Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word “bot”. Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin’s reported agent of “kbinBot”.
The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.
Edit:
Here are all the links that I’ve found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)
From a cursory search, I’d read this post from about a month ago asking for orientalism to be added to the rules as an example of racism/bigotry, on the basis that it was a regular and highly-bannable offense without being at all clear that it was an offense to a lot of newbies. Most people understand racism and xenophobia to mean race and country, and wouldn’t necessarily qualify criticizing any country’s government to fall under that, while the admins and some of the comments disagree.
This comment seems to be the only real notice either of the admins took of that request, and it was only to say, “Yep, western outlets reporting on the east are bigoted, what about the US?” Which is disappointingly unhelpful in clearing up what the rule actually covers beyond implying that it covers everything about the east coming out of the west, and that would be insane. Beyond that, they spent the majority of their time in the comments with everyone else, deleting stuff and fighting about the genocide thing instead of addressing the topic.
Checking the current rules, nothing beyond that has been done. Glancing at the modlog shows a recent article talking about the US supplying Ukraine with cluster bombs that has indeed been removed for bigotry, same as I expected they would be. Not locked for a shitty comment section, just removed. Really irate that I haven’t got a screenshot like the thorough documentation Pineapple’s, but it seems (I assume for traffick reasons) that the modlog is having trouble loading and keeps erroring out on me now.
Suffice to say, yes, there are those that appear to believe this through word and action, and they aren’t clearing up what they do believe like they really should if they don’t mean to be so hilariously heavy-handed with it. All Dessalines really accomplished was shutting down the conversation without explaining.