An alternative perspective on Alien.top and the Fediverser project (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn't work, it wasn't as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning

Also disclaimer: I have no involvement in the Fediverser project other than following it from afar and discussing with the creator in a few comments.

Hello everyone,

As the other thread is already quite active and I guess my comment would probably be drown there, I open this new to bring an alternative perspective on the project.

Remember the human

First of all, could we please try to limit the hostility against the project creator? It's fine to disagree, to block, to defederate, but wording such as "hate", "screw the person" don't seem to align with "remember you will be interacting with actual, real people" and "Be respectful of others."

Now that this is out of the way, a few considerations to take into account:

The Network Effect - the issue that Fediverser is trying to solve

As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. "Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?"

It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre, and Signal still hasn't convinced most of the Whatsapp userbase to make the switch. Matrix is struggling to be a full Discord replacement, but has the benefits of having bridges with most of communication platforms (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/)

Those bridges can ease potential reluctant users to at least try out Matrix, as they can still access their previous network.

That was the whole idea behind Fediverser. I remember the initial plan being a two-ways bridge between Lemmy and Reddit, allowing people to see content from Reddit from Lemmy, interact with it, and having people on Reddit seeing responses too.

Added with all the Lemmy pros that we know (third-party clients, alternative front-ends, etc.), it could be a huge helper into bringing more people into Lemmy. Which brings us to the next question.

Do we need more users?

I know this is highly debatable, but I will try to bring some perspective on this.

I have been an active user on Lemmy for a few months now. I like it here, great apps, nice people, interesting discussions.

But still, I still to go Reddit too.

Why? Network effect. As much as Reddit sucks today, there is still content that is only posted there, and sometimes I just want to read that content. And I'm not talking about niche topics like obscure fandoms. Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren't very popular on Lemmy. And probably won't become anytime soon due to the network effect. Which is fine for me.

But the issue I see is that overtime, the migration might never really happen. We might be in a "next year is the year of the Linux Desktop" or a "Chrome vs Firefox" situation rather than a "Digg to Reddit migration". And I'm taking examples where the alternative is still widely used. Lemmy could actually become Diaspora, as over time, more and more people just think that the convenience of a Revanced third-party client is better than having to browse two platforms.

But to be fair, the future doesn't even matter that much. What I wanted to say here was that I understand why the Fediverser creator wanted to avoid that scenario, and tried to accelerate the process.

Resources consumption

The list of instances part of the Fediverse project can be found here: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network. I had a look at two, https://level-up.zone/ which replicated a gaming sub, and https://selfhosted.forum/. While they are quite active, they don't seem to be that active (most of the threads have less than 5 comments, there are a few that high the hundreds, but they are quite rare).

I have seen several admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, "as much as the largest instances". Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown? Can we afford a growth this large? The scalability issues have been mentioned since June, and it seemed that things had improved on that side, but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?

However, to be fair, I guess this point is mainly assessed as a "low return on investment" for the resource consumption. Which brings us to the previous point "What what Fediverser trying to solve".

As a conclusion, I hope this perspective might help people see why this project was made, and that maybe it does not deserve all the hostile reactions from the other thread.

That's it, thank you if you made it to the end. Looking forward having a discussion in the comments.

Have a good day.

Edit: I noticed I didn't mention the copyright issues in the comments, but to be fair I'm far from being knowledgeable on the question. It might however have a Streisand effect of having Reddit sue a single person over comments that are made for free by Reddit users. Is that worth being sued by them, I don't know (also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?)

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[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My opinion on it is pretty simple:

I'm here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human's knowledge or consent is not "made by a human" anymore as far as I'm concerned.
I don't f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it's fine if it attracts more people and it's fine if it doesn't. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform's goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns. Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. Your posts being copied to another social network by a bot impersonating you feels cheap and desperate, and like your rights are being seriously violated (which is probably the case)! This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the "fake bot social network".
On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that's widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?! That's pretty much the worst entrance to the Fediverse you could have, almost guaranteeing a bad experience from the get go!

So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don't fill it with bot content just to make it look like one of the big social networks on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, because you alienate the people already here and you give it a bad rep in the outside world.

