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.
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.
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.
UPDATE: I was able to successfully post an article to kbin.social from my lemmy.ca account. It did take about an hour for the article to show up on kbin (when not viewed from my lemmy.ca account), but it did eventually show up.
The linked post dismisses the v0.18.0 upgrade as a possible cause, but appears to do so without evidence and it’s by far the most likely explanation.
Whether the fix has to happen on the Lemmy or the kbin side to restore compatibility is an open question, but I don’t see any evidence of anything beyond a normal upgrade that broke an untested cross-app interaction.
I think 0.18 is very coincidental as well. My posts hard cut off on kbin 3-4 days ago, which is roughly the time that 0.18 came out. The problem is that I’ve posted things on beehaw which don’t end up on kbin, and beehaw is still running 0.17.4.
As I was looking into this stuff I’ve noticed that edits don’t seem to be federating very well between my server and beehaw. I hope there’s a more deterministic way to make sure that every federated server has everything it should, instead of just getting “most of it” and calling it good. (I don’t know anything about activitypub so maybe this is already baked in and we’re just failing on implementation)