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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[–] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.

If the posts are from a Reddit community's few actual posters and none from any of the posters on Lemmy instances, what's the incentive to switch over to Lemmy? Moreover, if someone's mainly a poster, aren't you only encouraging them to stay on Reddit and post as they know there's someone handling mirroring their posts elsewhere for them?

I've read over the discussions around this and I can sort of see where you're coming from for some of the few folks that want to lurk and browse Reddit stuff via Lemmy apps or the like, but I'm struggling to see how much it really helps different Lemmy instances draw more posters. This may help bring lurkers over, but from what I can tell, there's not much of a problem with people lurking across Lemmy, but more of a poster problem, in terms of having a greater variety of people posting and commenting.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 11 months ago

what’s the incentive to switch over to Lemmy?

The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.

Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.

This may help bring lurkers over.

By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.

Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.

As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:

By creating two-way communication (which is okay, but still works in favor of Reddit)
By promoting Lemmy as an alternative and bringing more people from Reddit (which is ideal)

The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.

The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.