Fediverse

287 readers

1 users here now

This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

founded 2 years ago

236

Lemmy.ml is blocking all requests from /kbin Instances (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

99 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I discovered yesterday evening that Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances. Specifically, a 403 'access denied' is returned when the user agent contains "kbinBot" anywhere in the string. This has been causing a cascade of failures with federation for many server owners, flooding the message queue with transport errors.

This doesn't appear to be a mistake; it has been done very deliberately, only on Lemmy.ml. Lemmy.world and other large instances do not exhibit the same behavior. It also isn't a side effect of the bug introduced in Lemmy 0.18. You can observe by sending the following in a terminal

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.world/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test                                
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "notKbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "placeholder-user-agent" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

Additional evidence of this not being a Lemmy 0.18 bug:

This occurs when making web requests to any location on the Lemmy.ml webserver, not just ActivityPub endpoints.
Go to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and pick an instance running 0.18.0. Perform the above commands, replacing the URL for Lemmy.ml with that particular instance's address.

If this continues, my instance may need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. This is especially problematic because Lemmy.ml continues to federate information outbound to other kbin instances while refusing to allow inbound communication from them.

Spoofing the user agent is less than ideal, and doesn't respect Lemmy.ml's potential wish to not be contacted by /kbin instances. I don't post this to create division between communities, but I do hope that I can draw awareness to what's going on here. Defederating /kbin instances entirely would even be better than arbitrarily denying access one-way. This said, we should all attempt to maintain a good-faith interpretation until otherwise indicated by the Lemmy developers. It's possibel that this is a firewall misconfiguration or some other webserver-related bug.

Relevant comment from me (#354 - [BUG] Critical errors/failed messages during messenger:consume)

Edits:

Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.
Someone has posed a question on Lemmy.ml about the block here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1563840

(page 2) 47 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Man, I just realized how much I love kbin. I was on Lemmy arguing with people against defederation and something just felt off about it. It was like that rabid leftist part of Reddit that refused to see outside of their bubble. Kbin has a really moderate atmosphere and I'm happy to be here. I feel like people are allowed to have proper discourse here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The two have roughly equal daily users, right? I have an account on both but kbin seems like it has generally less app development. Are there kbin apps I don't know about yet?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

@ArtemisApp

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I believe I saw a workaround for the /kbin "404 not found" error. You must first connect with the primary URL string, and then a subsequent call to the URL containing the specific magazine.

[–] 0x4E4F 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Edit: Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.

Try writing to the main Lemmy dev on GH, he's mostly active there. He's also the main admin of lemmy.ml.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Could it be a problem due to the newest Lemmy software upgrade?

For what I read it's a complete mess.

It denies access from non-en-us browsers, for example.

It wouldn't surprise me if it messed with federation too.

But, they're the devs. They did this mess. Why would they present a software upgrade that clearly had a lot of issues is beyond me...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is there any chance they're just blocking things with bot in the name? Just crappy keyword filtering?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Lemmy.ml admins have been silent about this issue for over a day now. The hypothesis that this is merely a technical glitch is rapidly losing plausibility. Something's up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

No, it's specifically "kbinbot", case insensitive. Even "botkbin" gets through just fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

While underhanded, it's better than weirdo shit like worming their way into kbin instances and pulling coups on the mods, which is what online reds used to do to various left-leaning political subreddits, FB pages, etc. Better to keep the tanks in the depot.

[–] Wolpertinger 1 points 2 years ago

This crap is why I've taken to just telling people to treat the various instances as if federation isn't a thing. This adds needless complexity at a time when general, non-tech savvy users are looking at alternatives.

It may overload servers, but the various lemmy/kbin instances are, for the most part, acting independently of each other anyway.

I wonder if it's better for a number of lemmy/kbin administrators get together and work towards providing a good user experience for incoming/new users, promote the instances that are working together on each other's sites, etc. If one instance is having load issues, it would be nice for sign-ups to be disabled and users redirected to another instance whose admins they're working with. Maybe this is already being discussed behind the scenes.

I feel like how common defederation is will hurt the entire project in time.

load more comments