kbin.earth federation problems fixed

Recently, I've noticed federated threads/comments/votes were lagging behind, and it turns out kbin.earth was being spammed (hundreds in a minute, leading to a couple thousand queued messages after only half an hour) by a Lemmy server with the same exact activity pub message. After blocking the server (feddit.de), federation should now work correctly. If the admins of the server ever fix the issue, I'll be glad to unblock it.

Edit: turns out, this was probably actually a kbin issue, but at least it's fixed the issues temporarily.

/kbin logotype
MrKaplan,
@MrKaplan@lemmy.world avatar

Hello @jwr1,

I just wanted to reach out to let you know that this may actually be a kbin issue, where your server has been spamming feddit.de and feddit.de has just been acknowledging/relaying your activities.

Since several weeks ago already we have been seeing various issues with massive amounts of activities being sent by kbin instances, primarily kbin.social. Today we (Lemmy.World) have also discovered a kbin.earth user being affected by this and have issued a community ban in one of our communities to remediate the issue and prevent thousands of activities sent from kbin.earth from being relayed through Lemmy.World.

We have so far been unable to establish any communication channel with @ernest, despite trying over multiple channels.

If you wish to perform some research about this, the user account we’ve seen this happen with from kbin.earth is @Oofnik, who we have banned from !world for the time being.

Feel free to reach out to me via matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world directly if you’re looking for more details.

TheVillageGuy,

@ernest please put more people on this if you can

roguetrick,

I actually made a post on kbin meta about it, but hey, thanks for not site banning me.

Oofnik,

Hi,
Did you really mean me? I certainly am a real person, if someone is using my account to spam Lemmy I would be happy to know, I can delete the account and make a new one. I just looked at my profile and I have only posted one comment that I see, on this very thread.

MrKaplan,
@MrKaplan@lemmy.world avatar

yes, really you.

i believe this is a bug in kbin somewhere causing (almost) endless loops for the same activities (data sent between instances to communicate your actions like votes) over and over again.

all the accounts i’ve looked at so far are (or at least look like) real users. we do not believe that this is a malicious action triggered intentionally by someone who has access to the account. you just happen to be one of the unlucky so far 37 users affected by this.

Oofnik,

Ok thank you,
Is there anything I can do, or this is just a back end issue?

MrKaplan,
@MrKaplan@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t want to tell people not to interact with the platform, but it seems that it’s mostly votes triggering this issue currently.
Not voting kinda defeats the point of the platform in the first place.
I don’t think there’s really anything for you to do different, at least not until it’s known what exactly triggers this issue.

We’re currently evaluating a solution on our end to ignore all votes coming in from kbin.social, which we may consider extending to other kbin instances if necessary. That should mitigate most of this hopefully.

Oofnik,

Ok, thanks, and good luck sorting it all out 🤞

jwr1,
@jwr1@kbin.earth avatar

Hello, thanks for reaching out. I wondered if the federation issue we've had was actually just a kbin issue, but it's a lot easier to see incoming messages than outgoing, and I just assumed it was feddit.de's fault when I saw all the spam. Unfortunately, I'm guessing I won't be able to do much to fix this since I'm not a kbin (or php) developer, and Ernest doesn't seem to be actively developing anything (including bug fixes) for kbin right now. I'll message you on Matrix for more details, just in case.

Oofnik,

Hero!

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