No, there is no way to block an instance in Lemmy yet.
Liftoff!
A mobile client for Lemmy running on iOS and Android
If it's a language thing, make sure you don't accidentally have that language selected in your account settings. You should have "undefined", plus whatever languages you actually speak. Note I don't think you can do this through Liftoff yet so you might need to use the mobile site.
Some stuff probably still gets incorrectly language tagged but I've only seen the occasional non-english post which is what makes me think maybe you've got a wrong setting somewhere if you're seeing a lot of them. Just a thought!
How do you actually change the language settings? I seem to just have a list of every language and the x doesn’t seem to remove them
Probably depends on how you're viewing it. If it's on the website, it's just a normal multi-select field so you can ctrl-click the ones you want. If you're on the mobile site, on my Android phone at least it shows as a series of checkboxes. If you're using iOS or some other app, no idea!
Ah I wasn't sure how to select English without deselecting undetermined, I didn't think to try ctrl+click, thanks!
Is anyone using language? I have English and undefined set. There is a warning that deselecting undefined will hide most content. Pretty sure almost everything is undefined.
Literally that comment you just wrote is tagged as English, think it's maybe a default setting on the community level.
Fair, but I'm seeing quite a bit of foreign (to me) language posts.
Interesting! I've seen barely any, and we're on the same instance, must be something to do with one of our settings or blocklists or something. Ah well!
There is not a way yet. What I do is just block each large community from the instance instead. Usually there are only a few communities from smaller instances that are active enough to be spammy.
if you don't want to filter them all manually you could check instances that blocks more other languages instances. For example, the instance I'm member of, feddit.de blocks a japanese instance because its impossible to moderate the content without knowing what the post means. https://lemmy.world/instances scroll to blocked vs https://feddit.de/instances scroll to blocked
Definitely get to grips with the languages options, but we are also looking at a simple solution to the wider problem: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues/371