We’re aware of ongoing federation issues for activities being sent to us by lemmy.ml.
We’re currently working on the issue, but we don’t have an ETA right now.
Cloudflare is reporting 520 - Origin Error when lemmy.ml is trying to send us activities, but the requests don’t seem to properly arrive on our proxy server. This is working fine for federation with all other instances so far, but we have seen a few more requests not related to activity sending that seem to occasionally report the same error.
Right now we’re about 1.25 days behind lemmy.ml.
You can still manually resolve posts in lemmy.ml communities or comments by lemmy.ml users in our communities to make them show up here without waiting for federation, but this obviously is not something that will replace regular federation.
We’ll update this post when there is any new information available.
Update 2024-11-19 17:19 UTC:
Federation is resumed and we’re down to less than 5 hours lag, the remainder should be caught up soon.
The root cause is still not identified unfortunately.
Update 2024-11-23 00:24 UTC:
We’ve explored several different approaches to identify and/or mitigate the issue, which included replacing our primary load balancer with a new VM, updating HAproxy from the latest version packaged in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to the latest upstream version, finding and removing a configuration option that may have prevented logging of certain errors, but we still haven’t really made any progress other than ruling out various potential issues.
We’re currently waiting for lemmy.ml admins to be available to reset federation failures at a time when we can start capturing some traffic to get more insights on the traffic that is hitting our load balancer, as the problem seems to be either between Cloudflare and our load balancer, or within the load balancer itself. Due to real life time constraints, we weren’t able to find a suitable time this evening, we expect to be able to continue with this tomorrow during the day.
As of this update we’re about 2.37 days behind lemmy.ml.
We are still not aware of similar issues on other instances.
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Oh, come on. Again?
The Usual suspects, Network troubleshooting editon
FUCK active directory
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I mean…if you wanted to defederare from lemmy.ml I’d be fine with that.
It’s certainly an efficient way to resolve the problem.
There’s too much content on lemmy.ml to defederate. We’d lose like a quarter of all the content.
We would adapt, just like when Beehaw was a significant amount of the userbase on Lemmy and they cut us and sh.itjust.works off, we adapted and they got smaller. Lemmy.world is a bigger server than lemmy.ml. Only reason their communities are still so big is network effect. Which would be curbed by them being cut off. As I’ve said already, network effect is curbed by force, taking away a choice, not providing 7 more choices while leaving the original.
We’d lose the .ml version of that content.
But I thought the whole point of federation was that if mods, or communities become problematic, you could always create your own. Then all the non-problematic people will move to that.
Is that not the very foundation of the concept of the fediverse?
It’s not wrong, but I don’t regard Lemmy.ml as being problematic enough to defederate from. Their moderation practices are questionable and their user base is annoying but it’s otherwise generally tolerable. People can block the instance if they don’t want to see content from it.
It would be nice to have a simple way to block the user base too
I wouldn’t.
this comment section is not a place to rant about other instances
The hypocracy of people exaggerating the scale of the problems and piling-on about other instances in their manic drive to turn this place into an echo chamber is depressing.
I don’t see why not.
Yeah a swept clean comment section looks way better…
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Unfortunately not entirely true. They have the largest Linux Community. To be precise, the big one.
ProgrammerHumor is there as well. The Open Source and Privacy communties are very bigs as well there. Completely dwaring their .world counterpart.
I’m not a fan of .ml either but you can’t deny that they have this 3 parts (which very much represent the ideals behind lemmy) covered very well.
[email protected] is a nice alternative
I think things like this can be helpful at curbing network effect. Which can only be really curbed by force. Beehaw used to have quite strong network effect in some communities too in the earlier days, but now, they have much less of a vice, and are actually much quieter than they were before.
Might be a good idea to check out [email protected] in these trying times. In case it’s a while before the issue is fixed.
The fact of a community being big doesn’t mean that it is good.
They get smaller when less people federate with that clown-shoe of an instance. The idea that the community inertia in those three communities is forcing other instances to remain federated despite wide-spread dislike and disdain for .ml users is absurd. Burn the bridge. The more it gets defederated, the bigger similar communities on less toxic instances can and will grow.
Could you imagine using that logic in any other context? “I hang out with a community of KKK members because three of their members know a lot about Linux and have a lot of Linux-involved friends.” Give me a break.
It happened that way with Beehaw. Beehaw used to be in the same position as lemmy.ml with some of their communities. But they decided to knee jerk defederate us and sh.itjust.works because we’re big. They stopped being the de-facto communities not just for us here but almost anywhere else. Defederation does curb this kind of network effect, and quickly too, especially when it causes the less active ones to inflate like crazy.
