Heads up, everyone: approximately 24 hours ago, our episode discussion bot @shinobu@ani.social stopped posting new discussion threads. Please be aware of the outage and consider posting manual discussion threads in the meantime until the situation is resolved.
The root cause of the outage is due to lemmy.ml defederating from ani.social (source), which of course hosts @shinobu@ani.social. Because !anime@lemmy.ml is hosted on lemmy.ml, this defederation situation prevents our bot from posting anything new to the community.
At present moment, there has been no official statement as to why this action was taken. It is my belief, however, that the decision was made without due consideration and should be reversed. I humbly call upon @dessalines@lemmy.ml to please take a second look at the content of ani.social and their content policy because I believe that the high standard they uphold as server operators is self-evident.
Thank you everyone for your time and I apologize for the inconvenience.
It kinda reads like lemmy.ml admins think images containing children are inherently pornographic.
Thats… Not a good look for the instance. Or its leaders.
That is most unfortunate. It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that this was done without any elaboration or warning. Without a reversal, if we want to keep automated discussion posts, there are a couple options I see. Either posts are made by a local account on lemmy.ml, discussions are moved to a different community/instance, or ultimately automated posts could go away.
This is the most active lemmy anime community, with the next most active belonging to hexbear.net which is a polarizing instance to say the least. Beyond those, it is a steep drop in activity. The anime community on lemmy.world for instance most recently had a post 20 days ago (beehaw’s anime & manga community is a bit better at 5 days ago). All this is to say it would be a steep ask to get the community that has essentially consolidated to lemmy.ml to move elsewhere. I hope it gets resolved soon.
This is actually a big fear of mine. The content on !anime@lemmy.ml is nearly identical to the content found on ani.social. If you compare the new queues you can see for yourself just how much crosspost activity there is.
If it’s a content problem, then we have a content problem too. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in with this much uncertainty
If you can get the mod of anime@lemmy.ml to cross promote, then it should not be too bad to move the episode discussion to a different instance, since lemmy users can join both communities and get posts from both. It won’t be flawless or without difficulties to make such a move, but I think people will go out of convenience.
This is clearly causing pretty fundamental problems to infrastructure this community’s reliant on. Cross-promotion would be fine, imo. We just need to know what the users want of the community.
Dumb question: why can’t the episode bot be hosted on another instance?
Not a dumb question! This is what I’ll have to do if no better solution comes around.
The reason I haven’t already done that is that the underlying Holo code is not designed for multi-user. I won’t be able to just swap out the credentials because doing so will cause it to blow up when it fails to edit old posts owned by the old bot account. In other words: it’s going to be a big hassle to move over and even in the best case scenario things will break and generally look ugly.
Yeah, in this case, if you need to change host instances, I think it might make sense to have a clean break. It means that the discussion link table won’t link back to episodes posted by shinobu, but the link table was broken on lemmy.ml anyway (it has ani.social post ids with a lemmy.ml domain) and I think I am the only person that has said anything about it in the past. So, I am guessing that it might not be a critical feature for most people. Shameless plug time: a clean break would also ease the transition to a tool different than holo (cough). The lack of instance-agnostic links to posts is really problematic for cross-instance automation in general and I don’t have a good solution for that yet.
