Hello! I’m setting up a kbin instance, and while it’s a little hard to tell thanks to the 0.19 breakage, it seems to be interoperating to some degree with most of the fediverse. I can post messages back and forth, at least.

With lemmy.world, though, it’s not working. I get messages like this in the log:

Get fail: https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819, https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819
Bots Temporarily Blocked

And, indeed, it seems like lemmy.world is configured to reject connections from user-agents containing the word “bot”. This is what happens when I access the same URL while manually setting user-agent to what kbin uses for client HTTP requests:

$ wget -nv --user-agent="kbinBot/0.1 (+https://my.domain/bot)" https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819
https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819:
2024-01-07 05:25:43 ERROR 412: Precondition Failed.

And, verifying that the word “bot” is the issue:

$ wget -nv --user-agent="kbinAgent/0.1 (+https://my.domain/agent)" https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819
2024-01-07 05:25:56 URL:https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 [264000] -> "6458819.2" [1]

$ wget -nv https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819
2024-01-07 05:26:06 URL:https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 [264006] -> "6458819.3" [1]

While I can understand that many bots are harmful so this is probably a necessary measure, it seems to me like this will break federation with all kbin instances (unless they figure out to change their user agent). No? Would it maybe be a good idea to add an exception to this for kbinBot? I may have misunderstood something, as I’m new to all this, just saying how it looks to me poking at it briefly.

Also, is it okay if I change my user-agent so that it doesn’t contain the forbidden word? Presumably there’s no administrative reason kbin and lemmy.world shouldn’t talk.