@lemmy_support you really need to count users in a saner way. There is no way that alien.top has over half a million user accounts.
They’re all bot accounts.
The instance is a worse version of those RSS bots that mirror random subreddits because it mirrors the comments as different bot users too. So you have to pay attention before you realise no one is going to reply because it’s just mirrored engagement from somewhere else.
Thankfully lw defederated
- Replies are going to be possible in the next release
- Even if you are not yet getting a reply from OP, you can get a conversation going with other subscribers in the community. It is happening already in the bigger groups like !main@selfhosted.forum and !main@soccer.forum. Instead of writing for the OP, consider writing there to bootstrap the “organic” community
- Instead of complaining about the current state of the instance, let’s be optimistic about its potential. This is meant as a tool to get the people out of reddit. The biggest things stopping more people from migrating are (a) the lack of content here and (b) people not knowing where to sign up and what communities to subscribe. Alien.top and the fediverser project solves both issues. if you are still on reddit and find a comment/post from someone who you’d like to see in the fediverse, send the OP a comment or DM telling them about how easy it is to sign up.
Why care so much about getting people out of reddit? We should just strive to improve what we have, for ourselves, and people will come in time if they like it.
Having 100s of bots posting just drowns the actual people, and honestly I prefer a post with 5 genuine comments than 200 reposted comments, especially since the quality of those comments is debatable.
Also, why would I comment in a ghost town where I know nobody will read what I type?
Some people think that you need thousands of comments and views and posts for “success”, but I feel way better hanging around Lemmy, small as it is, than I ever felt in reddit (except in some small subreddits).
Why care so much about getting people out of reddit?
It’s a moral imperative to me. I have kids who are still little, and I hope by the time they are teenagers we don’t have an internet dominated by the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Reddit.
Having 100s of bots posting just drowns the actual people
The bots are setup to only to work in very well-defined communities, and only in communities where the mods gave me explicit approval. Is there any community that is “flooded” by the bots?
I prefer a post with 5 genuine comments than 200 reposted comments.
I don’t know about your use case, but a lot of my reddit usage consisted of following technical subreddits where the discussion is quite productive. Given that I don’t want to use reddit anymore (unless if it is to help people get out of it), it makes sense to me that have the mirrored conversation as well just to be a lurker.
especially since the quality of those comments is debatable.
You can still downvote/report.
why would I comment in a ghost town where I know nobody will read what I type?
- Even if it is a bot, it has the potential to actually be taken by the real user.
- Even if it is a bot and not going to be taken by the real user, it will be seen by real people who are already subscribed to the community and it will help them to overcome their “ghost town” feeling.
- Even if it is a bot and the community it is not followed by a lot of other users, people that follow you will see your response anyway.
Point is: we need to start from somewhere, and it’s easier to start with a “ghost town” than with no town at all.
It’s actually a really cool project. It’s a great way of starting communities, with the full conversation content. The people there are working on bi-directional bridges. So that comments from Lemmy come back to Reddit as well.
Yeah this is a cool project, i made a crude version to mirror some subs on a private instance of mine
But I’m going to take a look at this one and see if its better than what I have
I agree. You don’t like it? Block it. Defederation should be a last resort thing.
Yes. I don’t understand all the hate. More options are good thing for community moderators.
I think people have just gotten way too sensitive… either that, or I’m going more numb, lol 😂.
I’ve noticed high sensitivity on here, so you’re not alone.
Yeah, me as well… it wasn’t that bad on reddit, was it 🤔?
Yes and no. Each one of those users represents a real reddit user and their comments in the bridge threads.
So a bot isn’t creating the content, a bot is mirroring the content into Lemmy.
Yes but if I reply to anyone there’s never going to be a response, because it’s 1-way.
So it will flood lemmy with a load of content that effectively stunts actual engagement because people have to spend time sifting through it all to find where the real users are. The end result being that a subset of users don’t bother and potentially give up on lemmy all together, which has a snowball effect of further reducing real engagement.
Reddit is on Reddit, leave it there.
They’re actively working on bi-directional.
I agree, it’s not ready for general consumption, until it’s bi-directional
Maybe I should’ve named the project “Bicentennial men” or “Pinocchio”.
They all start as bot accounts but they can become real users. There are already a couple of hundred active users there.
Oooooof yeah I didn’t even think about the fact that instance might fuck up the user account number statistics. Ugh. I don’t think that’s a lemmy thing, that’s an alien.top thing.
