When visiting this community from a stock Lemmy front end, there is down-voted spam and garbage near the top of the timeline. This happens regardless of the view selection (hot, active, scaled, etc). Certainly if the user asks for the “hot” view they should not be seeing negative scored threads near the top. And ironically, using the “controversial” view pushes the negative threads further down, which is the complete opposite of what’s expected.
Mbin fails to show the spam at all, even when selecting the “Newest” view, which we expect to show everything in chronological order regardless of score. So mbin is broken too.
The 3rd-party Lemmy client alexandrite behaves more like mbin, and does not show the spam even if a chronological order is requested.
My guess for what you’re seeing:
- The community did not have much content to begin with, and so the spam is currently overwhelming all the feeds. Info on the sorting algorithms is here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
- Controversial likely selects for content that has both up and down votes, so the heavily downvoted spam doesn’t count as “controversial”. I don’t see controversial sort listed in the docs right now, maybe I’m looking in the wrong place
- The Mbin instance you are using likely isn’t federating the content over, which can happen if no one from that instance is subscribed to it.
Not sure what’s happening with Alexandrite though. That might be a bug
Best you can do is report it and wait for mods/admins to see it