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Can we defederate from Alien.top? It's just bots. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Are these bots from alien.top posting outside of their instance?

Yes they are, and the "opt-out" procedure post 0.19 instance blocking feature would be to go to https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network, read the side bar and block the 18 (as of writing) domains from your feed, I dunno if there are more.

Just look at nba.space, style.land for example... there is no meaningful engagement to be had because all those sites are flooded with traffic reposted from Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Uhhh that's bad then, and therefore I agree with the defederation.

Thanks for sharing, I added all these domains to my mobile app instance filter until 0.19 hits the server.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I had the same thought process as you did!

When I thought it was just people cloning their own accounts, I didn't see why anyone was against it.

Once I saw that the bots weren't made from a request duplicate made the the original user, and that they almost exclusively post outside of Alien.top, I was very against their existence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

just saying that I to prefer solutions where the user just has more power to adjust these things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't disagree, but burdening the users, especially new ones, with all these common tasks will make Lemmy a pretty dismal place.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

ah yes the great burden of freedom and control. Best to alleviate the common user of such drudgery. Seriously though for me I like the control to be at the bottom and then tools to simply. Like subscribing to block lists or such. I mean im someone who often does not use an ad-bloc but always uses no-script.