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.
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.