lemmy as a platform but it seems kind of strange to me since the client knows which posts are image and non-image links

jol, (edited )

Yeah, why would anyone comment in a crosspost. Feels weird when the OP is not even here. I started blocking communities that mostly crosspost.

Corgana,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

Right? There is an argument to be made for bot-submitted content to be used for jumpstarting news-oriented communities (the kind that are essentially RSS feeds with comments). But anything else just feels like speaking into the void.

nutsack,

I would very much like to be able to block image posts

smeg,

I think the Summit client for android can do this

nutsack,

hell yes it does thanks for the gold kind stranger

Corgana,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

Very cool thanks!

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

You can disable bot accounts in your settings so at least those don’t show up in your feed.

Spzi,

Yes, but this also blocks helpful bots, for example link converters. I’d like to block the x-post spam but keep the utility from other bots.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, understandable. On Lemmy World we defederate with those kind of instances because we know most of our users don’t want that stuff.

Luckily the next version of Lemmy is around the corner and then you should be able to block those instances yourself.

Texas_Hangover,

Where the AI redhead pussy at?

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

There’s a bunch in c/all, lol. Some of it okay, some just straight up not great. Eventually c/all runs out of topics and just starts injecting nsfw posts from subs.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Lemmy World defederated as soon as we became aware of this instance.

It is created by @rglullis who said this was something requested by many but we really didn’t see the advantage of it.

dipshit,

“whoever is in charge of that instance”

Did you try contacting them? abuse@alien.top? Or just block the instance? Or just ignore them?

Maybe you could start a gofundme and a petition!

mojo,

I’m sure they mean well, but it’s annoying

jacktherippah,

Thankfully lemmy.world defederated a long time ago.

Unforeseen,

Agreed it’s just pollution

Unforeseen,

This has been absolutely beyond infuriating I can’t even block it properly from Connect. Agreed this is nothing but pollution spam

sexy_peach,

Server admins should block stuff like this

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Which we did at LW. They started spamming some communities with this and we defederated.

sexy_peach,

pretty cool, same on feddit.de :)

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

FYI: communick.news/post/451025

The mirror bots now are disabled, how about reconsidering the block?

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

How about no?

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

So, just to be clear: the project was from the very first step meant to help people migrate from Reddit and to join Lemmy. Now that it is starting to actually achieve its goals, you now want to penalize it for its success?

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

If you call this thread a success you are delusional. You’re condescending to everyone that doesn’t agree with your viewpoints. Which isn’t really new to me

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

The thread has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it is that today I got 90 real people signing up to alien.top via reddit and one of them is asking “hey, can we get federation with LW now”?

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2c923940-b9bf-41a1-b224-e55bf7de1ee6.jpeg

rglullis, (edited )
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

User counts are only for active users. You should know that quite well.

In any case, please go ahead and make it clear: if you want to act like an arbiter of success to determine if alien.top should be re-federated, how many users should it have?

Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

this shit is pointless. defederated

HerbalGamer, (edited )
@HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works avatar

God I can’t wait until instance blocking because this kind of drama is just soooo very tiring.

Edit: Clients that do that are great and all but I switch between desktop and phone too often for just a client-side solution on one of them.

Geth,

This exists in Sync for Lemmy. I couldn’t live without it tbh.

LucasWaffyWaf,

It’s doable in Boost, too.

soullioness,
@soullioness@lemmy.ca avatar

Also Summit for Lemmy can do this too.

randomivysaur,

As does Jerboa.

leftzero,

And Connect for Lemmy.

netburnr,
@netburnr@lemmy.world avatar

Connect client can do this

onlinepersona,

If I’m not mistaken, they are going to release that feature soon on the default lemmy client.

The backend will support it github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869 but I can’t find the corresponding frontend PR or issue

Salix,

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2144

onlinepersona,

Oh, I wasn’t aware that was accessible to users! Cool, thanks.

Dunno when they plan on releasing it.

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