A post on kbinMeta states that “Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances.” More details here, but the theory is that – rather than defederating – lemmy.ml returns a 403 ‘access denied’ message in response to any inbound requests from a user agent with “kbinBot” in the string. Upvotes, comments, and boosts don’t seem to be going through. However, it appears that lemmy.ml still federates information outbound to kbin instances.

I’m wondering if anyone here knows what is going on and why it might be happening? Federation between Lemmy instances and Kbin instances seems to be a selling point for both, so I’m sure others using both services are curious as to what’s going on.

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
    1·
    1 year ago

    Looking at the thread there it looks like this is just affecting the lemmy.ml instance specifically, I was worried for a sec since I follow some kbin magazines myself.

    I wonder if lemmy.ml is using some kind of WAF that has started auto blocking the requests from kbin, thinking its a DoS attack/malicious bot? I can’t see a reason why the devs would intentionally do this…

  • taladar@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 year ago

    Well, in case someone has the same idea, I just checked and the string kbinBot does not appear anywhere in the lemmy git repo.

    I also must say the whole conspiracy nonsense in the comments over in that kbin link you posted really doesn’t look good for their user base. Most likely this is some sort of bug or compatibility problem.

    • clb92@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Well, in case someone has the same idea, I just checked and the string kbinBot does not appear anywhere in the lemmy git repo.

      Web developer here. This type of blocking based on user-agent would be easier done though the server configuration than in the Lemmy code anyway.

      Most likely this is some sort of bug or compatibility problem.

      Returning “403 Forbidden” makes it seem like it’s not a bug or compatibility problem. The lemmy.ml server only appears to return 403 when the user-agent contains the exact string “kbinbot” (not case sensitive). That makes it seem deliberate.

      I’m not saying it’s done with malicious intent, mind you. It could definitely be some kind of WAF or other automated blocking happening, maybe simply a misclick when blocking a flood of other bots, but that’s anyone’s guess until the admins respond.

    • IntlLawGnome@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m not particularly concerned with how “the kbin user base” looks or any silly tribalism like that tbh. I’m just wondering if/why the issue might be happening. If the string doesn’t appear in the git repo, that’s a useful data point for sure. But plenty of people are confirming that something is going on, so the questions as to 1) what is causing it and 2) why are still out there.

  • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure if this specifically applies, but there are federation issues happening across multiple instances.

    Many issues have to do with a mismatch in Lemmy BE versions. Lemmy.ml is on 0.18, others are on 0.17.4 waiting for Capcha support to come in 0.18.1. BE 0.18 replaced websockets with http, so it’s a substantial update. How this works with kbin specifically I do not know, but things are in flux.

    Additionally there is this issue:

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101

    Which according to the devs is related to this other issue that has been fixed and will also likely come in 0.18.1

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust/pull/52

    So, I do not believe this is international. If lemmy.ml didn’t want to federate with kbin they would just defederate. With kbin being its own distinct software that is different than Lemmy, these issues are likely due to the drastic change in the last Lemmy update. Things will have to be ironed out between kbin and Lemmy