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.
Update 2024-11-25 12:29 UTC:
We have identified the underlying issue, where a backport for a bugfix resulting in crashes in certain circumstances was accidentally reverted when another backport was applied. We have applied this patch again and we’re receiving activities from lemmy.ml again. It may take an hour or so to catch up, but this time we should reliably be getting there again. We’re currently 4.77 days behind.
We still don’t have an explanation why the logs were missing in HAproxy after going through Cloudflare, but this shouldn’t cause any further federation issues.
Update 2024-11-25 14:31 UTC:
Federation has fully caught up again.
this comment section is not a place to rant about other instances
I don’t see why not.
Yeah a swept clean comment section looks way better…
I’ll just post a sentence instead of a rant then, defederate from .ml please :3
Ookie dookie
Weirdly I can’t see any of the comments on that post
Please defederate from them.
Block the instance on your own client, not all of us are as closed minded as you are.
Because they’re tankies, and I really don’t need to explain to you why that’s a bad thing. You already know.
No seriously. I see the term used in memes and I don’t know what it means.
Here’s a Wikipedia article that explains what a “Tankie” is.
TL;DR - It’s a slur to refer to authoritarian communists, originally used to speak out against people who supported using tanks to suppress dissidents.
Generally, anyone who supports aggression or violence to silence or oppress people are referred to as Tankies.
No, being a tankie isn’t only about supporting aggression / silencing people, it is specifically about romanticizing communism as some great philosophy that solves every problem and in extension sucking the D of Russia and China, while going “every other country bad” to the point of complete insanity.
Otherwise rightwing US are tankies.
A tankie is someone who sided with the authoritian government and their tanks against the one guy who stood in front of them in Tianenman Square.
They say they’re communists but defend an authoritarian oligarchy…
Authoritarians say they’re communist because they hate communism and don’t want people to think it’s a good idea. So they call everyone on the left a tankie.
It’s a stupid label and 99% of the people throwing it around don’t understand anything about it and are just lying about what communism is.
Oh wow! Haha ok thanks. From context clues it seemed like it could mean anyone.
I don’t kmow what tankie means
Don’t worry, neither does he.
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.
It’s been far better the past few days without them.
Honestly some of the discussions I have with lemmy.ml people don’t make sense in any capacity
I haven’t really had that experience with anyone from .ml yet. There are a handful of actual tankies there but for the most part, from want I have seen, it’s mostly various forms of far left opinion which no one should be afraid of.
Some people here do spend an unseemly amount of time complaining about them. Which is more toxic than anything they’re usually complaining about.
I had interactions like this person: https://lemmy.world/comment/13434977
A lot of them seem to be like the crazy Facebook crowd (not all).
But that being said, unfortunately, as Lemmy grows, I’m seeing more of that in general where we slowly move away from a “scientific” oriented approach, to half-truths and biased information.
So you’re probably right.
But yeah, people do complain a disproportionate amount about them (I feel like a lot of people screaming “tankie”, are similar to the trump crowd people)…
That whole argument was painful to read. By the end he was so frustrated he became very obnoxious. Not cool.
I didn’t get the sense of someone deliberately sowing misinformation however. Being misinformed isn’t a dealbreaker nor is a poor rhetorical style.
I think it is important to continue forward with users with a wide range of sources. None of us have a monopoly on the truth and all of our ‘trusted’ sources palter and decontextualise their facts to some degree.
I know it’s probably an unrealistic expectation but I’d rather mods, in general, had higher standards for curating civility in discussions.
“Echo chamber” is often used as a criticism on the internet. But in real life, when you make friends, it’s with like-minded people, right? So maybe it makes sense to seek online spaces with like-minded people, rather than spaces with people of various views attacking and insulting each other.
It’s a reasonable argument for giving you tools for tailoring your own feed but not for censoring entire groups out.
It makes sense.
Not everyone on .ml wants to eat your dog. Just as not everyone on .world is Trolleyman.