[-] HubertManne@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

this comes very close to anything I would have to say about it.

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[-] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 31 points 1 year ago

One thing I hate about it is the posting of reddit questions. Several times I've tried to help someone having some sort of an issue only to realize the question was originally posted on reddit and the poster is not even on the fediverse, nor will they probably ever see it. It's a waste of time and effort, and certain subs are already becoming a graveyard of unanswered questions with no value to anyone.

To me that's not adding "content" it's simply cluttering the fediverse with garbage from a site many of us left behind on purpose. Reddit sucks, why bring it here?

[-] INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago

I bet five bucks this comment was originally posted on Facebook

[-] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Ha lol that would be ironic! If I wanted anything to do with reddit I never would have deleted my 12 yr old account there.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

12 yrs? That's impressive!

--posted via Snapchat on iOS

Scnr

[-] INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

AI is amazing. It's like I'm talking to a person

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 year ago

Eliminate all bots.

Crossposts are useless because the communities are not interactive.

The strength of the Lemmy community in my opinion is the high quality of discussion, and there is no discussion to be had on reddit reposts when we are not having our content reposted onto reddit.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I see where you come from. From a lurker point of view, it doesn't change that much, though.

If in the near future the communication would be both ways, what would you think of the tool?

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think it only serves to continue to keep reddit afloat. If our stuff does get crossposted, then we're effectively just still using reddit. The point was to leave the platform because of the leadership, not kinda continue to half use it by proxy.

It's a bandage that needs to be ripped off, not re-applied.

I don't think there are any high quality discussions left to be had with the current suite of redditors.

E: I see you're getting downvoted and that sucks - I for one appreciate our discussion.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t think there are any high quality discussions left to be had with the current suite of redditors.

First of all, thanks for your comment, I appreciate the discussion.

To answer your point, I’m not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.

I’m probably against the grain here, but I still see some quality content on Reddit among the thrash.

And when I tell those people who post interesting content why they don’t come to Lemmy, they explain that they don’t have the time to post everything twice, and even if Reddit is bad, it’s still where most of the people are.

[-] registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 6 points 1 year ago

From a lurker point of view, it doesn’t change that much, though.

Then why not lurk at reddit for reddit content if it's not about interacting with the community?

If in the near future the communication would be both ways, what would you think of the tool?

It would be a nightmare, there's a clear difference between the people that have joined Lemmy because they wanted, those who joined Lemmy because Reddit became shit and those still on Reddit. I don't want to interact with those still on reddit, if I did I'd simply stay on reddit.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Then why not lurk at reddit for reddit content if it’s not about interacting with the community?

Because people might want to have a look at a platform before considering moving to it, and they would consider it because they wouldn't be afraid of missing out on their usual content.

It would be a nightmare, there’s a clear difference between the people that have joined Lemmy because they wanted, those who joined Lemmy because Reddit became shit and those still on Reddit.

I'm not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.

I'm probably against the salt here, but I still see some quality content on Reddit among the thrash. When I tell those people who post interesting content why they don't come to Lemmy, they explain that they don't have the time to post everything twice, and even if Reddit is bad, it's still where most of the people are.

It's probably this people that Fediverser is targeting.

[-] registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 4 points 1 year ago

Because people might want to have a look at a platform before considering moving to it, and they would consider it because they wouldn’t be afraid of missing out on their usual content.

I'm confused about the difference between a lurker and someone requiring an account, yet don't want to interact with the community. Why can't people who leave a platform and create a new identity "lurk"/browse the old place for content, no matter if leaving reddit or lemmy?

I’m not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.

You're right in the way that it's subjective - your perspective is as valid as mine. My own preferences still stand, I don't want to interact with current reddit regulars.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

I’m confused about the difference between a lurker and someone requiring an account, yet don’t want to interact with the community. Why can’t people who leave a platform and create a new identity “lurk”/browse the old place for content, no matter if leaving reddit or lemmy?

Because people to use one thing. It seems pretty similar to why people only wanted to keep Whatsapp, and not install Signal next to it. You could definitely say that they could use both side-by-side, but it seems against most of the users natural behaviour. They want one thing.

My own preferences still stand, I don’t want to interact with current reddit regulars.

