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.
I’ve blocked almost all the Reddit reposter bots (BAPCsales is one exception). If we wanted to be friendlier to new users, ideally these sorts of feeds (game day, bot newswire, subreddit reposter) would be opt in to receive while hidden by default, but it sounds technically challenging to implement well.