In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer.
Marked safe from Tesseract blocklist!
What’s the deal with this Tesseract developer? Did they just block everyone that has ever looked at them funny? I looked at the blocklist and saw all kinds of people: trans-oriented, piracy-oriented, and lots of tankie-oriented instances. And a lot of users I’d never heard of.
Now they’ve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won’t have to answer any questions.
Now they’ve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won’t have to answer any questions.
Tea is just all over the damn floor at this point.
…but like… what did they think was gonna happen? Did they think they were so clever that no one could figure it out? Even when it effectively broke functionality on sites that used it but were blocked? Like they couldn’t add in code to disable specific parts of it if it was deployed on one of those sites so they could keep the whole thing secret? Like just a little text search string to ignore any users and sites that match the site domain as its rolling out, so they would keep using it and be none the wiser because it would work for them but continue to have its blocklist maintained and secret because it wouldn’t cause any problems.
I hate that it takes me like zero effort to conceptualize a better way to have done this shady shit, but on the other hand I guess I’m just glad they weren’t that clever.
EDIT: Upon reflection, I do wonder if this was at least partially vibe coded, because LLMs don’t have forethought and can’t plan ahead for contingencies like that. Because it also seems like a no-brainer that it would lead to configuration failures if deployed on one of the sites that is blocked.
The dev was quite vocal about being against LLM usage. Most notably, I remember their April Fool’s Day post about an update that adds a bunch of AI features. The post was obviously just a big joke, full of disparaging comments about LLMs. With that said, that was April (maybe even 2025, I can’t remember). It’s possible that their opinion had changed in the time since. But I doubt it, personally.
I won’t lie, that mention of Nicole kinda got me nostalgic. What happened to you Nicole? Why did you forsake us?
This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.
The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”
So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.
Do I have that right?
Yep, you’ve got it!
I used to use that frontend, and I am in that block list. What irony!
Tell me about it. I liked that frontend so much I promoted it heavily. They blocked my whole instance…
Wonder if I’m in there? If not I’ll be saddened.
Edit: apparently I am WOOHOO, THANK YOU FOR THE BADGE OF HONOUR
How does one look?
I feel like that’s probably a badge of honor.
I’m a bit miffed that I’m not shadow blacklisted.
But also wtf
And lastly, porn is ok but GirlsFrontline is banned? Lol. It’s like an anime style game. Looks kinda stupid to me but i wouldn’t be shadow banning it
I guess it just is the wrong kind of porn according to the dev.
The fuck?? Why in the world is a front end blacklisting people or instances??
ETA: This is literally the first thing I see after coming back from a break. Also, I’m so sorry you have to deal with this Ada, the dev sounds like a jackass
Why are some people so batshit insane ???
Yeah but what about those stupid tankies AM I RIGHT BRO LOL but seriously we gotta block all leftist content or they will take over and people won’t think for themselves!
/s
This one is just getting wilder and wilder the more the code is analysed
What’s the tea?
Youshouldknow has been running discovery posts but it blacklists left wing, and trans friendly instances and communities, certain users, keywords (including stupid shit like “censoring me” and “Yuri” but not “hentai” or “furries” wat) and the dev took their entire instance offline to hide when the shit hit the fan
After the Rimu fiasco I tried returning to Lemmy and found Tesseract to be my favorite frontend primarily because of the ability to create community lists w/o subscribing to them (the closest thing I found to Piefed Feeds).
And then this happens…
I’m going back to RedditI highly recommend the Alexandrite front end if you liked Tesseract
Fun fact: your name made the list, too:
"^RockBottom", "^rockerface$", "^rockSlayer$", "^RockyDale([0-9]+)?$", "^RockyGlen([0-9]+)?$",Fuck yea, worth it!
Unfortunately I don’t see Tess-like community grouping feature in Alexandrite, and it doesn’t even have a setting for the default comment sorting method.
I don’t really like Tess’ UI design that much - I’m comfy with Lemmy’s default. It’s advanced features that I’m gonna miss. Alexandrite seems to be just as bare-boned as Lemmy’s UI.
But I found info on Lemmy 1.0 that will be released eventually and has most features that I want so I probably just gotta wait a little until that day comes.
That’s fair, I wasn’t aware of the advanced features. I didn’t like the Tesseract UI, so I immediately abandoned it after checking it out. Alexandrite had a similar appearance, with a UI I really like
Good. I support this decision.
Me as well.
Not sure you’re aware, but you are on the secret tesseract block list. Good job keep up the great work!
Good! If I weren’t on there I’d be sorely disappointed. Let the love flow through!
Whelp that explains why I’m experiencing login-loop at the blahaj.lemmy.zone landing page… I liked the UI & UX of Tes. Oh well.
Can’t we just fork it?
