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://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]
https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]
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.
The worst part is when I spend time replying to a question, later to realize the OP will never see it.
I fell for that a few times. Then I realized these were communities on instances that had like 40 million posts all from people from Alien who had a Lemmy history consisting of one post and no comments.
Exactly this. I didn’t notice the bot icon the first time I saw alien.top, and wasted time responding.
I’ve blocked the instance from my client.