why am I seeing 2 year old downvoted posts on all? And communist posts?

Lemmy's default sort is "Active" - which I believe is "most recent comment activity"

The classic reddit experience is most like the "Hot" sort option.

Lemmy's other weird default is the "feed" which can be all, local, and following. Lemmy defaults to "local", which is probably not what you want (chronological feed of posts on your home server)

Also highly recommend "blocking" communities if you don't want to see their content. (Mostly important if you browse the "All" or "local" feeds)

I’m on hot though
- I wasn't sure how to respond to this at the time.
  
  I'm coming back to report that I just saw this.
  
  I was scrolling All + Hot using Connect on Android and saw this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/57957
  
  Judging by the influx of new comments, I wasn't the only one.

Yes. The hackers removed many instances from the blocked list which may include the prominent authoritarian-left instance lemmygrad.ml (I can't remember if it was defederated before the hack.). If that was supposed to be defederated before the hack, then the admins still haven't realized so you should contact your admin about it.

"Authoritarian-left" hmmm....
- "Left" in quotes

Some people believe in different things from you.

That's not the point of OP's message.

Probably so. That and 196 is a very active community.

What even is 196, why's it so popular and how'd it get its name? I saw so much from it I think I blocked it just because it was drowning out everythink else.
- It’s a queer shitposting channel. I love it, but it’s not for everyone.
  
  It split off from 195 when they got invaded by homophobes and have been having a gay old time ever since.
- It spun off from the subreddit, which spun off from 195 due to cultural disagreements.
  
  195 came about as a fun little private subreddit between a few friends for their dormitory room. It blew up, things got ugly, and it was eventually shut down, with most people moving to 196 and its sibling subs.
  
  People wanted to replicate 196 on Lemmy, so here we are.
  
  It drowns a lot of things out since one of the rules of the community is that when you visit, you're meant to make at least one post. Since it doesn't have a small user base, that also means a lot of posts, and as it doesn't have a clear direction, besides a generic meme group, it gets anything and everything, which doesn't help matters.

What sort settings were you using when viewing All? I've noticed that when using the Hot sort setting, I occasionally get some random years old threads, usually from lemmy.ml.

I can't say for sure, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've just chalked it up to a glitch in the use of the two settings (all/hot) together. Given the description of how the sorting settings are meant to work from the lemmy docs, I think I may be close to right, but I'm not a dev or anything for it so...Yeah.

What attack? Sorry if I'm not updated.