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

 undefined

    
> 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

  

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

 undefined

    
> 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

  

Hi all,

I'm a developer that has an interest in online communities, fediverse software and, at a point in the very recent past, consuming and creating a lot of Reddit content. Discontented with regards to the direction Reddit has taken, I've taken it upon myself to start a small, general-purpose instance to give back to the /kbin community and help reduce load. The instance is hosted on a secure, well-equipped dedicated server and should support a large influx of users and communities. I will be regularly administrating it (and may even seek fellow admins); but ideally, administration will be hands-off and moderators will take onus for their magazines.

Come check us out at kbin.cafe. I'll be happy to answer any lingering questions in this thread.

Please be sure to report any issues by messaging me or emailing us at the address found in the linked post. Currently some avatars for some federated magazines are missing, but this will be resolved soon.

Thanks f