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:
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This occurs when making web requests to any location on the Lemmy.ml webserver, not just ActivityPub endpoints.
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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:
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Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.
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Someone has posed a question on Lemmy.ml about the block here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1563840
Doesnt surprise me, the developers of lemmy (which are owners of .ml) have an agenda. They are into censoring on ukraine news, and other stuff. I dont get why people are choosing lemmy over kbin when they are equally bad looking
Wait why is kbin bad looking?
It looks better than reddit.
yeah, kbin is probably the nicest looking reddit alternative i've seen. Really sleek design without leaning into the overly overly mobile-focused watered down New Reddit bs, while also not nearly as hideous as old reddit.
I do wish kbin looked a bit better on mobile, though. I have larger font on my iPhone and instead of wrapping, the text just goes off the screen and can't be viewed.
IMHO Kbin actually looks better on my mobile than on desktop.
I have both set to the aqua/greenish theme and on mobile my upvotes/interactions show up bright yellow...but on desktop there's no difference. Even if I take off "follow desktop personalization theme". (firefox for both.)
I'm glad you think so. Please see the attached screenshot for an example of what I'm talking about. I'd like to have the text one size bigger so I can read it more easily, but then whole words are cut off or missing.
Its a huge downgrade from reddit in terms of visual quality. But im soeaking on mobile safari so i guess that will explain alot but anyways heres what i see.
The posts that have pictures dont really show that well until you click on it. You need to scroll down a whole thread to comment on a post. Creating a post/thread is confusing, its hard to navigate “magazines” (idk why theyd call it that), theres a lot of problems with it.
Lemmy looked pretty bad on mobile safari, far worse than kbin
Eh? What are you talking about? There's literally a bunch of Russia and Ukraine news at https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews. This rumor mill needs to stop. People started some bad rumors about Lemmy devs just because of their political association and now its blown up into full lies.
I use both Lemmy and Kbin, but I prefer Lemmy for a bunch of different reasons:
This guy acting like those in charge at Lemmy being pro-CCP and censoring dissenting opinions isn't a valid reason for not wanting to be involved with them. Fuck Lemmy. Fuck authoritarians.
I wouldn't really call it "rumors" when you can go directly to the horse's mouth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
My concern is with this line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda.
That post was made by the founder of Lemmy and the instance they mention at the end became Lemmygrad (because lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist").
With Lemmy.ml as the "main" instance, you're exposing all these posts to an admin team who has openly said "we are agitating for our views wherever the people go, and we have ultimate control over all content." They have already removed posts critical of China as being "orientalist" (which shows a severe lack of understanding of what "orientalism" even is - it's not "anything that criticizes our Dear Leader"). I can't trust that any community hosted on lemmy.ml is free of bias.
It isn't "rumors" when you can clearly go and back it up with a source.
(FWIW - I don't mind Lemmy as a platform. My Lemmy account is actually from 2020, before I realized what they truly were. The maintainers have done a good job of keeping politics out of the software, and the concept of only using "ethical" things is a myth when your computer has rare earth elements in it. As far as instances go, Lemmy.world seems fantastic and has grown to be far larger than the tankie instances. But Kbin is more fully-featured and has a lot more long-term potential, even though it's lacking in the short-term.)
I think liking an internet post and voting for the leadership of the government are not suitable for comparison here.
Sounds like youre spewing a lot of bullshit or intentionally misguiding. Read the thread below you and youll see.