I was really surprised to hear this, so I dug a little deeper. It looks like an honest mistake.

Here’s what their admin said:

We unintionally did until about 8 hours ago.

Lemmy.ml has a ton of bot crawlers in its nginx logs spam fetching posts, so I added the bots to an nginx block. Turns out one called kbinbot wasn’t actually a crawling bot, but their federation requester.

If we don’t respond quickly, its because we have notification backlogs that are months long at this point.