Okay. Well, if it’s fixed, that’s all that matters, I guess. I don’t understand this desire to downgrade other people’s answers into speculation, but it’s not like this is the first time it’s happened.

Language selection with Lemmy is pretty unintuitive, so others may be interested to know that OP is technically incorrect here. Despite what the UI says, it’s actually impossible to deselect ‘undetermined’. Whatever frontend you’re using might let you, but the backend will just ignore it. I don’t use this account much, but I used it here to make a very deliberate decision to send my earlier response using ‘undetermined’ as the language, so that OP would definitely see it, and the fact that they clearly did demonstrates for itself that what they’re suggesting is nonsense.

Using a web browser, go to your account settings. In ‘languages’ ensure that ‘English’ is selected. The posts will then be visible to you when you are logged in.

You’ve made this post in the ‘afaraf’ language, so you may as well deselect that while you’re there if you don’t understand it. This of course means that most people here won’t see this post, ironically enough.

Also, if folks could stop parroting out the same bullshit ‘federation delays’ answer to every question, that’d be great. It’s not that. It’s actually very rarely that (even if you were the very first person to discover that community, which you weren’t, it’d only take a refresh to resolve it).

The problem is not feddit.org. You can still create communities there. The problem is that the ‘name’ field is too long - it’s needs to be 20 characters max. I answered this from another account, but now I’m thinking you can’t see it because you haven’t selected ‘English’ as a language you understand. If that’s the case, then it means problems with Lemmy are stopping people solving other problems with Lemmy, and the whole thing is doomed.

You might need to have the ‘show nfsw’ setting turned on. Anyway, they look like this:

So the theory that they were downvoted for spamming someone’s feed likely has validity.

I screenshotted this from their ‘trending’ page, which suggests that their content is garbage and their tech is fucked.

Hmmm. Speaking of Fediverse interoperability, platforms other than yours (Pandacap) typically arrange things so that https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ was the domain, and something like https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/users/lizard-socks was the user, but Pandacap wants to use https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ for both. Combined with the fact that it doesn’t seem to support /.well-known/nodeinfo means that no other platform knows what software it’s running.

When your actor sends something out, it uses the id https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/, but when something tries to look that up, it returns a “Person” with a subtly different id of https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ (no trailing slash). So there’s the potential to create the following:

1. https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ sends something out.
2. Instance hasn’t heard of that, so looks it up, and creates a new user in its database, with the returned ID (https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/)
3. https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ sends else something out. Instance looks in it’s DB, finds nothing, so looks it up and tries to create it again. The best case is that it meets a DB uniqueness constraint, because the ID it gets back from that lookup does actually exist (so it can use that, but it was a long way around to find it). The worst case - when there’s no DB uniqueness constraint -is that a ‘new’ user is created every time.
4. Repeat step 3 for every new thing you send.

If every new platform treats the Fediverse as a wheel that needs to be re-invented, then the whole project is doomed.

Tragically, this also means that, even after 31 years, I’ve still never ‘get good’ enough.

Yeah, I know what you mean. That note is misleading, and kinda redundant too - you can physically de-select Undetermined in the UI, but the change won’t actually take if you press ‘Save’.

Most likely reason is that you unticked ‘English’ as a language you understand when you were playing around.

Well, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that Lemmy is now surrounding your spoilers with the expected Details and Summary tags, and moving the HR means PieFed is able to interpret the Markdown for both spoilers.

The bad news:
It turns out KBIN doesn’t understand Details/Summary tags (even though a browser on it own does, so that’s KBIN’s problem).
Neither PieFed, or KBIN, or MS Edge looking at raw HTML can properly deal with a list that starts at ‘0’.
Lemmy is no longer putting List tags around anything inside the spoilers. (so this post now looks worse on KBIN. Sorry about that KBIN users)

Firstly, sorry for any potential derailment. This is a comment about the Markdown used in your post (I wouldn’t normally mention it, but consider it fair game since this is a ‘Fediverse’ community).
The spec for lemmy’s spoiler format is colon-colon-colon-space-spoiler. If you miss out the space, then whilst other Lemmy instances can reconstitute the Markdown to see this post as intended, Lemmy itself doesn’t generate the correct HTML when sending it out over ActivityPub. This means that other Fediverse apps that just look at the HTML (e.g. Mastodon, KBIN) can’t render it properly.
Screenshot from kbin:

Also, if you add a horizontal rule without a blank line above it, Markdown generally interprets this as meaning that you want the text above it to be a heading. So anything that doesn’t have the full force of Lemmy’s Markdown processor that is currently trying to re-make the HTML from Markdown now has to deal with the ending triple colons having ‘h2’ tags around it.
Screenshot from piefed:

(apologies again for being off-topic)

Update: for LW, this behaviour stopped around about Friday 12th April. Not sure what changed, but at least the biggest instance isn’t doing it anymore.

I’ve since relented, and filed a bug

When I’ve mentioned this issue to admins at lemmy.ca and endlesstalk.org (relevant posts here and here), they’ve suggested it’s a misconfiguration. When I said the same to lemmy.world admins (relevant comment here), they also suggested it was misconfig. I mentioned it again recently on the LW channel, and it was only then was Lemmy itself proposed as a problem. It happens on plenty of servers, but not all of them, so I don’t know where the fault lies.

A bug report for software I don’t run, and so can’t reproduce would be closed anyway. I think ‘steps to reproduce’ is pretty much the first line in a bug report.

