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://alien.top/post/263029

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.

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[–] uis 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Client-side filtering? Easy. Client-side sorting? Not easy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why?

[–] uis 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why hard? Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy's existance on every discovered lemmy instances, which depending on algo you are using, might include comments metadata. To aid client-side sorting you would need server-side filtering, which will limit data avaliable to sorting algo. For example client-side trending algo would not show old trending post because it was filtered out.

So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Client needs to fetch all metadata needed for sorting for every post created during entire lemmy’s existance on every discovered lemmy instances.

Why would you need all data to build the frontpage? Why not just make a sliding window with the content from the last 24/48h?

So client-side sorting is basically running stripped version of instance without file hosting.

Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?

[–] uis 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Why would you need all data to build the frontpage? Why not just make a sliding window with the content from the last 24/48h?

Exactly what I'm saying. To not be super resource-intensive, client-side sorting needs to be incomplete. As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.

Even if that were true, how is that different, e.g, from any modern desktop email client?

Not much I guess(sounds like Thunderbird). But what about mobile?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.

Not necessarily true. You can build an index and keep a cache of the N posts by each sorting method. Your data store will grow linearly with the number of sorting criteria you will have, which should be small.

But what about mobile?

We are talking about an amount of data that a sqlite database process in a breeze. My K-9 email client can handle all my 20 years of gmail...