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Lemmy.ml is blocking all requests from /kbin Instances (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by barista@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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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

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[–] Cloudless@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This will save me time. I am trying to block all communities hosted by the tankies instance.

[–] curiosityLynx@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can block the instance itself, you know. No need to hunt for the communities.

[–] assbutt@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

...are you going to tell us how? I'd love to block some instances, but I don't know how. Tell me how and I will.

"You can block instances" isn't fucking helpful if you don't explain the process.

Edit:

Go to the relevant domain's front page (e.g https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social for kbin.social).
The URL scheme is "https://kbin.social/d/DOMAINHERE" assuming you are currently on kbin.social.
On the right in the sidebar you can see "Domain" and below that options to subscribe or to block.
Really it's the same thing as magazines, just that you generally don't visit the domain itself.

https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/104312/Lemmy-ml-is-blocking-all-requests-from-kbin-Instances#entry-comment-422809

[–] tal@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I don't believe that there is currently a link to the /d/DOMAIN page -- that it needs to be manually-entered. That makes the functionality hard to find, and probably should have a PR to add a link somewhere in the UI.

[–] curiosityLynx@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I'm sorry I wasn't all that helpful. IIRC you need to find a post by someone on that community (or in that community?). Anyway, the name of the instance will be displayed on the card of that post and is clickable, which will bring you to the kbin page about the instance, where you can block it.