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.
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