this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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[Discussion] alien.top bots (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works to c/agora@sh.itjust.works
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English message:

As some of you may have noticed, there's an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.  

I expect there are multiple valid opinions on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone's opinion on the situation. 

You might also want to read lemmy.ca's discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.  

Things that I think need to be pointed out:  

  • alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in. 
  • together they've made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
  • That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy. 
  • They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona. 
  • alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different instances with copies of different subreddits.

I don't have an exhaustive list of such communities,  I haven't found an official one.  I'll post a fewfrom my personal blocklist in a comment below. 

And a note on the upcoming 0.19 release: 

  • the new user-level instance block feature will block all the communities of the blocked instances,  but will not block these users' posts or comments if they are done on another instance's community.  

My opinion isn't any more valid then anyone else's so I'll put it in a comment below.

Our users' input is welcomed.

What do you, dear users of sh.itjust.works, think about federation with them?

Thanks

Message français:

Comme certains d'entre vous l'ont peut-être remarqué, il y a une instance peuplée de 1,1M de bots qui copient ees posts et commentaires Reddit dans plein de communautés sur plusieurs autres instances.

Il y a plusieurs opinions sur le sujet et ce fil de discussion vise à prendre le pouls de l'opinion générale sur la situation.

Je vous suggères de lire la discussion chez lemmy.ca à ce sujet ici, discussion intéressante. 

Quelques points qui, selon moi, doivent être soulignés :

  • alien.top compte actuellement 1,1 million de robots, dont seulement 6 sont des utilisateurs hebdomadaires qui se login.
  • collectivement, ils ont déjà fait 1,59 million de commentaires dans une multitude de communautés dans différentes instances.
  • Ce projet proclame essayer de convertir des utilisateurs de Reddit à passer à Lemmy.
  • Il existe un portail pour permettre aux utilisateurs de Reddit de prendre contrôle de leur version bot.
  • alien.top a une seule communauté locale, les bots publient tous sur différentes instances, des copies de différents subreddits.

Je n'ai pas de liste exhaustive de ces communautés, à première vue, je n'en trouve pas une liste officielle.  Je mettrai dans un commentaire ci-dessous quelques communautés que j'ai bloqué au niveau personnel. 

Pour finir,  une note sur la version 0.19 de lemmy qui s'en vient :

  • La nouvelle fonctionnalité pour bloquer une instance au niveau d'un uutilisateur bloquera toutes les communautés d'une instance bloquée, mais ne bloquera pas les publications ou les commentaires de ces utilisateurs s'ils sont publiés dans une communauté d'une autre instance.

Mon opinion n'est pas meilleur qu'une autre et je mettrai plutôt dans un commentaire ci-bas.

Les commentaires de nos utilisateurs sont les bienvenus.

Que pensez-vous, cher utilisateurs de sh.itjust.works de la fédération avec eux?

Merci

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I see very little value in mirroring Reddit on Lemmy.

As a link aggregator, I think we're doing fine. We seem to have no shortage of our own "Headline linking to a paywalled article no one reads" thank you very much.

As a discussion board, I think most folks will see a Reddit mirror and go "Well that's pointless to engage with" and ignore it.

It doesn't really help us out here, and I don't think it makes Lemmy more attractive to Redditors, who probably haven't noticed and might be a little alarmed at the identity theft aspect.

I'm also curious as to the load this kind of behavior puts on the rest of the Fediverse. How much bandwidth, local storage etc. of sh.itjust.works does it take to spam the All Active feed with pages of Reddit mirrors?

Aeons ago I drafted a defederation policy, which I don't think was ever officially ratified. I'm glad to say it hasn't come up a lot. "operated for the purpose of hosting bot accounts for the purposes of spam, scams, denial-of-service attacks, or other traffic generally unwelcome or disruptive to the Fediverse." was number one on my list of reasons to defed from an instance.

I would call the behavior of alien.top to be spam, generally unwelcome or disruptive.

If they are keeping posts within their own instance, open the poll and I'd vote to defederate. If they have bots that are posting spam here, I actively petition to defederate.

[–] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

The author paused their bots soon after this post was made, although probably not because of this post but likely the general backlash, not just from here.
Last I checked, they were still very much in a "no it's the kids who are wrong" mindset.

My main problem with this is it's actually a net negative for user engagement.
Like you said, why would anyone interact with a pool of bots?

While much less egregious, sometimes even useful, even the normal bots who post stuff from an RSS feed can get a little tiring. At least when someone posts something, there's at least this one person who's likely willing have a discussion about it, whereas with bots it's far from guaranteed.

I too would be curious about the resource use coming from them, maybe if/when we purge them we can compare.