I was one of the trailblazers who defeded from .ml and once the domain filtering feature was added, I added lemmy.ml to my domain blocks in the admin panel. Reason being, I don’t want .ml content including crossposts and re-posted images.

I thought that was working great until I noticed today that I hadn’t gotten any posts to !books@lemmy.world for several months. Even trying to manually resolve a post pulled from there directly, it wouldn’t load. Finally checked the server logs, and there was a Domain is blocked event right after the logged call to ResolveObject. Of course the logs didn’t say what domain.

Long story short, after scouring the randomly-selected test post to see if there was some kind of false positive, I finally realize there’s a “Related Community” link to a community on .ml in c/Books’s community description and that was what it was hitting on. Any post coming in to c/Books was being rejected because the community description linked to something in my site’s URL filters.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    This could be a major vector for malicious actors. Try to block me? I’ll just edit my description to cut off from every community.

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
    8·
    9 hours ago

    Is there an issue about this in the GitHub tracker? It could be an unintentional consequence.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      6·
      10 hours ago

      Lol. I guess now I gotta decide which is more annoying: Not having content from c/Books or having to deal with unwanted spillover from .ml. I don’t have the chutzpah to ask the mods to change the community description lol

      Just figured this might catch other people off guard like it did me. I never would have expected the community description to be evaluated for the URL filter (only posts/comments).

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    10 hours ago

    That’s good to know.

    Also, I think the larger instances are curating their front pages as well. I’m not techy, so correct me if I’m wrong, and that can’t even been done. It sure seems that way when you look at new on my home instance.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    14·
    7 hours ago

    So, can’t even speak about a given community (just because they live in a certain instance) without getting blocked? Well now that’s censorship if I’ve ever seen any.

    • unknown1234_5@kbin.earth
      74·
      8 hours ago

      you’re missing the point. in subscribed view .ml content can still appear. the point is to make it so that nothing from lemmy.ml can get through at all because the people on that instance suck to interact with.

        • unknown1234_5@kbin.earth
          2·
          3 hours ago

          its not necessarily every single user, but the vast majority of the time when you interact with a .ml account they act insane and are assholes. it may only be a vocal minority, but the mods do nothing to stop them and on .ml communities they actively support that behavior.