Lemmy.ml is blocking all requests from /kbin Instances - /kbin meta - kbin.social
kbin.social
I discovered yesterday evening that Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances. Specifically, a 403 'access denied' is returned when the user agent contains "kbinBot" anywhere in the string. This has been causing a cascade of failures with federation for many server owners, flooding the message...

I discovered yesterday evening that Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances. Specifically, a 403 ‘access denied’ is returned when the user agent contains “kbinBot” anywhere in the string. This has been causing a cascade of failures with federation for many server owners, flooding the message queue with transport errors.

This doesn’t appear to be a mistake; it has been done very deliberately, only on Lemmy.ml. Lemmy.world and other large instances do not exhibit the same behavior. It also isn’t a side effect of the bug introduced in Lemmy 0.18. You can observe by sending the following in a terminal

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.world/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test                                
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "notKbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "placeholder-user-agent" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

Additional evidence of this not being a Lemmy 0.18 bug:

  • This occurs when making web requests to any location on the Lemmy.ml webserver, not just ActivityPub endpoints.

  • Go to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and pick an instance running 0.18.0. Perform the above commands, replacing the URL for Lemmy.ml with that particular instance’s address.

If this continues, my instance may need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. This is especially problematic because Lemmy.ml continues to federate information outbound to other kbin instances while refusing to allow inbound communication from them.

Spoofing the user agent is less than ideal, and doesn’t respect Lemmy.ml’s potential wish to not be contacted by /kbin instances. I don’t post this to create division between communities, but I do hope that I can draw awareness to what’s going on here. Defederating /kbin instances entirely would even be better than arbitrarily denying access one-way. This said, we should all attempt to maintain a good-faith interpretation until otherwise indicated by the Lemmy developers. It’s possibel that this is a firewall misconfiguration or some other webserver-related bug.

Relevant comment from me (#354 - [BUG] Critical errors/failed messages during messenger:consume)

Edits:

  • Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.

  • Someone has posed a question on Lemmy.ml about the block here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1563840

  • Machinist3359@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    The distinction between a square and a rectangle is important, even if you don’t like right angles and parallel sides. Fascism is a flavor of authoritarianism which is uniquely worse and focused on genocide.

    • Colombo@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      Fascism is not focused on Genocide. Even for Nazism, Genocide is only a (welcomed) byproduct.

        • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          So do communist governments (e.g. Holodomor, Uyghurs in China). So do capitalist governments (e.g. Native Americans, Irish). Genocide is not unique to fascism, unfortunately.

          • Machinist3359@kbin.social
            3·
            1 year ago

            Not unique, but uniquely central. Fascism cannot exist without a persecuted outgroup. In other contexts, genocide is generally a state consolidating power or resources, but not the focus of these state projects.

      • Machinist3359@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        There is no fascism without genocide. It’s an idealogical ponzi scheme which promises to an ingroup if they destroy outgroup(s).

        Other forms of authoritarianism simply demand obedience, and optionally or incidentally incorporate genocidal policy to that end. But genocide is to fascism as driving is to a car, the reason for all off is components. Not a byproduct to some imagined other purpose

          • shutuuplegs@reddthat.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            fascism făsh′ĭz″əm noun A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

            There is your proof. It’s in the definition of the term with suppression and racism.

            If you don’t want to do your own research and information gathering that’s fine, but I suggest doing so in the future. Knowing exact terms and their meanings in a political conversation is incredibly important.

            • Colombo@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              suppression of the opposition != genocide, same with racism.

              If you don’t want to do your own research and information gathering that’s fine, but I suggest doing so in the future. Knowing exact terms and their meanings in a political conversation is incredibly important.

              Not only you provide a definition, that doesn’t prove anything, but you are also smugly passively aggressive. This is not the way discussion should be led.

              If you don’t want to discuss, do not get into conversations that do not relate you in any way.

    • Klear@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      The distinction between a square and a rectangle is important

      Square is a rectangle though…