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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[–] rglullis@communick.news -1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The people complaining can't even understand the concept of curating their own feed, do you think they will understand if we start talking about bridges and double-puppets?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Asking someone to stop spamming is a form of curation.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -1 points 2 years ago

First you need to make a convincing argument that this is any type of "spamming".

Then you need to explain why you can only curate your feed by looking at their firehose, when there are far more other effective filters in place.

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 2 years ago

conscious choice to change from the default to All.

First, the default listing is set by the instance administrator so we can't be sure of what is the default in the first place.

Second, one of the most common criticisms carried against open source developers is the tendency to provide too many configuration choices to end-users instead of streamlining the interface, which leads to creation of footguns.

Making it so easy to browse by all is one such footgun.

These "lemmy community syncing" tools is also a footgun. The people running those scripts are basically forcing all content from all communities to be copied across the instances. (curiously, if people were not running these scripts, the likelihood of them getting "hit" by alien.top would be quite small).

[–] uis@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

At least it will help against those who accidentally(or intentionally) say "just use Teddit"/other frontend.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -2 points 2 years ago

Honestly those don't bother me so much as the one that call it "spam bots". I've spent so much time making sure that the bots only post the content that is relevant to a specific community, and I am going out of my way to make sure that no post is going to a community that does not approve of the bots, but somehow what I am doing is as bad as the script kiddie that was posting goatse-style pictures everywhere this weekend.