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)
Funny thing - I experimented yesterday with posting from and to various instances and verified that the ONLY case that was problematic was from kbin to lemmy.ml, and posted about that from one of my lemmy accounts, then after thinking about it and poking around a bit more, I wrote a post from my kbin account to this very magazine arguing for defederating from lemmy.ml. I ended up deciding to not post it though, so I just copied it and saved it and was planning to wait a bit longer. So it was particularly fitting to see that someone else actually did broach the topic.
And if I’m honest, I think that defederating from them should still be on the table. I think there’s no question that this was deliberate and malicious (and driven by petty jealousy of a not only competing but arguably superior piece of software), and it indicates that they shouldn’t be trusted.
I would think that the most sensible approach would be to consider them on probation. If they can demonstrate that they actually can be trusted to act in good faith, fine. If, on the other hand, they pull another shady move like this one, defederation should be the immediate response.
Though Ernest likely wouldn’t agree…
I think that would be a terrible idea, respectfully.
Many reddit refugees made communities on .ml. I did. I didn’t know about all the tankie junk.
That would kneecap my small (but growing) community.
Perhaps a solution to all this would be a community migration tool or a "community’ instance that holds them.
A community migration tool would 100% make sense for both Kbin and Lemmy, especially if there were an option to link the old, read-only community to the new location, redirect users to the new location from the old. That would also facilitate consolidating communities who want to consolidate.
If I signed up to a mag on one instance, that doesn’t mean I want to sign up to it on a different instance.
Fair, so perhaps just a notification that goes out if an instance moves? Community with its settings and posts moves, but the users can be invited (or not, per their settings) to migrate too?