Just wanted to mention that some of the issues may likely have been due to issues with Mbin rather than on fedia's side, and we put together an emergency hotfix last night / this morning. The issues had taken out another Mbin instance, so hopefully now that this instance has grabbed those fixes, there will be slightly less queue/db issues (I'd like to say all solved forever but I've learned my lessons).
@jerry wow OK that is worrying me a bit now. I just moved to Hetzner about 3 months back. As far as I've seen, mine has stayed online OK - it's a VPS though, so maybe not affected then as it is not dedicated server hardware. I moved to them as they really seemed to offer more bang for less bucks versus my previous two server hosting providers.
I'll open the back up. An issue with mbin is that there's no way to moderate new accounts, and so I have been battling massive amounts of spam, and the moderation interface for mbin is not super efficient, so it creates a LOT of work.
It's a small instance with fairly low activity (322 monthly active users reported). [edit: excluding this one] The only two local magazines I know with semi-consistent activity and >100 subs are @floatingisfun and @firefox and even the latter seems to be only sporadically active right now. The head mod of the former mag (hitstun) has done some cool local CSS stuff though!
The thing about federation is that you can subscribe just fine to communities on remote instances, so that's where you'll probably end up getting most of your feed from.
Do you mean blocking a domain? So navigating to /d/domain_to:block? If you do: that block all posts that have a url linking to kbin. Since comments do not link to anything they will not be blocked by this. If you want a feature like this, please consider making an issue over on github in the mbin repo
It definitely does not block threads from those instances showing up. For example I have lemmy.ml blocked that way and I still get the occasional lemmy.ml threads pop up and have to manually block all the different communities on that instance.
That makes no sense to me. Imagine blocking users would work the same way and it would just remove links to their profile, but not the stuff the account posts.
Think of it this way: there is currently no way to block an instance from a users perspective, there simple isn't (and yes we should add one). What blocking a domain is for: I hate everything the guardian posts, I don't want to see anything talking about that.
Interesting choice over there to close the issue so quickly rather than asking for more info, although you didn't give them much to go on.
I wonder what was the resolution of the previous problem that frequently caused this sort of thing? Was the error handling improved such that we might reasonably expect the processing to keep going when it hits something it doesn't like, or was it just a quick fix for the one specific thing that happened to be breaking it at the time? Did that one make it to the github tracker?
That GitHub tracker is for problems with mbin code, not with instances running Mbin software. The problem that Fedia experienced is very likely caused by a bug of some sort in mbin (or something that Mbin is depending on), but we don’t know for sure what it is yet. Once I’m unemployed in a week, I hope to have more time to debug issues like this and get them resolved.
The cause is unclear to me, but the processes that manage incoming and outgoing federation were "stuck" until I manually intervened. It's running now. I'm adding to my to-do list for after my job ends in 10 days to implement some sort of detection and hopefully automated restart for when this happens again.
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