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Reporting bot instances? There is an annoying one that is reposting posts and full comment threads from Reddit. (self.lemmy_ca_support)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by remotelove to c/lemmy_ca_support

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There is a federated instance that seems to be doing 1:1 post copies from Reddit. Not only are the questions copied, all the users are bots and entire comment chains are copied. This is not entirely a bad thing in some edge cases.

However, reposting questions in fake(?) tech support communities with fake comments is annoying as hell and a waste of time for people who really want to give genuine advice. alien.top is one of those weird instances, for example.

I can easily block the instance on my client, so there is that. If this is actually an issue, it should be blocked, defederated, whatever, at the lemmy.ca instance level.

In fairness, I don't have a full grasp of the details of how federation actually works, and personally, I don't really care at the moment. (I'll dig into it later as time permits.) Heck, for all I know, there could be a legitimate connector built to facilitate easier transition for users that are migrating from Reddit to Lemmy. (Is that even a thing?)

Cheers. Sorry if I sound stupid. This was just bothering me a bit.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The point of federation is to not have a single central point that controls instances. Instances are automatically federated with all other instances, generally. Its up to a given instance owner to decide to defederate from another instance. And thats the “nuclear option”. Ive only seen it done when the instance is posting hatespeech/CSAM/etc.

You can request it to the admins whatever your home instance is but I doubt anything would happen.

Block it in your client, like you have suggested.

A third option is to host your own instance, which will give you control over what other instances you federate with

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One plausible argument for defederating bot instances is that generate a flood of posts, which is slightly hostile to new users. If a new user joins lemmy, finds a flood of bot posts, they may end up assuming the entire system is bots, and give up before even getting to installing a client and blocking them.

Definitely much more of a grey area compared to CSAM/hatespeech, but kinda the same line of thought: "if users see this content, they may be turned away".

[–] Rentlar 3 points 1 year ago

I've blocked almost all the Reddit reposter bots (BAPCsales is one exception). If we wanted to be friendlier to new users, ideally these sorts of feeds (game day, bot newswire, subreddit reposter) would be opt in to receive while hidden by default, but it sounds technically challenging to implement well.

[–] mp3 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I filter alien.top at the mobile app level, hopefully Lemmy 0.19 shows up soon and grant the same ability on the webUI.

[–] remotelove 1 points 1 year ago

That is the plan: Just block it at my client eventually since I am exclusively mobile.

I am curious about how karma and spam bots/instances continue to mature on Lemmy. As Lemmy grows, the amount of spam may scale with it. It's just helpful to know what is better to block on my side and what the instance admins are capable of blocking on theirs.

Quite honestly, building and maintaining some kind of an independent instance reputation system may be helpful. It could potentially take a bit of work to maintain but it may relieve some work for the instance admins.