Hello everyone,
Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it's up to the instance admins to clean it up.
There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.
We don't want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That's why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.
This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy's.
We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.
We hope you understand and support our decision.
The Lemmy World team
Defederated is only on instance-level. A community can not be defederated, but it can be removed or purged. So far the only action we have taken is removing some of the Kbin communities (or magazines as they are called on kbin).
Your community is still available on https://lemmy.world/c/13thFloor@kbin.social
If you want to see which instances we are currently defederated from you can look that up here.
So no, we didn't block your community. But I do see some posts are not showing up on Lemmy World. Not sure why that happens, there haven't been any changes on our end. We will update to Lemmy 0.18.5 tomorrow which resolves some federation issues.
Edit: It actually was removed. now restored. Passed info to other admins.
Thanks for the update. I'm still getting the following error across multiple browsers when I hit https://lemmy.world/c/13thFloor@kbin.social:
Hoping it gets resolved with the update - was worried we'd screwed something up and gotten on your removed list.
Huh. I'm sorry I have to check what happened but the 13thfloor was actually removed. I must have missed the 'removed' tag earlier. I restored it and I'll make sure the other admins know not to remove that community. So it should be ok again.
Thanks much! That fixed it for the 13thFloor. FYI, looks like @scifi is still blocked, and they're generally pretty cool without spam issues.
Restored that one as well !scifi@kbin.social
Awesome - thanks!