What is alien.top and why do all the users from there show up as bots and have no history?
What is alien.top and why do all the users from there show up as bots and have no history?
I've been seeing a lot of users from alien.top commenting in various threads (mainly sports) lately. They only caught my attention because they are all flagged as bots and I typically manually block most bots (not all because there are some I like). For every one of them their entire post history consists of 1-2 comments or posts. When I took a look at that instance there is nothing there at all and it also shows no users. The comments look human enough but I guess I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all the comments are LLM generated. Is alien.top just someones LLM experiment or is something else going on here?
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Purely guessing, but maybe it's top comments from reddit?
Edit: pretty much, yeah
If that's what it is the the way they're doing it is beyond obnoxious because I can't just block the whole thing. If I wanted reddit comments then I would be using reddit.
Luckily in a few weeks you can block entire instances natively within lemmy. In the mean time maybe your app allows filtering?
Will that also block all users from that instance? I was under the impression that it just blocked posts from that instance showing up in your feed.
Did we really need yet another reddit mirroring bot?
I personally requested it because this particular bot also mirrors comments, not just posts. And the two super niche communities it posts in are completely dead on lemmy, so im trying to revive them by having at least some updates, also so people dont have to go back to reddit just to get that niche content. https://communick.news/u/rglullis set it up.
As somewhat expected, alien.top was defederated. May I recommend you re-create your community in an instance managed by people with a little bit more sense?
The admin banned the whole communities! I first have to find an instance that would be okay with your software. Do you have any suggestions as to how to find one? Also, in case you didnt see, real lemmy users engaged in discussions based on the reddit comments many times already, making your idea a success!
real lemmy users engaged in discussions based on the reddit comments many times already
Yeah, I know. I'm seeing the same at !main@selfhosted.forum and !emacs@communick.news. It's really cool, and it will be even cooler when I make it two-way.
I first have to find an instance that would be okay with your software.
I'm thinking of building a whole network of different instances based around specific interests. I have for selfhosted (which will be for devops in general), soccer, basketball, american football, tennis, crypto/blockchain. Maybe I should set up one for TV/Movie/Music discussion. Any good ideas for a domain name? :)
Did we really need yet another reddit mirroring bot?
The idea of fediverser is to do a lot more than "another mirroring bot". The idea is to have a way that can let people "clone" their reddit profiles to Lemmy instances and seamlessly migrate away from it. Pulling content from reddit and into specific communities (where the mods have expressed interest in hosting the mirrored content) is a way to bootstrap the Lemmy community and to convince potential reddit-migrants that they can settle here without missing out on the content from the niche communities.
If it's top comment on a reddit post then yeah, they'll automatically get filtered since they are tied to their posts.
Are these bots posting in communities from other instances?
The bots are only posting to communities that have explicit approval from the mods. Are you subscribing to any of those communities or is your complaint because it is showing in your "all" feed?
Edit: Instead of downvoting, please explain what is your problem with it. I will be a lot more likely to make changes if there is reasonable feedback.
These bots go against the Lemmy World rules on bots. Yes they need the approval from the moderator but they can not just import unmoderated content from reddit.
unmoderated content from reddit.
What if the content is moderated?
The tool I'm working on also was designed to only mirror content that is reviewed by the service administrator. They will still show up as bots, but the messages will only go through after a human has reviewed the content. It also can define what sets of posts should/should not be mirrored (e.g, no NSFW, no post from actual reddit bots, no stickied comments, self-posts or link posts only, etc)
Would that be okay?
Well I guess our problem with it is that we don't want a bot clogging up our feeds with content from Reddit and we would prefer if you shut it down.
Please, don't use the Royal We to make your argument. For every person complaining about the bots, I have two people asking for it and telling me that they are glad they can access content from the niche communities without having to access reddit.
Anyway, your beloved leaders at LW already defederated from alien.top, so there is nothing you have to worry about. Enjoy your sheltered life.
For everyone complaining about bots you have two that come and tell you that they are glad? I highly doubt it seeing the activity in those communities. You're not the first one to do this reddit botspam, and our actions against these have been very consistent.
You can look that up here: https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world
You create a bot that goes against our publicly-available policy and then you get mad we don't want to change that policy for you. These rules about bots were put in place because our users requested it. And we are far from the only instance with that policy. Try to do the same on lemm.ee
Our announcement on the bot rules: https://lemmy.world/post/1860512 Another thread on Reddit repost bots: https://lemmy.world/post/4844752
I am not mad. I am just saying that the tool is meant to do more than being just a mirroring bot. At the moment, it is creating bots, but eventually there will be a percentage of those who will be real users.
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