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

  • Eisenhowever@kbin.social
    28·
    1 year ago

    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

        • slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social
          16·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • mochi@kbin.social
            5·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • artisanrox@kbin.social
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.)

              • mochi@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                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.

      • Eisenhowever@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

    • UrbenLegend@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      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:

      1. Interface is cleaner and more performant.
      2. Getting to your list of subscribed magazines in kbin is a pain in the ass. Why is it buried in Settings?
      3. Kbin votes are public. This is just bad for privacy. It’s one thing to say that votes are public due to federation, and whole other thing to blatantly show it in the UI. There’s a reason why voting at a government level is kept secret, just sayin’.
      4. Also why the hell are they called magazines? None of the names in kbin map to existing conventions. “Threads” are posts. “Magazines” are communities or groups. I never get used to it because it isn’t natural to call these things the way kbin calls them.
        • Onii-Chan@kbin.social
          13·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
        19·
        1 year ago

        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/

        Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

        Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

        So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

        Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

        Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

        I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

        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.)

      • Bodleum@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        I think liking an internet post and voting for the leadership of the government are not suitable for comparison here.

      • Eisenhowever@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Sounds like youre spewing a lot of bullshit or intentionally misguiding. Read the thread below you and youll see.