It seems like just recently, everything broke. Posts from some other instances (Lemmy 0.19 or kbin) aren’t showing up here reliably anymore, and then sometimes posts from a few days ago will suddenly show up. kbin.social has a banner talking about unusual “problems” without going into detail.
Does anyone know what’s going on or why? I’ve heard that Lemmy 0.19 has a problem where its outbound federation queue will sometimes die until it’s restarted manually, but that doesn’t seem like it should affect a lemmy.world <-> kbin interaction. Is it just Lemmy 0.19, or just lemmy.world, or are there multiple issues, or what gives?
Everything seems kinda fucked at the moment. Here’s the German community on kbin, fedia.io (mbin) and its original Lemmy instance:
https://kbin.social/m/dach@feddit.de https://fedia.io/m/dach@feddit.de https://feddit.de/c/dach
kbin.social really struggled with its issues affecting performance a lot which ernest seems to got a hold of by now. This didn’t happen on fedia.io (mbin) but the federation issues seem to persist with being almost 2 weeks behind now. Something is really off but it also seemed to all have kicked off around the same time? Kinda feels like Lemmy pushed something that affected both platforms differently. Either way, kinda makes the Fediverse somewhat unusable and pointless if stuff like this constantly happens.
Oh, just to add on to my previous comment to address the specifics: My guess is that feddit.de’s outbound federation is not running because of this bug in Lemmy 0.19. It will probably stay that way until the queue is manually unborked somehow, and even then, feddit.de will probably not be able to federate real reliably in general until the fix is released and they upgrade. Without knowing too much about it beyond some guesswork that’s my prediction.
Like I said in my other comment, I sort of prefer it that way. Call it the fediverse’s version of the “good fast cheap, pick 2” decision. You can have one only of the following options:
I’m happiest with #3 personally.
Eh. I mean, stuff breaks sometimes; I get it. No one’s getting paid to maintain the servers, so any degree to which they function is sort of a bonus. Honestly I kind of prefer it that way, even if NGL it’s definitely irritating when stuff is broken for extended periods of time like this.
I’m currently working on installing kbin on a server of my own so I can try to make that my new home. I like its codebase much better than Lemmy’s, to the very superficial extent I’ve investigated the two of them, and I like that kbin attempts to interoperate well with both Mastodon’s part of the fediverse and Lemmy’s part. Presumably if I can get it working as a little server for me, it’ll be better-behaved without the load of a ton of users on it, and I can just hang out there and wait it out until people sort all of this out and it all starts working well.
Did you have a look at mbin, mentioned in an earlier comment ? It looks quite promising too
https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
I looked at it super-briefly. Honestly, I tend to prefer the kbin “I have a vision for what I want this to be and I don’t want democratically inspired changes to my codebase” system over the mbin “if it looks good we’ll merge it” system. Based on my little bit of experience with it, the backend of kbin seems relatively well-organized, and obviously he put it together well enough for it to be able to work in production on a busy site, so I trust his judgement a little. I didn’t look in detail enough to make a real informed decision about it though. I do have some nitpicks with kbin (definitely as far as the frontend in particular) but relative to other Fediverse software it seems above average (although, that’s a low bar.)
Looking over mbin now, the one thing that seems like a serious point in its favor is talking about security fixes. Do you know anything more about that? Are there security things that the maintainer(s) of kbin are not wanting to address or something?
Edit: Oh, also, update: It looks to me like lemmy.world is currently configured to break all incoming federation from default-configured kbin instances. Maybe I am wrong about that, but that’s how it looks to me right now. I posted about it.