Yeah, I know what you mean. That note is misleading, and kinda redundant too - you can physically de-select Undetermined in the UI, but the change won’t actually take if you press ‘Save’.

Most likely reason is that you unticked ‘English’ as a language you understand when you were playing around.

I’m not no, just the cheapest VPS I could find.

The requests never reach my backend, 'cos they’re blocked by nginx rather than it reverse-proxying them like it does for the traffic I’m interested in. So, thankfully for my poorly-programmed backend, it doesn’t have to process the deluge from lemmy.ml. It’s a bit of blunt instrument though, 'cos it just blocks everything. In the future, there’s likely to be some quieter communities on lemmy.ml I’d like, but right now, I can’t follow them without also getting everything from ‘memes’ and ‘asklemmy’.

I’m also thinking about how lemmy seems to get behind on it’s federation activities, and it would maybe help if they didn’t generate them in the first place for recipients who don’t want them.

I’m essentially asking someone to stop coming to my house and knocking on my door. I could ignore the knocks, or put a sign up, or employ someone to stand in my garden and stop them. These are strategies to cope with the problem, but I think the real solution would be if they just stopped coming.

I’m not sure they are supported.

Firstly, I should clarify that lemmon.website is mine, and I’m the only user that’s ever been on there.

When I was running Mastodon, I noticed that, after I’d unsubscribed to the lemmy.ml communities, there was still entries for incoming activities in the systemd journal. Before I stopped running Mastodon, I unsubscribed from all lemmy.world communities. After I started up a new, basic server using Rust’s hyper library, I saw that all activity from both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world was still POSTing to /inbox

I think what happens is that, when a Mastodon user unsubscribes, the software longer views the community’s public key as valid, so it doesn’t show the posts, etc, but you haven’t ‘really’ unsubscribed because lemmy has errored. Here’s how I’ve tested this.

1. Start a brand new lemmy instance, on a linux VM in Windows, using ngrok to tunnel though from a ephemeral URL. So, right now, there’s lemmy service you can see running using:
   curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/api/v3/site

2. Log in to a Mastodon server that’s designed to let users experiement with ActivityPub (https://activitypub.academy/), to subscribe and unsubscribe to a new-created test community. It looks from there like:
   

But in lemmy, it shows the same ‘WARN Error encountered while processing the incoming HTTP request: lemmy_server::root_span_builder: Unknown’ that I quoted in my first post

I don’t know what that error means. But I can see that lemmy still thinks it’s federating with 1/1 instances, and if I create a post on the test community, I can see it do:

INFO send:send:send_lemmy_activity: lemmy_apub::activities: Saving outgoing activity to queue https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/activities/announce/create/ea41951a-6430-4e53-a5c4-afd644bf0824
Jan 11 11:47:43 lemmyA lemmy_server[977]: 2024-01-11T11:47:43.343193Z  INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: lemmy_apub::activities: Saving outgoing activity to queue https://f2d0-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app/activities/create/bfcbf25e-37ab-4cfa-b44d-92cecacb1e56

3. To investigate the error, I tried sending JSONs in the same format that Mastodon uses, but utilising a command-line script. The Follow works, but the Undo-Follow doesn’t. The header returned shows the same error as journalctl does: 400 Bad Request "{\"error\":\"unknown\",\"message\":\"\"}"

I then recrafted the JSONs to be more like lemmy, changing the ‘id’ of Undo to have ‘activities/undo/UUID-string’, and that works. No entries in journalctl, and a 200 OK Response header.

4. From lemmon.website, I can use the script to Follow and Unfollow communities on lemmy.ml

EDIT: I’ve had some success with this. Using the private key of the old Mastodon user I’m no longer getting stuff from ‘memes’ now, I think. (still stuff from ‘asklemmy’ though).

I’ll keep tinkering with this. Maybe during testing I followed asklemmy from another user. In the meantime though, it’d help enormously if any Follows from anyone at lemmon.website could be undone at your end (like I say: it’s all me)

(There is still the JSON problem though. It suggests that any ‘Undo-Follows’ you get from mastodon accounts aren’t being processed properly, so you’re maybe wasting subsequent federation activity. I realize that’s more a lemmy software issue than lemmy.ml issue, but it’s my understanding that you’re the same people!)

Reading your link, a defederation is just blocking the traffic from my end, which I’m already doing by having nginx reject everything with a 403 code.

I’m hoping that I can stop the traffic from being sent in the first place.