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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[–] squiblet@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ah, no, I’d come and see “okay, this site has a couple inactive communities about civ and one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”. Pretty unclear why you think that would be better. I’d prefer to make posts in the genuine Lemmy communities personally, not one filled with spooky clone accounts. If I wanted the reddit content, that’s what reddit is for.

[–] rglullis 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

"one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”

I can point you to communities on selfhosted.forum that started completely from bots and today have hundreds of organic users. In some cases, threads that get started from a reddit mirror got carried on by users on Lemmy.

What is pissing some (not all) people off is that they only wrote because they didn't know it was a bot. While I understand the feeling of being tricked, it doesn't change the fact that a community with more content (even if mirrored) ends up attracting more real users than the desert communities that people create but do not put out content

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay, which communities are those?

[–] rglullis 0 points 11 months ago

Go to https://selfhosted.forum/communities and check "users per month". Bots are not counted on those.