I screenshotted this from their ‘trending’ page, which suggests that their content is garbage and their tech is fucked.

Well, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that Lemmy is now surrounding your spoilers with the expected Details and Summary tags, and moving the HR means PieFed is able to interpret the Markdown for both spoilers.

The bad news:
It turns out KBIN doesn’t understand Details/Summary tags (even though a browser on it own does, so that’s KBIN’s problem).
Neither PieFed, or KBIN, or MS Edge looking at raw HTML can properly deal with a list that starts at ‘0’.
Lemmy is no longer putting List tags around anything inside the spoilers. (so this post now looks worse on KBIN. Sorry about that KBIN users)

Firstly, sorry for any potential derailment. This is a comment about the Markdown used in your post (I wouldn’t normally mention it, but consider it fair game since this is a ‘Fediverse’ community).
The spec for lemmy’s spoiler format is colon-colon-colon-space-spoiler. If you miss out the space, then whilst other Lemmy instances can reconstitute the Markdown to see this post as intended, Lemmy itself doesn’t generate the correct HTML when sending it out over ActivityPub. This means that other Fediverse apps that just look at the HTML (e.g. Mastodon, KBIN) can’t render it properly.
Screenshot from kbin:

Also, if you add a horizontal rule without a blank line above it, Markdown generally interprets this as meaning that you want the text above it to be a heading. So anything that doesn’t have the full force of Lemmy’s Markdown processor that is currently trying to re-make the HTML from Markdown now has to deal with the ending triple colons having ‘h2’ tags around it.
Screenshot from piefed:

(apologies again for being off-topic)

Update: for LW, this behaviour stopped around about Friday 12th April. Not sure what changed, but at least the biggest instance isn’t doing it anymore.

I’ve since relented, and filed a bug

When I’ve mentioned this issue to admins at lemmy.ca and endlesstalk.org (relevant posts here and here), they’ve suggested it’s a misconfiguration. When I said the same to lemmy.world admins (relevant comment here), they also suggested it was misconfig. I mentioned it again recently on the LW channel, and it was only then was Lemmy itself proposed as a problem. It happens on plenty of servers, but not all of them, so I don’t know where the fault lies.

A bug report for software I don’t run, and so can’t reproduce would be closed anyway. I think ‘steps to reproduce’ is pretty much the first line in a bug report.

If I ran a server that used someone else’s software to allow users to download a file, and someone told me that every 2nd byte needed to be discarded, I like to think I’d investigate and contact the software vendors if required. I wouldn’t tell the user that it’s something they should be doing. I feel like I’m the user in this scenario.

They’ll all POST requests. I trimmed it out of the log for space, but the first 6 requests on the video looked like (nginx shows the data amount for GET, but not POST):

ip.address - - [07/Apr/2024:23:18:44 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"
ip.address- - [07/Apr/2024:23:18:44 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"
ip.address - - [07/Apr/2024:23:19:14 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"
ip.address - - [07/Apr/2024:23:19:14 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"
ip.address - - [07/Apr/2024:23:19:44 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"
ip.address - - [07/Apr/2024:23:19:44 +0000] "POST /inbox HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.3; +https://lemmy.world"

If I was running Lemmy, every second line would say 400, from it rejecting it as a duplicate. In terms of bandwidth, every line represents a full JSON, so I guess it’s about 2K minimum for the standard cruft, plus however much for the actual contents of comment (the comment replying to this would’ve been 8K)

My server just took the requests and dumped the bodies out to a file, and then a script was outputting the object.id, object.type and object.actor into /tmp/demo.txt (which is another confirmation that they were POST requests, of course)

I can’t re-produce anything, because I don’t run Lemmy on my server. It’s possible to infer that’s it’s related to the software (because LW didn’t do this when it was on 0.18.5). However, it’s not something that, for example, lemmy.ml does. An admin on LW matrix chat suggested that it’s likely a combination of instance configuration and software changes, but a bug report from me (who has no idea how LW is set up) wouldn’t be much use.

I’d gently suggest that, if LW admins think it’s a configuration problem, they should talk to other Lemmy admins, and if they think Lemmy itself plays a role, they should talk to the devs. I could be wrong, but this has been happening for a while now, and I don’t get the sense that anyone is talking to anyone about it.