image proxying is currently not usable for us anyway, see e.g. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4874

correct.

we don’t have an eta currently. we’re still keeping an eye on issues reported by other instances.

which features are you looking for?

@PugJesus@lemmy.world, you might have been posting only for LW users for a while :-/

this is unfortunately correct for the time being.

while we still have aggressive rate limits in place to limit federation impact from kbin bugs, which started with the measures that @sunaurus@lemm.ee mentioned, this wouldn’t impact activities coming from lemmy.world towards kbin.social.

while kbin.social used to break down every now and then based on what i saw people comment, service was typically restored within a short period of time. more recently however, any time i’ve looked at kbin.social in the past couple weeks, it’s only been showing an error page. i suspect it may have been unavailable the entire time, not just at the times i looked at it. looking at our federation stats, the last successfully sent activity from lemmy.world to kbin.social was dated 2024-06-18 00:12:25 UTC, although the actual send date may have been later. successful is also not necessarily guaranteed, as some error codes might be misinterpreted as success due to how servers can be set up and how response status codes are interpreted on the sending side.

if activities sent from lemmy.world don’t reach kbin.social then the posts and comments won’t be relayed to other instances. this is generally an issue in activitypub when instances are down, as such “orphaned” (at the time) communities effectively become local-only communities, isolated islands on all instances that already know about them.

at this point, the last time we’ve received an activity submission (federation traffic) from kbin.social as on 18th of June, so it seems like it was working for some time on that day and has been broken since.

at the start of this month, @ernest@kbin.social (kbin.social owner, main kbin dev) said that he was going to hand over management of kbin.social to someone else, as he’s currently unable to take care of it. presumably this hasn’t happened yet.

cough

There is a very simple explanation for this specific case: nobody on hackertalks.com is subscribed to !goodoffmychest@lemmy.world!

Most community related activities on Lemmy will only be sent to instances that have at least one subscriber for the community.

we’ve switched from using multiple federation sending containers (which are supposed to split receiving instances across workers) to just using a single one.

feel free to reach out to me directly via matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world if you want

edit: fyi, mentions of @lwadmin@lemmy.world will usually not be seen.

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.

looking at the activity generation rates of some popular lemmy instances, anything that is significantly above lemmy.world is likely not just sending legitimate activities.

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.

so far this has been a single case with kbin.earth and lots and lots of cases with kbin.social.

no other instances have been observed behaving like this yet.

for a magazine to show up on lemmy, a logged-in user needs to visit it first. afterwards, to ensure that new content is published to lemmy instances, someone from that instance needs to subscribe to the magazine. this needs to happen on every instance as far as i know. this is one of the reasons services like https://lemmy-federate.com/ or https://browse.feddit.de/ exist.

it is indeed mostly like related activities we’re seeing

maybe I misunderstood your comment, I read your Texas AG example as asking for information about users. did you mean Texas AG asking for the removal of comments where people are stating they’re trans?

as I’m very tired right now, I only want to comment on one of the arguments/questions you brought up.

you’re asking for the difference between taking down content and providing information about users.

its very simple actually. sharing non-public data is a very different story than removing access to otherwise public information, whether it’s originally coming from Lemmy.World or elsewhere.

when we take down content, even if it’s more than legally strictly necessary, the harm of such a takedown is at most someone no longer being able to consume other content or interact with a community. there is no irreversible harm done to anyone. if we decided to reinstate the community, then everyone would still be able to do the same thing they were able to do in the beginning. the only thing people may be missing out on would be some time and convenience.

if we were asked to provide information, such as your example of a Texas AG, this would neither be reversible nor have low impact on people’s lives. in my opinion, these two cases., despite both having a legal context, couldn’t be much further from each other.

We do question the validity of claims, but when it comes to takedowns of copyright related content, we simply do not have the resources to throw money at lawyers to evaluate this in detail. We can apply common sense to determine if something appears to be a reasonable request, but we can’t pay a lawyer to evaluate every single request. We also can’t afford going to court over every case, even if we were to win, because those processes take large amounts of personal time and have a risk of significant penalties.

Legal advocates on Lemmy or any other platform for that matter are not a substitution for legal council.

What would be the alternative?

Moving the instance behind Tor and hoping to never get identified?

As long as you’re operating a service on the internet you’ll be bound by laws in one place or another. The only thing you can do against this is trying to avoid being identified and therefore trying to evade prosecution. This is not a legal defense.

Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.

If we get a request, of course we will evaluate that request.

When it comes to taking down content, such as copyright infringing content, we may err on the side of caution to reduce the legal risk we’re exposing ourselves to.

When it comes to handing over data that is not already publicly accessible, such as (not-really-)private messages or IP addresses of users, we will not “err on the side of caution” and hand out data to everyone, but we must follow the laws that we’re operating under. See also https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/#4-when-and-with-whom-do-we-share-your-personal-information.

Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.

if being gay became illegal in NL for example, and there would be laws to prevent talking about gay people, then we’d have to either no longer tolerate such content on our platform or ensure we’re no longer bound by dutch laws.

The execution should have been better, but the decision itself was a team decision, not an individual admin decision without talking to the rest of the team.

FAILED

fwiw, it does not appear to be triggerable from within lemmy at this time.

I’ve just tried this on another instance and lemmy complains

The webfinger object did not contain any link to an activitypub item

I suspect this currently can only be triggered from threads.