Crossposting to Mastodon and Bluesky failing

tylerknowsnothing · March 23, 2025, 9:44pm

I’ve not changed anything in my posting behavior or on my blog, but crossposting has been failing for the last day. I’ve rebuilt a few times. There are errors for Mastodon getting mentions in the logs as well as this (partial):

Feed: Cross-posting exception: 60552764, /home/manton/.rvm/rubies/ruby-3.2.3/lib/ruby/3.2.0/json/common.rb:216:in parse’, unexpected token at 'Just a moment…<meta name=“viewport”…`

I’ve also refreshed the feeds to no avail. @manton Might you take a look at it when you can?

jsonbecker · March 24, 2025, 12:05am

That looks like you have a post that has within it the content of a <head> block with that illegal meta tag. Have you tried customizing your feed or adding an external source that may have a feed with invalid HTML in the content of a post?

tylerknowsnothing · March 24, 2025, 1:12am

Nope. Haven’t made any changes recently, and it was working just fine until a bit ago. I’ve tried to copy/paste the entire error, but it refreshes the page too quickly to do so. And I’ve only been getting the following error since I refreshed the feed in Sources. The parse error stopped showing up around 2PM PST.

tylerknowsnothing · March 24, 2025, 7:29pm

Okay. I finally managed to catch the error, I believe in complete.

Feed: Cross-posting exception: 60552764, /home/manton/.rvm/rubies/ruby-3.2.3/lib/ruby/3.2.0/json/common.rb:216:in `parse', unexpected token at '<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en-US"><head><title>Just a moment...</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><style>*{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;padding:0}html{line-height:1.15;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;color:#313131;font-family:system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Helvetica Neue,Arial,Noto Sans,sans-serif,Apple Color Emoji,Segoe UI Emoji,Segoe UI Symbol,Noto Color Emoji}body{display:flex;flex-direction:column;height:100vh;min-height:100vh}.main-content{margin:8rem auto;max-width:60rem;padding-left:1.5rem}@media (width <= 720px){.main-content{margin-top:4rem}}.h2{font-size:1.5rem;font-weight:500;line-height:2.25rem}@media 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'#' : location.hash;window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUQuery = location.search === '' && location.href.slice(0, location.href.length - window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash.length).indexOf('?') !== -1 ? '?' : location.search;if (window.history && window.history.replaceState) {var ogU = location.pathname + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUQuery + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash;history.replaceState(null, null, "\/api\/v1\/statuses?__cf_chl_rt_tk=_PBs3gDarCExfAd.iWVDK1lM0onjyDC.gzYXEVBQJWs-1742765170-1.0.1.1-w5r8xfWX8hx2YzN5URPCVq3ng1pHCcPAs6uzrStZ3Fk" + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash);cpo.onload = function() {history.replaceState(null, null, ogU);}}document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(cpo);}());</script></body></html>', JSON::ParserError

I’m not sure how to make it wrap, if that’s even possible.

manton · March 24, 2025, 8:01pm

It does look like Micro.blog is getting an HTML page when downloading your feed instead of the JSON Feed. We’ve seen this happen when a domain name is using something that has an extra security check, for example, but that is usually for external feeds hosted somewhere else.

The “Just a moment…” in the response does point to that too.

Are you using Cloudflare or something else that is proxying the request to your domain name?

tylerknowsnothing · March 24, 2025, 8:06pm

Nope. Just a straight pointer from name.com, ever since I attached my custom domain to it, and that was some time ago. Last year.

manton · March 24, 2025, 8:39pm

I think I’ve figured it out. Last year when you were using a different domain name, we had to hardcode the IP address on our servers to work around some issue that I’ve forgotten about now. It looks like that was still interfering and routing the requests to the wrong server all of a sudden, maybe when the old domain expired.

Let us know if the problem doesn’t go away now.

tylerknowsnothing · March 24, 2025, 8:40pm

Will do. I was just about to post, and I’ll check to see if the old x-posts go through.

tylerknowsnothing · March 24, 2025, 9:04pm

It’s still throwing the error getting mentions fault. I just realized that even though I’ve noted it is not crossposting to Bluesky as well, there are no errors indicating that in the logs.

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 12:26am

I don’t know if this was smart or not, but I disabled my Mastodon source in order to reauthorize it. It failed. I then removed the existing auth, and it looked like it was going to work, then it failed. I’m not going to touch Bluesky for now.

I checked notifications from my Mastodon instance admin, and found this:

“On this Mastodon server, your IP address is not captured. Since this server is behind Cloudflare protection and the firewall only accepts traffic from Cloudflare proxy servers, the only IP address recorded is the IP address of the Cloudflare proxy server you connected through, which might be the closest to your location, or not.”

Not sure if that might be a contributing factor.

sod · March 25, 2025, 7:11am

Good troubleshooting! Yes, the error is happening because your Mastodon instance is behind a Cloudflare reverse proxy. Here are some possible solutions:

The Mastodon instance admin could configure Cloudflare to allow Micro.blog’s servers to access the Mastodon API.
Or they could stop using Cloudflare.
You could move to another Mastodon instance.

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 3:50pm

That’s very likely and I can ask the admin to add micro.blog to the whitelist. The only issue with that is that my Bluesky crossposts have also not been working over the same time frame.

jsonbecker · March 25, 2025, 4:10pm

I think, though I’m not certain, that crossposting may be tried sequentially so failing on the first one it tries to do may stop it from proceeding to attempt other crossposting.

sod · March 25, 2025, 4:10pm

Depending on how @manton has implemented the cross-posting, that might make sense. If cross-posting happens sequentially, a failure with Mastodon might prevent the Bluesky cross-posting code from executing.

My theory is that if you temporarily disable cross-posting to Mastodon, cross-posting to Bluesky will start working again.

Edit: yeah, what @jsonbecker said.

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 4:16pm

@sod Could also be, but since I’ve removed Mastodon in order to re-authenticate it, it’s no longer in the chain and subsequent posts have not been crossposted to Bluesky. Definitely high quality elimination process, though which I appreciate. This might suggest that there is both a crossposting issue and that I only happened across the Cloudflare proxy issue because I detached Mastodon whilst troubleshooting. Of course, as a writer, it’s all well beyond my pay-grade

manton · March 25, 2025, 4:46pm

Confirming that cross-posting happens sequentially, so if anything blows up, unfortunately it halts processing the other services. I’m sorry about this limitation and can work on making it less fragile.

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 5:04pm

Well, that settled that! I guess I had made my last post before I removed Mastodon crossposting. I just posted a test message, and it’s gone to Bluesky and Tumblr as expected. I’ve sent a note to my instance admin asking to add Micro.blog to the Cloudflare whitelist, and he’s also very responsive. His name is Jerry. AdminJerry.

Reminds me of that Primus song. Jerry was a masto admin…

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 6:53pm

Just to follow up, Jerry got back to me and sent me a screenshot of his logs. There doesn’t appear to be any blocking going on. So, below are a screenshot of the salient portion of his logs and the two shots I took to show him my process.

manton · March 25, 2025, 7:49pm

Thanks for the screenshots! I have another theory if why this was happening and I just rolled out a fix for it. Can you try signing in one more time?

tylerknowsnothing · March 25, 2025, 7:54pm

Tried again after a shift-reload and still the same error. Also tried with fresh logins on Mb and hear-me on my iPhone Safari and same result.