Can we defederate from Alien.top? It's just bots.

Alien.top's raison-d'etre is to create bots and repost things from Reddit.

The instance makes a bot with the same username as the poster from reddit, then makes a bot with the same username as all the commenters, and re-posts each comment.

Every alien.top user in this thread is a bot.
https://lemmy.ca/post/10599153?scrollToComments=true

I did a quick check, and it looks like 138 of the comments are bots.

23 comments

I am here to express agreement with this.
I am sick of bots. I am sick of reddit. I am sick of reddit content being mirrored. If you want to read reddit comments go to reddit. Lemmy is not reddit, it should not aspire to be, and it is a unique and interesting place full of great conversations with quality users. Reddit is a wasteland, and I am tired of people trying to import it to our new space.

Good timing, I was planning to make a thread today to poll public opinion. Yes, I'm in complete agreement. I don't see anyone here with a solid counterargument either.
Even when 0.19 is out I think these bots are a bad idea. The new users who are most likely to be confused by them, are also the least likely to figure out how to block an instance.
I've defederated us from them for now.

I second this.

I made a comment about it here
Bots need to:
Have a targeted and specific purpose
Be easy to block for anyone not interested
Be limited in how many posts it can make in an hour.
I find our local sales bot really helpful, but to anyone who finds it annoying they can block the one user and move on. alien.top is hard and complicated to block, even moreso than lemmit.online
- Agreed. Although I'm not a user of the sales bot, I think it provides value for others.

I'm in favor of this. I got tired of blocking communities from that instance and finally blocked the whole instance because it kept spamming my all feed with zombie threads.

Maybe for now, and re-enable federation when 0.19 is officially out and each user can block the instance if they want to?
EDIT: F#ck me for attempting to leave that as an individual preference I guess.
- 0.19 is not going to be the magical fix everybody is hoping it to be. Yeah, you'll be able to block an instance from federating to your feed, but the posters from the instance will still show up.
  
  Are these bots from alien.top posting outside of their instance?
  And maybe an improvement to the instance blocking feature could be to add a toggle to also block users from that instance as well, not just the communities (per-instance setting).

Generates content and if I need to search for something I can do it here rather than Reddit

Nice to see 140 non toxic helpful comments.
- They aren't really comments, they are closer to pictures of comments.
  
  Yeah I get it and understand how it works. It’s still amazing to me. Also I don’t know if you understand that the creator is trying to have communication get mirrored between Reddit/lemmy so they’re both contributing to each other.

23 comments