OC Federation of a one-user lemmy instance with kbin.social

I just realized that it might not be a technical issue that I can't subscribe to any kbin.social magazines from my one-person lemmy instance but that I might not be on the whitelist.

Every time I try to subscribe to any magazine I get "Subscription Pending". First I thought it was some technical issue, cloudflare, server overloaded, etc. especially because I had similar issues with lemmy instances.

Today I updated to lemmy 0.18.0 and all the lemmy servers started letting me subscribe, but not /kbin but perhaps there is something incompatible. But I found threads about people subscribing to kbin from lemmy successfully. And then I was reading https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/93050/How-do-I-request-federation and then it dawned to me that I might just either not be on a whitelist or even worse on a black list.

How is it supposed to work?

Is this the reason why my single-user instance can't subscribe to any https://kbin.social magazine? I'm not even getting an error, just "Subscription Pending". That sounds kind of broken and different to how Mastodon is dealing with that issue.

Do I somewhere need to apply to be able to subscribe to any /kbin magazines? If so where do I do that? Is there a email I can sent my application to? Or is the idea that if you have a single user instance you create a new user on every instance to find some meta-magazine where you can ask to be able to subscribe to a magazine on that instance?

Or are small instances not part of the design?

I also see that my comments in threads of other instances which kbin federates with don't show up here either, which is understandable if my instance is banned.

zamuz,

@jeena if you deployed your instance using the Ansible method, you may be facing the same issue described here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106

The solution, which I applied to my instance and confirm it works, is described in one of the comments:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106#issuecomment-1606222766

I applied those changes (excluding the port changes) to the nginx_internal.conf template in the lemmy-ansible playbook, ran the playbook again and I can now subscribe to Kbin magazines from my Lemmy instance. There's still the weird quirk of having to click the Subscribe button a couple of times (or maybe clicking and refreshing the page) to make sure you're subscribed correctly.

jeena,
@jeena@jemmy.jeena.net avatar

Amazing! Thanks for the link, I had to fiddle around with the nginx_internal.conf because the first guy put a lot of different ports in and later another guy who created a patch put the map inte location instead of http but once I understood how map works I could fix it and now I can subscribe to /kbin instances, wohoo! Thanks again for you help!

zamuz,

Last week I subscribed successfully to a couple of Kbin magazines (/m/linux, /m/photography) from my personal Lemmy instance, and federation seems to be working correctly with new posts and comments showing up in my Lemmy instance as expected. Since then, though, any attempts to subscribe to other Kbin magazines have failed. I understand Kbin is under heavy load and @ernest is working overtime, maybe new subscriptions from remote instances are currently paused or disabled?

cygnus-velum,

I also noticed that posts to a magazine from my Lemmy account is only viewable from the Lemmy instance I posted from (lemmy.world). Or at least it seems that way since the only replies are those from the same instance and I can’t find it from my Kbin account.

I wonder if it’s related.

ryan,

Hi, you're not the only one with this issue. I've seen it floating around, and was able to find a very similar question on the kbin matrix earlier this month (which appears to have gone unsolved).

Do I somewhere need to apply to be able to subscribe to any /kbin magazines?

I haven't heard of this - I don't see any subscription options on my own kbin instance that would prevent federation. If these existed it would be per instance.

This link may give more insight - if you are specifically trying to subscribe to things on kbin.social , Ernest may have some cloudflare protections up right now? My latest understanding was that those were disabled as of about a week ago but maybe things have changed back?

I do also know that both kbin and Lemmy have undergone some larger dev changes recently and it's possible someone broke federation?

Or is the idea that if you have a single user instance you create a new user on every instance to find some meta-magazine where you can ask to be able to subscribe to a magazine on that instance?

I desperately hope not, that would kind of ruin the whole fediverse vibe we got going.

jeena,
jeena avatar

I saw that github issue back then and I also saw somewhere that the cloudflare has been removed and that lammy could federate now. But in practice it doesn't work for some reason.

That is why I've been thinking that they might have a white list and I'm not on it but the bigger instances are. But there is no way for me to see that.

ryan,

I can't edit and have my posts federate out, so I'll note that I was researching as I typed and forgot to self-edit by removing that top paragraph - indeed, the post by the Lemmy instance owner on the kbin matrix was likely to have been the result of the cloudflare protections.

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