Has kbin defederated or is federation bugging? - Lemmy
lemmy.ml
I’m asking since I can’t seem to access some kbin communities on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] but they are available from other instances. I tested this a few days ago so things might have changed. I also have the same question for fedia.io [http://fedia.io]. I can see it from other instances but not lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml]. Are there issues? I’m asking since there was no response to previous posts.

Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word “bot”. Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin’s reported agent of “kbinBot”.

The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.

Edit:

Here are all the links that I’ve found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:

  • Deceptichum@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Umm what?

    I remember people doing tests and other variations of words featuring “bot” went through no problem, even changing the spelling of KBin was enough to get in.

    I’m gonna have to call BS on their excuse.

    • blightbow@kbin.socialOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      That assumes they were using an expression based filter in the webserver config itself. If they were extracting user agent strings containing the word “bot” from their webserver logs and adding them to a static list of user agents to deny (particularly if it’s an external file referenced by the config that strings can be easily dumped into), it’s a plausible explanation. I can especially see this happening if they did a blind sort by log volume and only inserted the 20 biggest results or somesuch.

      Even if this was the case, was someone in a position to observe that one of those strings contained “kbin”? Yes. Was it possible they still didn’t notice? Yes, especially if shell pipelines are involved. Was it possible for someone to notice but assume that this wasn’t the kbin software itself, but a third-party tool that someone else wrote? Also yes. Still possible that all of this is bullshit? Still yes!

      Full disclosure: I’ve worked in the webserver and webapp adjacent spaces for a long time, and I have a lot of appreciation for how much damage one person’s stupid change without peer review can do in massive production environments. :) I am admittedly biased toward applying Hanlon’s razor in these situations.

  • gentleman@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    @blightbow Thanks. I appreciate the work that the admins here do. Kbin-social is a nice landing pad for this reddit refugee. That said, I don’t have an interest in posting to lemmy.ml because they seem to be a bunch of tankies, which is being generous. The question in my mind is why kbin-social hasn’t returned the favor and banned them as well as their gulag archipelago instance?