Did 4.4.1 break federation with Lemmy groups?

[arachnibot@nodebb.arachnibot.com]

julian@community.nodebb.org I'm actually having trouble getting new ani.social posts into my instance. I'm not sure if kichae@community.nodebb.org is having the same problem, but it seems that it grabbed posts from up to 9 days ago, and then stopped federating them in.

It says Asserting 0 group(s) when I check the remote category on my instance directly though, so perhaps this is related?

[mradcliffe@nokoto.org]

@julian On my implementation, I have not received anything actionable from a lemmy instance recently, but I purge remote posts after about a week. So this may not be NodeBB related. I am following some lemmy.world and lemmy.zip communities. The last federated lemmy activity I received originated at lemmy.ca 4 days, 19 hours ago.

[kichae@community.nodebb.org]

Wild.
What's really weird is that I know I stopped receiving topics and posts from all of the Lemmy servers I follow communities on on the day I graded from 4.3 to 4.4.1, which was several days after this forum was updated to 4.4.1. Meanwhile, those communities here stopped receiving topics and posts a few days earlier than my forum did (though, I can't say for certain that that was on the day y'all updated to 4.4.1).

My follow relationships are rather mature at this point, so it's not like this is an issue with establishing new follow relationships. Old ones are broken, too. Very strange. And also, FWIW, very unidirectional: I can still post into these groups and have my content federated. I'm just not processing or receiving anything coming back my way.

I'm up to my eyeballs right now, but I'll try to look more closely into logs this weekend to see if I can identify any paradigm shifts.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Kichae I suppose it's worth rolling back to 4.3 and figuring out what the change was...! I just wish testing federation wasn't such a long process.

[kichae@community.nodebb.org]

It is rather silly that it inter-platform federation so damn fragile. I can't wait until there's a bigger network of nodeBB sites federating.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Confirming that follow-unfollow-follow-unfollow logic is working as expected against ani.social which means the plumbing actually works.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

arachnibot@nodebb.arachnibot.com did you update NodeBB 9 days ago?

[arachnibot@nodebb.arachnibot.com]

julian@community.nodebb.org not to my knowledge! I actually reset my instance within the past 7 days, so it's unlikely to be that if I'd guess. It could be an upgrade related script didn't fire, but that's pure speculation

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Kichae I ended up opening up an issue on the Lemmy repo and they pointed out that there hasn't been a loss of federation with Lemmy, but that something (likely on the NodeBB end) is throwing errors and causing Lemmy to defer sending activities until after some timeout.

Loss of communication from Lemmy · Issue #5722 · LemmyNet/lemmy

I apologize in advance because this issue is absolutely vague as hell, but I will try to be as thorough and succinct as possible. I am receiving reports that an existing NodeBB connection to Lemmy is severed or becomes unreliable after a...

GitHub (github.com)

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

With the Lemmy developers' help, we figured it out! It was NodeBB's spam protection mechanism. One of our configurable options is to limit the number of upvotes one can make per day.

1. Someone (or someones) on Lemmy communities was sending lots of upvotes and running into this limitation when those activities were propagated to NodeBB.
2. NodeBB dutifully noted this and sent back an HTTP 500.
3. Lemmy dutifully noted this and retried sending the activity using an exponential backoff algorithm
4. Eventually enough 500s were recorded that Lemmy decided that our server needed a time-out of sorts

I updated the code to handle this case better, and now the activities are coming in at full speed. It'll take awhile to get back up to sync though