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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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 183 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (27 children)

I personally hate all the reddit cross post stuff, and it seems like the majority of lemmy users do too. I don't understand why people obsess over this as a way to "grow" lemmy.

It doesn't contribute to active conversations, in fact it deters users who reply locally and then never get a response.

Just let lemmy grow organically by making good content and contributing, stop forcing it with mirrors from reddit.

I wonder if we could get the top admins to threaten defederation with any instance that doesn't flag automated posts as bots. This way at least the users have some visibility.

[–] nocturne213@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

A while back I tried going to alien.top to as what the site was about and my adblocker completely blocked it. That was a sure sign I did not need to visit.

[–] rglullis -3 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Alien.top itself is just a standard Lemmy instance. I could believe it if you said it was timing out (as it had a 5 day outage a couple of weeks ago) but to claim there are any ads or trackers there is a simple, verifiable lie.

[–] nocturne213@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

Are you trying to access via http or https?

If you open https://portal.alien.top, do you see the same message?

[–] nocturne213@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I typed “alien.top” into my safari and that is what I got.

[–] rglullis 2 points 11 months ago

Then why does the URL show portal.alien.top?

I honestly don't know what to tell you. I'd like to investigate, but both Chrome and Firefox are normal.