I’d say that the majority of people on the fediverse are capable of having a civil conversation on most topics. Some might have a handful issues that they dig their heels in over but can be civil if you comport yourself respectfully. And then there are a tiny minority of narcissistic zealot idiologues that try to maintain a narrow normative pressure on permissable opinions.
Remember folks.
This is how they infiltrate circles and twist them to right wing authoritarianism and extremism
They send in someone who uses a soft approach as their opening gambit, talking about how they are good people, and how they don’t deserve to be excluded, and its really unfair to judge them for what they and their associates do, and that if you were really as tolerant and as leftist as you said you were you’d accept them, and engage with them, and sup with them.
While handwaving any of the actual, legitimate, pointed criticisms as the actions of a “tiny minority of zealots”
Its death by a thousand cuts, and what Hamartia here is doing is trying to do the first tiny cut. To try to make you feel unreasonable, and possibly even bigoted, for taking a stand againts the poor, innocent nazis/tankies/etc.
You know why this hasnt been a significant problem until this past decade? Cause these people were punched in the mouth the second they started "Well, Ackshually~"ing in the defense of right wing fascist extremism. The second they started to fly their freak flags. Its why they have a whole underculture of co-opted symbology and secret coded language, because they were scared and had to hide, and needed a way to recognize eachother without risking a baseball bat to their jaw.
And the reason we stopped doing that, is because this soft handed approach of theirs worked. Its why they dropped the coded language. Its why their freak flags are flying high and proud now. Its why they are openly, gleefully saying their absolute horrid, unfiltered hated with gleeful abandon now. Because what Hamartia is doing, worked. It got their foot in the door, and as soon as it was there, they crushed in with the entire party and took over.
You can see where we are today, and its because we let their faux-reason, concern trolling, and paly acting exploit our tolerance.
And you see what its gotten us
And you see why its better to go back to the old classics of punching these motherfuckers in the mouth.
So don’t let this soft hand propaganda being done by Hamartia and others sway you. Don’t let it make you feel unreasonable, or uncivil. They are manipulating you to open the door for the ones behind them that arent capable of feigning and playacting “polite” discourse in attempt to make you feel like you’re the bad guy.
These people have no place in a polite and tolerate society. They are a cancer that seeks to destroy it, by exploiting our beliefs against ourselves. Its not paradoxical. Its not hypocritical. Its not whatever bullshit attempt they make next at trying to twist tolerance into a dagger for them to use to stab tolerance itself in the back and kill it to their extreme benefit, and to societies great loss.
This is all patent nonsense.
True. People out here fighting leftists like their life depends on it
“leftists”
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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.
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.
!linux@programming.dev is a nice alternative
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I’m out of the loop. is there some post or link you can send me about . ml being malicious
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.
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.
Oh… I’ve tried to talk about fire retardants there once, just to have half of my words censored and my post becoming unreadable.
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.
largest Linux community
oh no, where will we get posts about windows being bad
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 !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone in these trying times. In case it’s a while before the issue is fixed.
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.
Yikes! Thank you for writing this out, I had no idea. Fk those .ml tankies
Wow that’s crazy, thank you and the other person for informing me
Russians
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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’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
Would need to be one that restricts participation of the other party, Lemmy blocks are useless in that regard. Otherwise you’re not doing anything to deal with network effect just pretending those spaces don’t exist. Something only useful for snowflakes with weak emotions, and not people who want to make a difference.
In order for that to work there needs to be effort taken to curb persistent network effect like the utterly monolithic communities on lemmy.ml. When there isn’t any, they just get bigger and stronger. That isn’t something you can do by starting new instances, it has to be done by ones with a big slice of the pie, something new instances never have unless started just after the collapse of an existing one.
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.
I wouldn’t.
I can think of a solution.
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 🤣
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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!
Oh, come on. Again?
The Usual suspects, Network troubleshooting editon
FUCK active directory
Ok, but who are you marrying and killing?
Active directory for both, against my will. It’s all three
Kill Firewall and marry WiFi (it’s an open relationship)
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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.
