Huh ... that's quite funny and unfortunate.

Curiously enough I've been ranting in some replies about how "The Protocol" maybe requires too much coordination at a software level for its promises of a distributed social network to be taken at face value.

This issue incidentally seems like a prime issue. Like, just looking at it naively, would it not be reasonable that at some level the protocol has some checks built into it such that an instance either is or is not federating with another instance and determining whether that is the case or not is straight-forward?

The arbitrariness of a service called kbinbot being a whole instance's federation request service and the ability to block that by accident without any more declarative data structures verifying or identifying whether federation is successful ... that all smells like a bad system.

I'm starting to wonder if there's something to my "concern" compared to other protocols (wish I knew enough to seriously examine it).

I'll stop ranting now ... glad lemmy.ml and kbin are connected again.