Whoever is in charge of that instance, STOP.

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/[email protected]

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

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.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    @[email protected], let me break it down to you as simply as I can:

    • Reddit comments are copyrighted material.

    • Reddit ToS means reddit can do whatever they want with these comments, you don’t have the rights to these comments.

    • Scraping and mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor, therefore, is copyright violation, and is illegal.

    • You don’t even have plausible deniability because you outright admitted, multiple times, that you are mirroring reddit comments to start a competitor.

    • Reddit’s army of lawyers can find you through your domain registrar, and will make an example out of you.

    • Every instance that federates with yours can also get sued for hosting copyrighted material.

    Please stop.

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 years ago

        Directly from Reddit’s user agreement when you sign up for an account there.

        You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

        So like it or not, they have the rights to whatever you post there already.

        There are plenty of reddit rehosters already, how is this different legally?

        Because these were noninteractive front ends, none of them with a creator who is insane enough to publicly declares that they are scraping reddit to start a competitor and explicitly to harm reddit’s financial interests.

  • Wahots@pawb.socialEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    I’m honestly so sick of bots on this website. Nobody even comments, it’s just junk that then dilutes the actual communities posting in c/all. I’d love to have a way to block all memes, porn, and bot posts just so I could actually discover new communities here instead of AI redhead pussy, bots crossposting stale linux memes, and old reddit help threads with 0 comments because they are asking for help on a different site.

  • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Can you please add a note to your original comment please?

    alien.top misreports its instance name and can confuse client blocks. In some cases you have to manually add “selfhosted.forum” for blocks to work correctly. I know this is an issue with Lemmy Connect specifically and I have left a note for the dev about this. If alien.top is misreporting its name like I suspect, it could cause issues for other clients.

    I requested my home instance (lemmy.ca) defederate from alien.top, but my cries went unanswered.

    • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      There is no “misresporting”. Selfhosted forum is a topic-based instance, like many other that set up as part of [email protected] .

      alien.top is a fediverser instance, which is done to help mirror content and to help people from reddit to migrate.

      The whole idea of fediverser is to make migration for redditors as easy as possible and in a way that they when they migrate they have access to all the content they were used to.

  • 𝕯𝖎𝖕𝖘𝖍𝖎𝖙@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    “whoever is in charge of that instance”

    Did you try contacting them? abuse@alien.top? Or just block the instance? Or just ignore them?

    Maybe you could start a gofundme and a petition!

  • Shadow@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.

      Just block communities and, where possible, instances.