If I ran a server that used someone else’s software to allow users to download a file, and someone told me that every 2nd byte needed to be discarded, I like to think I’d investigate and contact the software vendors if required. I wouldn’t tell the user that it’s something they should be doing. I feel like I’m the user in this scenario.

I can’t re-produce anything, because I don’t run Lemmy on my server. It’s possible to infer that’s it’s related to the software (because LW didn’t do this when it was on 0.18.5). However, it’s not something that, for example, lemmy.ml does. An admin on LW matrix chat suggested that it’s likely a combination of instance configuration and software changes, but a bug report from me (who has no idea how LW is set up) wouldn’t be much use.

I’d gently suggest that, if LW admins think it’s a configuration problem, they should talk to other Lemmy admins, and if they think Lemmy itself plays a role, they should talk to the devs. I could be wrong, but this has been happening for a while now, and I don’t get the sense that anyone is talking to anyone about it.

Hi

Pls check how much traffic you’re now sending out for every activity - my server is recording that everything from lemmy.world is being 4 times (e.g. 1 Upvote is sent 4 times to every instance that has a subscriber. Those instances will reject 3 of them for being dupes, but it’s still a lot to be sending out).

lemmy.ca had a problem where they were sending everything 3 times, and it was because they were running 3 containers, and they all had the same index number, so maybe it’s that.

Thanks.

I’m not no, just the cheapest VPS I could find.

The requests never reach my backend, 'cos they’re blocked by nginx rather than it reverse-proxying them like it does for the traffic I’m interested in. So, thankfully for my poorly-programmed backend, it doesn’t have to process the deluge from lemmy.ml. It’s a bit of blunt instrument though, 'cos it just blocks everything. In the future, there’s likely to be some quieter communities on lemmy.ml I’d like, but right now, I can’t follow them without also getting everything from ‘memes’ and ‘asklemmy’.

I’m also thinking about how lemmy seems to get behind on it’s federation activities, and it would maybe help if they didn’t generate them in the first place for recipients who don’t want them.

I’m essentially asking someone to stop coming to my house and knocking on my door. I could ignore the knocks, or put a sign up, or employ someone to stand in my garden and stop them. These are strategies to cope with the problem, but I think the real solution would be if they just stopped coming.

I’m not sure they are supported.

Firstly, I should clarify that lemmon.website is mine, and I’m the only user that’s ever been on there.

When I was running Mastodon, I noticed that, after I’d unsubscribed to the lemmy.ml communities, there was still entries for incoming activities in the systemd journal. Before I stopped running Mastodon, I unsubscribed from all lemmy.world communities. After I started up a new, basic server using Rust’s hyper library, I saw that all activity from both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world was still POSTing to /inbox

I think what happens is that, when a Mastodon user unsubscribes, the software longer views the community’s public key as valid, so it doesn’t show the posts, etc, but you haven’t ‘really’ unsubscribed because lemmy has errored. Here’s how I’ve tested this.

1. Start a brand new lemmy instance, on a linux VM in Windows, using ngrok to tunnel though from a ephemeral URL. So, right now, there’s lemmy service you can see running using:
   curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/api/v3/site

2. Log in to a Mastodon server that’s designed to let users experiement with ActivityPub (https://activitypub.academy/), to subscribe and unsubscribe to a new-created test community. It looks from there like:
   

But in lemmy, it shows the same ‘WARN Error encountered while processing the incoming HTTP request: lemmy_server::root_span_builder: Unknown’ that I quoted in my first post

I don’t know what that error means. But I can see that lemmy still thinks it’s federating with 1/1 instances, and if I create a post on the test community, I can see it do:

INFO send:send:send_lemmy_activity: lemmy_apub::activities: Saving outgoing activity to queue https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/activities/announce/create/ea41951a-6430-4e53-a5c4-afd644bf0824
Jan 11 11:47:43 lemmyA lemmy_server[977]: 2024-01-11T11:47:43.343193Z  INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: lemmy_apub::activities: Saving outgoing activity to queue https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/activities/create/bfcbf25e-37ab-4cfa-b44d-92cecacb1e56

3. To investigate the error, I tried sending JSONs in the same format that Mastodon uses, but utilising a command-line script. The Follow works, but the Undo-Follow doesn’t. The header returned shows the same error as journalctl does: 400 Bad Request "{\"error\":\"unknown\",\"message\":\"\"}"

I then recrafted the JSONs to be more like lemmy, changing the ‘id’ of Undo to have ‘activities/undo/UUID-string’, and that works. No entries in journalctl, and a 200 OK Response header.

4. From lemmon.website, I can use the script to Follow and Unfollow communities on lemmy.ml

EDIT: I’ve had some success with this. Using the private key of the old Mastodon user I’m no longer getting stuff from ‘memes’ now, I think. (still stuff from ‘asklemmy’ though).

I’ll keep tinkering with this. Maybe during testing I followed asklemmy from another user. In the meantime though, it’d help enormously if any Follows from anyone at lemmon.website could be undone at your end (like I say: it’s all me)

(There is still the JSON problem though. It suggests that any ‘Undo-Follows’ you get from mastodon accounts aren’t being processed properly, so you’re maybe wasting subsequent federation activity. I realize that’s more a lemmy software issue than lemmy.ml issue, but it’s my understanding that you’re the same people!)

Reading your link, a defederation is just blocking the traffic from my end, which I’m already doing by having nginx reject everything with a 403 code.

I’m hoping that I can stop the traffic from being sent in the first place.