At some point, it appears lemmus.org has decided to block us, though they still appear on both our linked and allowed instance lists: https://lemmus.org/instances

Unsurprisingly:

• there are some new posts in an active comm there: https://lemmus.org/c/shmups
• I can see some old posts in it, with 1 local subscriber: https://hexbear.net/c/shmups@lemmus.org
• Attempting to subscribe to that comm myself gets stuck in a “Subscribe Pending” state
• A post made to an instance that does still federate with us has no comments from Hexbear users: https://lemmus.org/post/21636557

Surprisingly:

• That post did federate to us, along with comments from local users: https://hexbear.net/post/8268821?scrollToComments=false
• Comments on that post do federate to the home instance: https://midwest.social/post/46038786?scrollToComments=true

Anyways, I continue to not understand how federation actually works. I said something in the past about lopsided federation, but that was a case where federation in both directions was the expectation, and it’s clearly not the case this time - it seems like lopsided is perhaps exactly what we expect.

Since Hexbear’s side of things seem to be working as expected, and so does the lemmus side, I’m not going to follow up with any admin pings myself on this one, but figured I’d document it still in case someone else strongly feels like partially federating with an instance that won’t federate back should be changed.