Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word “bot”. Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin’s reported agent of “kbinBot”.
The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.
Edit:
Here are all the links that I’ve found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)
Yeah, your original comment came up when I did my research immediately prior to leaving a note on a niche lemmy.ml community that I subscribe to. …Which immediately federated over to the original instance, because I missed this developer comment and the other admin didn’t reply to the thread you were quoted in until several hours later. Based on the timing of the older comment I don’t think it has anything to do with your post, but you can pretend you didn’t see this. ;)
In any event, it’s dealt with. I think it reinforces the need for proper backchannels between the highest population ActivityPub instances, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the politics is acting as a barrier to this since both lemmy.ml and kbin.social are directly run by their respective software developers.
I’ve seen a few offhanded references to how kbin originated as an alternative to lemmy without the tankie implications, but I haven’t found any links to posts from ernest himself that support this. By actions alone I would say that he strongly favors interoperability over politics, but who’s to say what thoughts the developers have for each other. :)
Yeah, I figured I wasn’t exactly gonna try to claim credit for it. I already have enough egg on my face without begging for more. Talk about perfection in timing, though. When I wrote that, I went back and forth between instances just to make sure. All relevant communities almost or totally empty. No other kbin comment in that thread crossing over. But mine…mine was the lucky one. Of course. Now I just look really mean for no reason.
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see some fallout of inter-platform politics either. Though I’ve seen fairly little of the lemmy devs, what I have seen has tended towards being political and heavy-handed and while that’s their right, it’s also the reason such a bug on their side appeared fairly likely to be intentional. I would be depressed to see creators here still kneecapping each other like the companies do, but I wouldn’t necessarily be shocked.
I’ve gotten the sense from Ernest’s general behavior that he’d most likely opt for the good of the community and keep whatever personal problems he holds under wraps until forced. He’s been shockingly sweet and humble, and goes out of his way to be transparent even over screw-ups he could just as easily keep quiet about.
This is a guy who had to be badgered to set up donations he clearly didn’t expect to actually receive. He’s squishy. I don’t see him setting out to dethrone Lemmy specifically unless one or the other falls under an evil witch’s curse and there are no remaining options. None of us really lose out by having competitors here and trying to murder lemmy would be far more trouble without much gain.
After pausing for a minute to dig up a half-remembered comment of his, it seems like there’s truth to both: he respects them as developers, sees continued federation and input as healthy, and is polite enough to make only a very small nod to the differences that led to kbin. Maybe they won’t be going out for beers with one another, but hopefully, they can keep each other more apprised if they’re to work together at all effectively.
PS. This is apropos of nothing, but I’ve seen you around and never stopped to tell you. You have just the coolest username and I love it.