I have just realised that alien.top seems to be mirroring reddit accounts, posts and comments, without labelling them as such. What is the point of this one way mirroring? As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave. There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.
without labelling them as such
All accounts are marked as bots.
What is the point of this one way mirroring?
The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can “take over” their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.
There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.
I’m also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful… Do you know the “rule” of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)
As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.
I’m not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I’m seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.
They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.
I am aware of the 90/9/1 rule, i dont agree this is the solution.
I may be the outlyer, but now that i am aware of it, i am blocking alien.top, and will not waste time interacting with bots.
They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.
If the accounts from alien.top you are seeing are not marked as bots, then it means that you interacted with an actual person who has taken over their account. ;)
i dont agree this is the solution.
Then how about help and come up with something better?
will not waste time interacting with bots.
Then don’t interact with the bots. You can, e.g, write the comment on Lemmy and send a DM to the original redditor, inviting them to join the instance/community. I did that to dozens of people already.
None of them are marked as bots. It is possibly a problem with my instance not mirroring the bot status.
I personally don’t think there is a solution. I don’t beleive it is possible to force growth, and trying risks turning people away. I am also not convinced that growth is essential either, reddit always felt so big that i felt like more of an observer, lemmy is nice and small that it feels more like a community.
You obviously disagree, and i will leave you to it.
Are you sure this isn’t just a Connect bug? This random profile I picked seems to mirror the bot status just fine for example.
Could be? I can now see bot markings on the posts, but not the profile, so maybe its just me. Its certainly was not super clear to me.
Can confirm, using connect the account is not marked but their posts are. Definitely seems to be a connect bug. Shame, connect has been pretty much perfect so far.
Oh wow that’s cool, I was wondering how this would be different from Lemmit. Really cool
How does 2 way mirroring work? How are you planning to fund / keep the instance stable?
How does 2 way mirroring work?
That will depend on a few things:
- If it’s an user that has “converted” via alien.top’s portal, we can work as a real reddit client and send message on behalf of the user.
- If the lemmy user is not on alien.top but wants to enable a two-way bridge, then we will have to do an authentication dance and send messages with passcodes to both reddit and lemmy.
- If the user does not want a bridge, we can still send a message to the reddit thread via another bot.
The last one would be the easiest to implement, but I’m avoiding releasing this because it might be taken down due to spam.
Regarding “how to fund it”. This is an open source project, so you can sponsor me via github, but the best way you can help is by signing up to my “proper” hosting service.
I like the idea. Did notice an error in the about page though:
We believe that the big traditional social media platforms have become *too big for their own good. Too much power concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley is leading to an internet that is closed and not with the best interests of the people in mind.
Sounds cool, looking forward to seeing it in action
That’s really cool. I got to do that with my Reddit account. Thx
It is by design https://portal.alien.top/about
@rglullis@communick.news is the creator
Hmm. I doubt they have any interest in reversing course, so i guess I will just block instead.
I am not a lawyer, but it does feel a bit wrong to mirror accounts, kinda defeats right-to-be-forgotten laws. Hopefully they know what they are doing.
- The right to be forgotten applies to PII. Comments can contain PII but usually don’t.
- The right to be forgotten applies to your private relationship with a company. Comments in public forums are, well, public. You can’t force the public to forget what you said.
You might be right, I have no idea. But still feels a bit wrongish.
There certainly were people here upset that reddit wasnt deleting their comments when they deleted their accounts, this feels kinda similar.
In this case you could make a very clear case that alien.top is infringing on copyright because those users only gave Reddit a worldwide irrevocable perpetual license to their postings, not anyone else.
User agreements aren’t really enforceable, and in this case, there would be a LOT of pressure on the side of fighting for the right to use public comments externally.
Because if reddit got their way, then that means publications can no longer cite Twitter comments. And if publications can’t rob Twitter comment, then they fucking die.
No, I don’t agree with the bot mirrors either. In fact, me and some friends found a 4chan mirror last month that was plastered with ads and replaced all instances of anon or a board name with some other words. The concept just feels scummy.
On the other hand, mirrors allow for users who wish to not or are blocked from engaging with reddit directly to still access it.
User agreements aren’t really enforceable
[citation needed]
if reddit got their way, then that means publications can no longer cite Twitter comments.
Why would publications no longer be able to execute their right of fair use?
I think that right to be forgotten is untenable in anything you publicly put into the internet. I know a bit off topic…
Once someone has open access to it (like reddit/lemmy). You are implicitly implying that you want anonymous access of that information to the wider world.
Do you think it is even possible? (BTW, im not being a dick, just interested)
Yeah, it realistically isnt feasable to actually be forgotten. But that doesnt mean we should deliberately make it harder either.
Ultimately, its not my problem, its not my account being mirrored, but if one of the users does find out that its happening, and they dont like it, the owner of alien.top would potentially have a legal battle on their hands. As long as they are comfortable with that risk, im not gonna stop them.
Yeah fair enough.
Also not a lawyer, but right to be forgotten applies to search engines to remove articles from the search index. Originally applied to news articles some guy in Spain didn’t want showing up when you google’d his name. The law doesn’t require the publisher to remove the content from their website, but instead requires search engines to remove the links in results.
So if someone’s comment was mirrored to Lemmy AND that comment was indexed by a search engine linking back to a Lemmy instance, then you still have the right to request Google or Bing or whatever to remove those links from search results via the same process.
The legal right to correct or remove PII is also part of the GDPR and its implementations by the states that implemented it. This isn’t a blanket “I can take down everything with my name on it” law, but it’s also not something that just applies to search engines.
I can see why Facebook didn’t enter the EU with their Fediverse thing, operating a Fediverse server as a company under the GDPR seems like a legal minefield.
