Recently, I’ve noticed federated threads/comments/votes were lagging behind, and it turns out kbin.earth was being spammed (hundreds in a minute, leading to a couple thousand queued messages after only half an hour) by a Lemmy server with the same exact activity pub message. After blocking the server (feddit.de), federation should now work correctly. If the admins of the server ever fix the issue, I’ll be glad to unblock it.

Edit: turns out, this was probably actually a kbin issue, but at least it’s fixed the issues temporarily.

  • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Hello @jwr1@kbin.earth,

    I just wanted to reach out to let you know that this may actually be a kbin issue, where your server has been spamming feddit.de and feddit.de has just been acknowledging/relaying your activities.

    Since several weeks ago already we have been seeing various issues with massive amounts of activities being sent by kbin instances, primarily kbin.social. Today we (Lemmy.World) have also discovered a kbin.earth user being affected by this and have issued a community ban in one of our communities to remediate the issue and prevent thousands of activities sent from kbin.earth from being relayed through Lemmy.World.

    We have so far been unable to establish any communication channel with @ernest@kbin.social, despite trying over multiple channels.

    If you wish to perform some research about this, the user account we’ve seen this happen with from kbin.earth is @Oofnik@kbin.earth, who we have banned from !world@lemmy.world for the time being.

    Feel free to reach out to me via matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world directly if you’re looking for more details.

    • Oofnik@kbin.earth
      2·
      6 months ago

      Hi,
      Did you really mean me? I certainly am a real person, if someone is using my account to spam Lemmy I would be happy to know, I can delete the account and make a new one. I just looked at my profile and I have only posted one comment that I see, on this very thread.

      • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        yes, really you.

        i believe this is a bug in kbin somewhere causing (almost) endless loops for the same activities (data sent between instances to communicate your actions like votes) over and over again.

        all the accounts i’ve looked at so far are (or at least look like) real users. we do not believe that this is a malicious action triggered intentionally by someone who has access to the account. you just happen to be one of the unlucky so far 37 users affected by this.

          • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            I don’t want to tell people not to interact with the platform, but it seems that it’s mostly votes triggering this issue currently.
            Not voting kinda defeats the point of the platform in the first place.
            I don’t think there’s really anything for you to do different, at least not until it’s known what exactly triggers this issue.

            We’re currently evaluating a solution on our end to ignore all votes coming in from kbin.social, which we may consider extending to other kbin instances if necessary. That should mitigate most of this hopefully.

              • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Hello,

                I just wanted to let you know that I have lifted your community ban for !world@lemmy.world now.

                I originally expected to be lifting the entire set of bans once the underlying kbin issue was addressed, but unfortunately that never happened. Since you were the only affected kbin user that wasn’t on kbin.social you were more affected by this than the rest, as kbin.social has been dead for a while now.

                I apologize that this wasn’t done sooner, especially considering that kbin.earth migrated to mbin a few months ago already.

                • Oofnik@kbin.earth
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  All good, I’m mostly a lurker anyway.

                  Thanks for following up though! Much appreciated.

    • jwr1@kbin.earthOPM
      1·
      6 months ago

      Hello, thanks for reaching out. I wondered if the federation issue we’ve had was actually just a kbin issue, but it’s a lot easier to see incoming messages than outgoing, and I just assumed it was feddit.de’s fault when I saw all the spam. Unfortunately, I’m guessing I won’t be able to do much to fix this since I’m not a kbin (or php) developer, and Ernest doesn’t seem to be actively developing anything (including bug fixes) for kbin right now. I’ll message you on Matrix for more details, just in case.