And it's valid. I see a lot of crap between the few gems I stumble upon, so I completely get it.

[-] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

agreed. the only useful bot here imo is autotldr, which could just be integrated into Lemmy itself, and having it be a bot is just a temporary compromise.

It would be nice imo if an extension system was added to Lemmy just like browsers. Autotldr, Wikipedia summarisers, remindme, video downloaders, etc could be handled like a client side extension instead of being bots. They'd work completely fine, and not clutter up everyone's feed that way

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

While we're at it: crossposts in general should go or he handled differently. The way things are, crossposts will create new posts with new comment sections like reddit did. Yet
a) if something is of interest to two communities, chances are, ppl who are interested are already in those two communities, so crossposts will only clutter their feed
b) it splits up the discussion unnecessarily

Why not have corrsposts as mere.links to the original post so everybody can join in? The way things are, each crosspost will turn into a circle jerk of all the same arguments regurgitated by different people in different communities.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

That's the problem with federation though, you have 20 servers with 20 communities of the same thing, and there's not many people redirecting and curating, because everybody wants to be a powermod. When we had the reddit migration it started a chain reaction nightmare of creating an infinite number of dead, useless, redundant communities. I like to use sports as a good example. Fanaticus.social is designed to be the premiere sports instance, yet all the local instances, like .ca or midwest.social, also will have their requisite team pages.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Perhaps instead of mirrors to reddit, we should be working on linking those communities together.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

It's happening already. You can see a few communities emerging as "the ones" on their topic

[-] ContentConsumer9999@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

#Kbin has a #feature to kind of deal with this called #collections. Instead of subscribing to all #magazines of a same type or even name, you can put them in a collection (or find a collection where somebody already did that) and then favorite that collection see all of those magazines in your feed. Splitting up the discussion is still not ideal but at least this lets you see all of it at once and increases #discoverability.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

I wish everything was a bit more standardized between kbin/mbin/Lemmy. It feels like we have these forks of the project that do different things because they emulate different behaviors of other sites, and reaching parity seems difficult without a lot of developer discussion.

I like a few things about kbin but for a while it was the instance causing the most spam on my feed because federated mod actions broke and spam cleaned up locally would not get cleaned on other instances. I saw Ernest back posting again so I guess development has resumed and some of those issues have been banged out.

[-] ContentConsumer9999@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, I believe Ernest had some serious irl issues come up and had to take a step back from development, which slowed progress down massively. But ever since he got back, he's been working really hard to #fix the major #issues and make the instance easier to use.

[-] ContentConsumer9999@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

#Kbin actually handles this really well. Whenever it detects 2 of the same #thread (at least that's how I think it works), it'll group them and only show one of the threads on your feed. If you click on it, right under the thread will be the other #cross-posted threads on other magazines, each of which has its own upvote/downvote and comment count. You can click on any of those threads to switch to a certain magazine's thread and see the #comments there. Also, when you comment, it only goes to the thread you currently have open.

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy does the latter part as well. You just have a chance to see multiple as well on the frontpage if you're subscribed to both communities

[-] ContentConsumer9999@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I just wanted to specify it isn't a mass comment kind of thing.

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[-] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?

Alternative reddit front ends like teddit always explicitly state that they do not host any content. They do that for a reason.

Archives are noncommercial and noninteractive, which falls under fair use, and they also comply with DMCA takedowns.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

Interesting, thanks.

Also actually kind of ironic to receive copyright advice from an account that could probably be considered as identity impersonation, but I guess we live in strange times ha ha

[-] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Why would it be ironic that an actor (whose job is, you know, to pretend to be other people on camera) would knows a bit about copyright laws in the States?

[-] registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 13 points 1 year ago

I agree that people should treat each other with respect. For those who doesn't understand, this is a good post. Perhaps I can elaborate on "the other side", or at least my side, and people could perhaps understand why people disagree with the mirroring?

As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. “Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?”

I don't want to interact with people who need a crowd. I want to interact with those who want to discuss my favorite topics. There's a healthy lack of shitpost and joke comments on Lemmy outside of the shitposting and joke communities. I like that. I want that to continue. I think it's due to the lemmy crowd being different from the reddit crowd.

