I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it’s been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.
Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There’s a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we’ve been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.
This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.
When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is “incompatible with that instance” which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.
Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don’t just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn’t it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think…
Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I’ll doubt I’ll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we’ll bring up mlmym again now that someone’s maintaining it again.
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I haven’t heard of tessaract before this…
Update, it seems like the Tesseract Dev and owner of Dubvee.org has responded to this, by shutting off his instance and redirecting the domain to this picture:
Real mature of him. I would encourage not using Tesseract anymore or if you must, using the Fork db0 provides, and contributing to that instead of the main one.
The butthurt is strong with this one.
Between Piefed doing the CCP shadow profiling and now Tesseract doing a Truth Social Approved Banlist, it feels like the Fediverse is entering or has fully entered the “techbros and nazis grab interest and seek for ways to enshittify” stage.
Oh well, at least it means we’ve got some attention.
Heinous behavior and would make me never use Tesseract because it’s been compromised beyond compare. I already filter the ones that don’t act in good faith, bot driven, or spread misinformation. That is my right as a user to evaluate an instance and decide if they are worth my time or a domain block to save me the trouble. Learning based on this post that Piefed has done something similar…Makes me glad that I stuck with my Mbin instance (after the demise of lemmynsfw). Like, unhealthy behavior on the part of turbolibs, it’s good that I read this post and will be very carefully about the software/fediverse instances I join.
export const BLACKLISTED_INSTANCES: string[] = [ "abolish.capital", "altmedia.house", "anarchist.nexus", "chapo.chat", "chatgptjailbreak.tech", "diggita.com", "hexbear.com", "hexbear.net", "ibbit.at", "test.hexbear.net", "www.hexbear.net", "hilariouschaos.com", "lemmy.bestiver.se", "lemmy.blahaj.zone", "lemmy.dbzer0.com", "lemmy.doesnotexist.club", "lemmy.durstig.online", "lemmy.ml", "lemmy.razbot.xyz", "lemmybefree.net", "lemmygrad.ml", "lemmyusa.com", "lemy.lol", "maga.place", "multiverse.soulism.net", "news.abolish.capital", "nnia.space", "noauthority.social", "r.nf", "realbitcoin.cash", "redlemmy.com", "welppp.com" ]Not exactly crying a tear for the Tankie Triad or the right-wing MAGAts. Shouldn’t be hard coded, should always be configurable.
But what the fuck did the flotilla do‽
lemy.lol
What the fuck did I do‽‽
Lemmy.blahaj.zone
What‽
Ayyy look who discovers that censorship against the “tankies” will soon turn into censorship against all wrongthink.
no no they’ll come for the communists and stop there
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a CommunistAnd that was that the end
But what the fuck did the flotilla do‽
Last I heard of them, they openly criticize EU support for Israel.
Based
We also defederated feddit.org for apologizing for and promoting Zionist liberal apologia.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, there is no reason a frontend developer should be making decisions about censorship on other people’s instances, no matter how reasonable it seems. That’s what they are trying to do. It’s why they hardcoded it and also why they changed the message to say “not compatible”. This is a major overstep from a developer to try to block or censor content on instances that are not their own, and is a breach of trust.
When you write code that runs on other people’s machines you need to hold yourself, or otherwise be held to a higher standard than if you’re just writing shit for yourself or for fun. Crap like this doesn’t meet that standard.Yea, I mean there’s room for “dev suggested lists” or some shit, but it needs to be documented, configurable and upfront about it at some point early on in the instance setup flow. Like in the setup guide docs or during first time setup menus.
This shit is totally unacceptable
Lemmy though has its own instance moderation tools so it’s also just unnecessary. The entire reason he did this is the hope that instance admins won’t notice it and that even if they do they might not be able to control it without recompiling.
Oh there’s room for a frontend to have mod tooling, Lemmy’s built-in moderation tools SUCK. They’re really basic and development is SLOW. We’re supposed to have better in v1, that’ll come…any day now LMAO
I often switch to Tess just for the mod tools when I need to do anything more than basic basic stuff lol
can’t moderate me on Tess I’m hidden
What I mean is, there is no reason for a frontend to do what Lemmy already does in the transparent way it does it. I used Tesseract for its community moderation tools and I think other’s do as well.
It just doesn’t make sense to do censorship in the UI tool exclusively when Lemmy has those options already, it would be like hiding someone from the UI while not blocking their account in the backend. Moderation tooling should be tied into the real features that we already have in the backend or it’s not really doing anything.
Vanguard type shit. Typical “liberal” behavior
Nazi type shit
