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:
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This occurs when making web requests to any location on the Lemmy.ml webserver, not just ActivityPub endpoints.
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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:
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Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.
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Someone has posed a question on Lemmy.ml about the block here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1563840
I hate tankies myself as well, but I also hate that some communities are only created on lemmy.ml. Plus some official subreddits moved over there as well (and no - no far-left ones).
yeah I can't believe the Firefox community is on lemmy.ml
Hate tankies as much as you want, but at least they don't deny that USSR was the real communism.
Ask Lenin what it was and he'd say state capitalism. Because that's what he called it.
I don't know wtf "real communism" is, all I know is that the communism I advocate for is not that of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao
In short...
A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.
1 is "real communism." Everyone owns everything (to an extent. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is still private property in communist thought. No, nobody wants to collectivize your towels), everyone has a job, everyone has all needs met and exceeded. Healthcare, transportation, tacos, whatever you need is covered.
2 is what we've seen in the real world because dictators gonna dictate. A group of individuals will get to the "we're in charge and can really do a communism this time!" step and immediately go "but it's kinda cool being an asshole and living in a fuckin' palace, you know?" and BOOM, STALIN.
"Real communism" is something that has actually, literally, never been achieved because it devolves into a dictatorship.
Meanwhile, all captalism devolves into oligarchies but people are fine with that because... reasons?
Uh, they do, actually. The belief is that the USSR was attempting to build communism.
I reject this because they didn't implement any communist policies, even Lenin himself said what they were doing was state capitalism.
The tankie defense is that they were doing it to later establish communism, but nobody who knows what they're talking about actually believes the USSR achieved socialism.
They even refused to help Yugoslavia after they implemented an actually socialist policy (workplace democracy).
The situation with the USSR was rather clearly that an authoritarian dictatorship wanted to call themselves a utopia so they said they were communist.
I don't understand why people give the USSR the benefit of the doubt and assume they were actually trying to do something good.