It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre

Yes, the good ol' days as I remember them. Filled with anti-censorship and freedom loving people willing to put their principles of a free internet above having a sheepish crowd of followers. Now I don't use Mastodon that often.

We might be in a “next year is the year of the Linux Desktop”

Try looking at it from the perspective of people like me who have been using Linux for years or decades - Who cares about "the year of the Linux desktop"?

admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, “as much as the largest instances”. Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown?

Yes, or take "drastic" measures like blocking whole instances or migrating data to external storage. My previous home instance got overloaded due to lack of proper admin tools and literally had to shut down due to a lack of storage space during the reddit influx.

but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?

Cries of help, "I'm out of space", from admins of smaller instances comes up in various support communites every so often. It's not a scalability issue if you have the funds to just increase resources. So yes and no IMO.

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[-] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren't very popular on Lemmy... due to the network effect.

No, no. It's because we're almost entirely basement-dwelling nerds who are alone, have no kids, no money, and only wear clothes to avoid the shame of other people seeing our naked bodies.

[-] Emotional_Series7814@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was always annoyed by the "LMAO everyone pathetic nerd stereotype" thing they did on Reddit, only partially because it assumed everyone was a man desperate for sex from a woman. Is this comment an attempt at a joke or a genuine assessment?

I may be a nerd and it is probably fair to say most Fediverse users are. But I'm not a basement-dweller stereotype and I'm not sure where that comes from aside from the tired old Reddit joke about all its users being that exact stereotype.

Also, again, network effects. Go where advice exists on a nice wiki, not where it's a new community and maybe 1 person will answer your comment if you are lucky—a lot of people just want an answer and don't want to deal with the nonresponse and tumbleweeds from a totally new community. It is emotionally easier to toss a post about gaming into the void than it is to approach with an actual problem you have in a relationship or with your finances you need help with, then to check in daily in hope someone answered only to get crickets back, and then repost in another community (or even another site, where you might have to rewrite that post so that you can't just look it up and find out FediverseUser83 posted the same thing as RedditUser92 and is thus probably the same person's two accounts). So these become "why waste the effort and time when you could just go to Reddit and get a quicker response?" to an even higher level than other communities—nonresponse probably hurts more.

For relationship advice specifically, I recall that subreddit being called unrealistic so often that I understand why people might be wary to start a new one here.

I'm actually pretty image-conscious and a lot of this manifests in putting effort into how I dress. I am also incredibly uncomfortable putting pictures of myself (yes, you can talk about fashion without selfies, but the typical "does this look good on me" post requires you post yourself. "Look at this outfit I put together" is easiest to do with your own human body, not searching online for images of each piece of clothing you put on and putting them in one image, especially because some older pieces may not have a perfectly matching online image) on social media like Reddit, let alone the Fediverse which duplicates your post to tons of servers who may or may not respect post deletions. I'd imagine this frustrates the growth of fashion, makeup, and hair communities.

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[-] Zarxrax@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I simply don't understand what this fediverser thing is supposed to accomplish.

So apparently it is "eventually" supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn't make any sense!

And if that sad state of affairs is the eventual goal for the project, what is it accomplishing right now, other than annoying people with bot spam? If you want to read Reddit threads, go read Reddit. There is no reason to spam your personal reddit rss feed to the world. And what is even the purpose for it creating user accounts, which is basically impersonating people?

I think it basically boils down to 1 question. Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy, in any measurable way. If that answer is anything other than "yes", then why is it enabled in the first place? If that answer is "yes", then there are still a whole host of reasons why that might not be a good thing.

[-] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn’t make any sense!

Because of all the recent drama with reddit and its continued enshitification. Apps that users/moderators relied on are gone, the mobile site is shit, etc. For a lot of users, there are enough pain points that mirroring the content somewhere else is enough to get them to switch.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other.

It's already working as a prototype, as mentioned here: https://communick.news/comment/1229610

Here is the example: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1857wsg/question_instead_of_nextcloud_why_not_use_a_ftps/kb0ozc5/

Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on?

Because then they would be interested in using the third party Lemmy apps and not the abomination that the Reddit one is.

