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alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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]

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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I hope instance admins can clean up their databases from this stuff, because I suspect these Reddit mirroring bots take up enormous amounts of database storage on popular instances once all those posts get pushed there.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I'll paste what @[email protected] (looks to be an admin) commented after you posted;

"Not just spam, it is also using system resources as high as big instances. I just defederated from it.

I wish someone made this integration in an app, that shows both Lemmy and Reddit feed, without an instance."

So seems like you were right

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

It's a lot of work to interact with the databases at this level, for most enthusiast and self-hosting admins it would simply be better to limit the damage by cutting off the infected appendage and wait for proper cleaning tools to come to lemmy admin.

It's usually been images that hogged the resources, but that's been due to the "steady" user base on Lemmy in the thousands or tens of thousands. Suddenly injecting... hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of accounts? We're in uncharted waters now.

I'm helping out at my home instance and talked to the admin - We've defederated as well.