alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam
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/pocalyuko@alien.top
https://lemm.ee/u/ItzMeRocket@alien.top
https://lemm.ee/u/CaptainCapp-n@alien.top
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.
Ultimately that will always be the case. This is just one example, but there's a million ways things can end up mirrored from various services. There will be torrent instances and porn instances and whatnot. With the way the fediverse works, you have to protect yourself from spam and bad content. The problem is the inability to filter it out, which thankfully Lemmy 0.19 now has: you can now block whole instances as a user.
But also generally, don't use All. It will always have random crap you don't want, especially as some instances use a bot to subscribe to everything. My test community has 74 subscribers, 72 of which are those bots. This means my random test crap ends up on All of lemmy.world and there ain't much I can do about that other than marking it NSFW so it doesn't show up to guests. The All listing sounds appealing at first and maybe it made some sense on Reddit, but on Lemmy it kinda doesn't work. Especially when non-english communities will take off, a good chunk of All may end up being in a language you can't even read.
Honestly a better fix for this would be custom feeds, or a way for admins to curate the contents of All without having to pull out the nuclear weapons and defederate.
I can see why some people would actually want a readonly Reddit mirror. Like, maybe there's a community you used to follow but never write to but don't want to have to use the Reddit app for. I understand why that'd be a minority of users, but clearly there's enough demand for it that it's a thing and there's even plans for implementing two-way bridging. Or if anything, tinkering with such a thing is a very fediverse thing to do. We shouldn't blame the instance for existing but the lack of tools to manage their existence.
Can't people just select their languages in their profile? I did it when I started seeing a lot of posts in German, I don't see any anymore
Technically yes but support for that feature is so ignored in reality most posts are tagged as unspecified. The docs even specifically say to always enable unspecified along with your languages otherwise you'll miss on a lot of content.
But that's the technicality of the example I picked, make it a meme communities instead or whatever and the point stands: it will get spammy as people start following Mastodon accounts and bots and Wordpress blogs and whatever else integrates with the fediverse.
All it takes is a single user that follows one of those and it's on everyone's All page.
I'm part of a non-English speaking instance, we got reminded several times to tag our content appropriately. I think I reminded other non-English instances too.
Meme communities are usually block by people who don't like them. That's the same for every other content.
The All feed is useful to discover new content, especially with Scaled sort. If you have an alt on lemmy.ml you should try it, it's quite good to bring content from niche but active communities.
I use All pretty much exclusively and don’t have any problems like that. It moves faster some times of day but I’m not sure I’m seeing what you describe about “a bot that subscribes to everything” (actually have no idea what you mean by that). If there’s something I don’t wish to be seeing, I block the user or community.
Interesting. Thanks.
Or One App To See Them All. Two. Matrix client and mastodon client.