It doesn’t make any sense!

And still Mastodon set-up a lot of repost bots when it started to attract people to the platform, by showing them they wouldn't miss the content they wanted to see.

It also required Twitter going to crap, but Reddit seems to be following that trend.

Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy

It is: https://lemmy.ca/comment/5397535

But if you want a data report with all the migrations successfully done thanks to the tool, that's probably too much to ask now

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 6 points 1 year ago

resource use across most fediverse software seems excessive due to the immaturity of the platforms. efficiency takes time, and the activity pub protocol is pretty new. efficient implementation is pretty rare.

buckle up, it could be awhile. i've been running an instance (K/mbin) now since july, resource use is my biggest issue.

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[-] VicentAdultman@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I got an invite to Blue Sky and realized why fediverse is great. Blue Sky already has the annoying kind of people that are on Twitter. We had those in fediverse, but they were all in some instances. Unfederated them and we are good. I don't think the objective here is to get big as reddit, twitter, etc. I feel so much better having a small community that interacts with me and makes sense to me. It would be great having more people in fediverse as well, but the amount now is fine for me.

[-] Shyfer@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 year ago

Judging by all the threads I've seen recently about the decreasing active user base of Lemmy, there are lots of people who want more, too. I don't think any project is going to make Lemmy as big as Twitter or Reddit immediately, so that seems like an unfounded fear. There's a vast mid area between current Lemmy and peak Twitter, so it doesn't hurt to at least raise the number of normies here so we can get threads about things other than tech and news. I want to see biologists giving their opinion on a discovered animal, or people who worked on a random movie chiming in with fun facts, the earthquake guy, or the astronomy person, etc.

The variety of people made Reddit fun.

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[-] eek2121@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I haven’t seen the alien.top stuff yet, but I had a friend that was working on a reddit bridge project that implements api over html for old reddit and new reddit. The idea was that you could target the api and make the client compatible with both reddit and lemmy. (The API is similar to Lemmy’s)

I got to play with it before he shelved it, and it worked great.

This seems like a better approach than the one they are trying to take.

Lemmy also needs a mechanism for linking your reddit user id (and twitter, and…) with your active lemmy id so users can find each other easier. I am surprised we don’t already have this with mastodon. Twiiter oauth is (used to be? I haven’t touched it in a couple years ) like a 5 minute thing to implement. Reddit apparently also supports oauth.

If you can sign into lemmy via a reddit login path, you could also do some other fun/interesting stuff.

Regardless, I don’t really see a need for any of it.

Lemmy has its own set of issues to deal with.

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[-] drmeanfeel@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I do respect the human involvement, respect them enough in fact to expect them to reflect on the ramifications of their actions/creation.

Some LinkedIn tech bro who's trying to get enough venture capital to boil the oceans using some overwrought genAI bullshit to create electoral campaign material is also "a human", but being willing to create that horrid output with its consequences leaves both the product and producer open to critique

[-] CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !communick_news_network@communick.news

[-] veniasilente@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

As someone who has created two communities here in the Fediverse hoping they could ever draw attention and function as alternatives to Reddit, I have to simply say that I can't do all the work alone. It's good that someone is trying to bring in more content, even if it means bringing it from Reddit. Other people don't like it? They're welcome to fix it another way so long as it's fixed. Otherwise niche communities will be all but forced to return to Reddit, as the statistics of stuff like "lirker vs poster" only ever benefit the most common topics, the largest instances, and sex / porn.

Also I honestly don't understand why people are stoning their chests that the content is not "human produced". Like, what are you trying to get at? It's link aggregation, and in the end it doesn't matter if the content was craftingly handwritten by a human who then walked to the Lemmy offices to retype it on the server's keyboard - what matters is whether the entities who answer / comment on the post are humans or not. A reasonable fraction of content on Reddit is literally links to elsewhere and left there for people to comment on them - heck, it's the entire point of some subreddits such as the news ones. Even in the cases where some introductory text or inviting commentary is posted alongside the link, the thing to comment on still requires going elsewhere to check anyway.

tl;dr: paraphrasing from what that sergeant from Starship Troopers said, "You are my content provider until you stop or I find someone better".