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.

  • m-p{3}MA
    2·
    1 year ago

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

    • remoteloveOP
      1·
      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.