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I’m out of the loop. is there some post or link you can send me about . ml being malicious
I don’t have a link because it’s been a while, but others and I have been piled-on by .ml and Hexbear users. In my case, 40+ people replied with nasty comments to a single comment I had made. And then I got straight-up banned from .ml because they misinterpreted what I was saying about communism. A mod cited whatever ambiguous and unrelated bullshit sidebar rule and I got the hammer anyway calling me a troll. But all the nasty circle-jerk comments stayed up. So fuck’em.
My experiences mirror this, tho not to that degree. It’s similar to Mos Eisley over there.
It’s a constant problem on the fediverse, if you search for things like lemmy.ml and CCP, propaganda, censoring etc it’ll get you started.
Hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are even worse.
Oh… I’ve tried to talk about fire retardants there once, just to have half of my words censored and my post becoming unreadable.
thanks. that’s pretty clear cut
Yeah. If anything the situation has become worse since that time. I was banned from the entire instance for a frank if somewhat critical discussion of Chinese history, even as I was trying to avoid contemporary politics because I knew that would get me in trouble.
Anything other than fawning praise of the Chinese government is labeled racism and results in a ban.
I was banned for saying ukraine has a right to defend itself, on the grounds of that being “pro war”.
I would take that ban.
I can think of a solution.
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Ah, I just today in the morning blocked Lemmy.ml. Seems to have been interesting timing :)
So it’s your fault!
In which case, thank you.
No one said it was a global variable. You can hardly blame the user for poor documentation.
I’ve never had a positive interaction with Lemmy.ml. For me it serves as a quarantine space, and a set of pre-tagged users I don’t personally enjoy dealing with.
…and I’m not particularly averse to Marxists sentiments either, but they’re certainly not good sales people, diplomats, or representative of their cause.
Which is just part of their reputation now. Having a bad experience with a .ml user seems to be part of the lemmy experience. It’s kind of comical how consistent it seems.
That said, I’m sure there’s good people on .ml.
Yeah, just avoid politics there and it’s fine. We all know about their zeal so it’s pointless to discuss it.
Is there a reason people seem to not like .ml? I only joined because it said the instance was for FOSS enthusiasts
Yes. Because it isn’t for FOSS enthusiasts… They use the .ml specifically to refer to an oppressive, violent, ignorant political ideology. Every bit as bad as capitalism. That’s a threat to anyone that disagrees with them left or right.
A lot of older established communities are there by the circumstance of it being the oldest server. And not by any other virtue. In fact, there are a number like the KDE project that have their own instance. Completely detached from political ideology. Which is a wise decision. A lot of official projects don’t want to be associated with the regular hypocritical and disparaging remarks of the admin staff there
I’ve been a foss enthusiast since the late 80s early 90s when I was in college. Used Linux since 94. Dabbled in BSD a bit before. Am solidly towards the anarchist left. And I block ML on principle alone. Authoritarians aren’t allies. And access to open source communities shouldn’t hinge on not accidentally crossing the fragile and hypocritical political ideologies of such groups. No place or group is perfect. But few are so flawed out of the gate.
Could it be an issue/compatibility with lemmy.ml running Lemmy v0.19.7 ?
I don’t believe it is.
There weren’t any network related changes from 0.19.6 to 0.19.7 and we haven’t seen this behavior with any of the 0.19.6 instances yet.
The requests are visible with details (domain, path, headers) in Cloudflare, but they’re not showing on our proxy server logs at all.
I’ve read enough posts over at /r/sysadmin, it is always DNS.
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Lol, flagged as inappropriate 🤣
FWIW the communities on walledgarden.xyz have been having federation issues to lemmy.ml for a few days as well.
Since we were/are working through some things with our host I didn’t want to bother anyone from lemmy.ml about it, but it’s a thing. AFAIK federation is otherwise working normally.
Good luck getting it figured out and resolved!
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Do these things usually happen from time to time?
I’ve noticed some lemmy.ml communities looking surprisingly “dead” some days here and there but not thought much of it.
I wouldn’t say usually, but they can happen from time to time for a variety of reasons.
It can be caused by overly aggressive WAF (web application firewall) configurations, proxy server misconfigurations, bugs in Lemmy and probably some more.
Proxy server misconfiguration is a common one we’ve seen other instances have issues with from time to time, especially when it works between Lemmy instances but e.g. Mastodon -> Lemmy not working properly, as the proxy configuration would only be specifically matching Lemmys behavior rather than spec-compliant requests.
Overly aggressive WAF configurations tend to usually being a result of instances being attacked/overloaded either by DDoS or aggressive AI service crawlers.
Usually, when there are no configuration changes on either side, issues like this don’t just show up randomly.
In this case, while there was a change on the lemmy.ml side and we don’t believe a change on our side fell into the time this started happening (we don’t have the exact date for when the underlying issue started happening), while the behavior on the sending side might have changed with the Lemmy update, and other instances might just randomly not be affected. We currently believe that this is likely just exposing an issue on our end that already existed prior to changes on lemmy.ml, except the specific logic was previously not used.
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