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.

  • sunaurus@lemm.ee
    5·
    1 year ago

    This is just pure speculation, but there was a recent DDOS against some Lemmy instances. Perhaps whoever was doing the DDOS was using “kbinbot” as their useragent, and this block was just a mitigation?

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
    5·
    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…

  • Yote.zip@pawb.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I don’t have a specific answer to what is happening but I’ll add that I have recently noticed that practically nothing that I post has been getting through to kbin. Posts that I’ve made onto beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, fmhy.ml, blahaj.zone, programming.dev, pawb.social, etc. etc. aren’t getting through to kbin, and none of them are defederating it.

    On my home instance I have 16 posts, 142 comments

    On kbin I have 8 posts, 67 comments

    It seems like something is fundamentally broken with the connection to kbin, not specifically lemmy.ml.

    • IntlLawGnome@lemmy.caOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Could be, for sure. I may try to post some things from Lemmy.ca to Kbin later. I was successful in posting from Kbin to Lemmy.ca a few hours ago, so I wonder if there’s a problem in the other direction.

  • Negative_Pair_5694@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    It is not a bug as it is blocking the specific user agent, it blocks all requests with that user agent even for things that cannot cause any incompatibility (like just querying user info from the command line). Also no other lemmy instance shows this ‘bug’, regardless of version. It is a very deliberate block either done manually or by an IDS.

    Would be nice if a server admin would chime in, but it is very silent on all channels.

  • 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