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.
Why are some people so batshit insane ???
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 just read about this and it’s kind of insane. Thank you for all your efforts!
I honestly didn’t catch that this server was one of the blacklisted ones. Seriously fucking wild.
Those db0 kids are chill.
EDIT: Just looked at the JSON.
What the fuck they blocked YOU, @[email protected] ? Seriously what the flying fuck.
They got my piefed account too!
It really roils me because you seem to be one of the most level-headed people in the Fediverse. I love running across your comments in random threads because you always have something of value to add, and you write well, to boot.
As you said yourself, it’s not the blocklist that’s the issue it’s that it’s not documented, seems somewhat intentionally hidden (including the apps claim that blocked sites are “incompatible”), and so the people deploying it aren’t even aware it’s there and don’t have the option to disable or change it to suit their needs. It’s very, very sketchy behavior on the part of the developer.
I was peeking around on db0’s post about it, and somebody mentioned that it’s really bad code structure, too. Which is true, hard-coding lists is atrociously hostile to convention and clean habits. It would be like if a chef never washed their hands because they thought it added flavor.
Hard coded lists are sometimes ok… but not for something that will change frequently like a ban list of websites
So it’s vibe coded?
No, it’s spite coded.
Ah dang. Did they get my nick at all? 🤞
Nah gotta up your posting game, I got individually and regex blocked 💪
Wonder if we should ask the devs of Lemmy and Piefed to somehow disable access to them, as it’s far-right idiots doing this… they may be tankies or liberals, but they’re not brownshirt fascists.
I’m not sure I understand, disable access to the blocklists? That’s up to the frontend Tesseract, it doesn’t interact with lemmy or piefed. It’s the frontend that is developed independently from either choosing not to display posts depending on the dev’s weird list.
As for piefed, the main dev has his own strongly opinionated lists that he maintains. Most of them can be disabled by the admins who set up a piefed instance.
I meant as in, that those who ““develop”” the crap frontend, can no longer access whatever enables them to develop it. If that’s on Lemmy’s devs, then that’s there.
I find it problematic if that were possible on one hand, but on another, the time is always to fight fascism.
Oh, that’s not really thing in open-source. The source being public means anyone can work on it. There are certain restrictions in terms of monetizing that are put in place by licensing but you can’t forbid individual people from working with, rewriting or redistributing the code (for good reason).
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.
UPDATE: The Tesseract project author made a public post addressing the obscured ban list: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942
There’s some clarity provided, most interestingly recontextualizing the hidden ban list as a “toxic mode” setting that can be turned on and off by the instance admin. So sure, that’s nice and all, but it still groups our entire instance, and our admin, in with the literal worst of the internet, making us banned by default. That’s the moral assessment this person has made of us, with no justification or receipts to back it up.
Just…
“These are all rough edges of the threadiverse which I am attempting to round off so we might actually be able to retain some level headed people instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel by being a dumping ground for people rejected by civil society.”
That’s pretty warped, but I don’t want to call it unforgivable. I just want the author to introspect and say more about why they feel this way.
Probably promoting his own biases while also blocking spam to justify its existence.
EDIT: I was right. This is from their angry defensive screed.
To be blunt: Tesseract is designed to attract and retain normies.
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 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.