I think someone at db0 forked it. If someone does so and actually keeps it up to date and maintained I could see it getting added, but I can understand why the admins would want to hold off for now.
They did and it should work just fine like that until Lemmy 1.0 drops since the API v3 compatibility is slightly broken in 1.0 unfortunately.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone could probably add this fork back but it might not seem worth it because it will break in Lemmy 1.0 and it’s still software made by a transphobe.
If Tesseract was the only alternative UI, I’d probably keep a fork of it available for folk. But there are enough other UIs out there that I’d rather simply drop it and forget that it exists
Same. It was my default lemmy UI.
I’ll keep using the default Lemmy UI no matter how many times it breaks lmao
EDIT: OMFG it’s like it knew I said something, I got errored out for a moment I’m fucking dead 💀💀💀💀💀
Probably its sleeper agent got activated the moment you said remotely anything that isn’t batshit insane
welcome sib, you are one of us sick wackos now /j
literally me_irl
We contain multitudes
Poking through both /src/lib/blacklists.ts and the double-secret policy file that gets pulled on load (see snot flickerman’s comment on how to look at it), I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the end goal of blocking this specific set of keywords, fediverse peers, communities, users, etc.
You’ve got radical right stuff in here with radical left stuff, lots of lie-peddling news outlets and state-backed propaganda sources as well. Lots of focus on Russian-sourced content, and some attention paid to American MAGA crap. It’s quite strange to find blahaj hostnames and users among them.
My best guess is that this is a hammy attempt to make Tesseract a more bland beige version of fediverse content with the pointy jagged parts filed off. But porn is a-ok.
Really weird choices.
Probably promoting his own biases while also blocking spam to justify its existence.
Desperate centrists who believe the axiom that all of their beliefs represent reasonable moderate positions no matter what are some of the weirdest, most ingrown people next to rightwing chuds.
I don’t think this is even something centrist, centrism is all about blandness, a la “whatever doesn’t offend people that aren’t batshit insane”.
Maybe “centrist radicalism” is a better word, in that someone tries to gather everything crazy.
As an anarchist/council communist, it is my belief that whether you are communist, socialist, christian democrat, liberal or not, as long as you oppose fascism and whatever’s more right wing, you’re my ally.
Sure, with some I’ll agree much more, and coordinate more. But either way, either someone’s a fascist or is not. Those that aren’t, oppose fascism, and therefore must be called upon to grow labour’s democracy, as fascism is a danger to everyone, fascists themselves included.
I see what you are saying and I am not arguing some opposite radicalism, but where your approach fails is that nobody is a monolith, we are many people in many different situations and it matters which version of people we feed energy and validation into… thus we must be concerned with how within each of us there are many potential fascist selves and thus what it means to be an antifascist/normal decent adult as a verb is to commit to continually re-examining the growth of our feelings and ideas and pruning away the things that begin to become ingrown.
Also, what is considered bland and what is considered radical are some of the most political battlefields in society.
There’s certainly a subset on the Fedi who seem to desperately want it to become a massively popular thing that persists through the ages instead of small but deep and worthwhile community growth among those who do choose to participate. Will it last forever? Probably not, most things don’t. Friendster died before MySpace and people forget it even existed (I mean, it was legitimately terrible)
It makes me wonder if this person thinks that they’re making the Fedi more palatable for “normies” or something.
Because that’s what popularity always brings, a marginalization of already marginalized communities. This comic sums it up pretty well.
Honestly, I think as long as we stay small and have our own community existing under the radar so to speak we have less likelihood of being invaded by even more numerous asshats than we already do. Lemmy or Piefed becoming massively popular could actually be a detriment, especially in terms of hosting costs, since most instances are funded via donations or the admins own personal income.
We don’t have to stay small, we just have to kick out the bad and not put up with it.
I’ve been a part of online communities for a long time. The ones I value most in retrospect were relatively small, niche and disconnected from grand global everything-platforms.
The fediverse is a step towards an internet of a million weird micro communities, finding ways to talk to each other.
It never ends. I’m sorry and thank you for everything you do for us. We value your labor on our behalf. 💖
seems like a good move, thanks Ada!
Is someone going to spill the tea on this ?
The fediverse seems so petty.
The tea done been spilt, and although the document itself seems to have been created with AI assistance, it’s fairly accurate.
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45726226
This is the code to check it yourself:
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonEither open the JSON file in a text editor with a search function or just do a grep of it looking for “ada” and “blahaj”
I love that you provided the code like that. Truly a community conscious thing to do :)
Well OP in the other thread provided it, I’m just passing it along. I thought it was the most salient takeaway. Seeing for yourself beats trusting someone else’s word every time. Trust, but verify.
Amen to that!
Still, even relayed, it’s an extra bit of effort, and that’s what makes a community a community
