Well that explains why a couple threads I posted weren't gaining any traction. I hope the issue gets figured out soon, otherwise I'll have to use my Mbin alt for anything lemmy.world related.
Is there a way to leverage down votes to limit content, at the magazine or instance level? I think I know the answer, but it would be dandy to put in place
Reporting them at the very least sends a message to the mods of the community the reported post/comment was on. Not sure about how/when it goes to instance admins, though. Which is where they really need to be reported to. Mods can block them from their community, but a spammer (human or bot) generally affects the entire server so it needs to go all the way to the top.
Blocking them also works to at least reduce the bots’ effectiveness. If everyone blocks it, it isn’t doing anything but wasting bandwidth, and if it’s not having the desired effect whoever deployed it might give up.
Most of the communities with significant spam problems have no moderators other than ernest. It's up to him to recruit more people to help moderate those.
In his most recent announcement, he said he's bringing 2 new instance mods. But I couldn't find the actual announcement post for the new team members. Unfortunately, these days Ernest often disappears for days or weeks at a time, so there's really no telling when we'll see the impacts of this.
I mean this is because of a technical issue likely on Kbin's side. Which is not a shock.
Also I posted 2 threads to kbin communities recently, 1 got most of its activity from LW and the other got 4 favorites from different instances and no comments (and it did not federate to LW, though I don't think that was related to the temporary block). LW could be too big but kbin seems kind of dead for the communities that aren't constantly in the feed (likely because of the same people posting, in many cases). Though technical issues always could be part of it in one way or another.
except it doesn’t work well for the rest of lemmy/the fediverse.
many other instances seem to be getting hit by this, but they don’t have as many activities generated locally for this to become much of a problem. additionally, this is mostly affecting instances with high latency to the instance that is being flooded by kbin, as lemmy currently has an issue where activity throughput between instances with high latency can’t keep up with too many activities being sent. the impact of this is can be a bit less on smaller instances with smaller communities often not having as many subscribers on remote instances, although we’ve seen problems reported by some other admins as well. this includes e.g. kbin.earth, which i suspect to have been hit by responses from a lemmy instance, while the lemmy instance was actually only answering the requests sent from that kbin instance.
during the last peak, when we decided to pull the plug for now, kbin.social was sending us more than 20 activities per second for 7 hours straight. lemmy.world can easily handle this amount of activities, but the problem arises when this impacts our federation towards other (lemmy) instances, as e.g. votes will get relayed by the community (magazine) instance, which means, depending on the type of activity being sent, we might have to be sending out the same 20 requests per second to up to 4,000+ other fediverse instances that are subscribed/following the community this is happening in. trying to send 20 requests per second, which lemmy does not do in parallel, requires us to use at most 50ms per activity total sending time to avoid creating lag. when the instance is in australia, with 200ms+ latency, this is simply not possible.
ps: if you’re wondering how i’m seeing this post, you can search for a post url and comment urls on lemmy to make lemmy fetch them, even if they haven’t been directly submitted through normal federation processes. this requires a logged in user on lemmy’s end.
Many of us are getting banned from other instances because there is a bug where kbin is sending way too much traffic per interaction. I know that was affecting federation (according to other instance admins) so It might have something to do with that. The content on kbin does seem to me like it's not in sync at all, but I haven't measured it.
All we can really do for now is hope for a fix and not interact with posts from other instances.
This post made it over to reddthat, so your posts are federating out.
Checking over on my kbin account as well, I can see content in /newest from multiple sources. /sub returns 404 but I think that’s just a caching bug (adding ?p=1 to the end of the URL lets me workaround it).
It took about a minute for my comment from reddthat to show up here, but it looks like it made it through ok, so inbound comments are working. (Note: replying to myself from my kbin account)
thanks. I actually was seeing something similar at the start of the weekend but it sorta reveresed on me where sub works and newest gives me the 404. I have been looking through my sub and I am seeing lemmy mags. Thanks for the feedback.
Honestly, no. Kbin has been barely usable for a long time and I'm starting to consider giving up.
I have a notification waiting for me, but I get a 404 on the page to check it out. /sub also didn't work yesterday. I spent a few minutes trying to edit a comment just an hour ago.
Nothing against Ernest, a page of this size is hard to manage alone or almost alone, but it's still a pain as a user.
I can't even upvote comments; it moves to an "error"-showing webpage entirely. EDIT: Okay, now I can, but just a moment ago it wasn't working, repeatedly...
kbinMeta
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Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.