A post on kbinMeta states that “Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances.” More details here, but the theory is that – rather than defederating – lemmy.ml returns a 403 ‘access denied’ message in response to any inbound requests from a user agent with “kbinBot” in the string. Upvotes, comments, and boosts don’t seem to be going through. However, it appears that lemmy.ml still federates information outbound to kbin instances.

I’m wondering if anyone here knows what is going on and why it might be happening? Federation between Lemmy instances and Kbin instances seems to be a selling point for both, so I’m sure others using both services are curious as to what’s going on.

  •  Yote.zip   ( @yote_zip@pawb.social ) 
    6•1 year ago

    I don’t have a specific answer to what is happening but I’ll add that I have recently noticed that practically nothing that I post has been getting through to kbin. Posts that I’ve made onto beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, fmhy.ml, blahaj.zone, programming.dev, pawb.social, etc. etc. aren’t getting through to kbin, and none of them are defederating it.

    On my home instance I have 16 posts, 142 comments On kbin I have 8 posts, 67 comments

    It seems like something is fundamentally broken with the connection to kbin, not specifically lemmy.ml.

  •  sunaurus   ( @sunaurus@lemm.ee ) 
    6•1 year ago

    This is just pure speculation, but there was a recent DDOS against some Lemmy instances. Perhaps whoever was doing the DDOS was using “kbinbot” as their useragent, and this block was just a mitigation?

  •  Negative_Pair_5694   ( @Negative_Pair_5694@beehaw.org ) 
    2•1 year ago

    It is not a bug as it is blocking the specific user agent, it blocks all requests with that user agent even for things that cannot cause any incompatibility (like just querying user info from the command line). Also no other lemmy instance shows this ‘bug’, regardless of version. It is a very deliberate block either done manually or by an IDS.

    Would be nice if a server admin would chime in, but it is very silent on all channels.

  •  𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏   ( @lemann@lemmy.one ) 
    1•1 year ago

    Looking at the thread there it looks like this is just affecting the lemmy.ml instance specifically, I was worried for a sec since I follow some kbin magazines myself.

    I wonder if lemmy.ml is using some kind of WAF that has started auto blocking the requests from kbin, thinking its a DoS attack/malicious bot? I can’t see a reason why the devs would intentionally do this…