I’m picturing one of these bipedal robots carrying a ripped, dripping garbage bag all the way through the house, hobbling along in that slow, wobbly gait they have, struggling with the doorknob for 5 minutes and eventually arriving at the sidewalk bin 20 minutes later to deposit a soggy mostly empty bag and then spending the rest of the day attempting to gather all the trash from the ground in this mysterious trail of garbage that leads from the sidewalk all the way back to the garbage can.

Very close. It’s actually Mr. Krabs that the boots are driving nuts in that one.

Had a gen z coworker once who was a little mind-blown when I pointed out that the squeaky boots episode of SpongeBob is just “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Usually any time I’ve tried to share that fun fact, anyone who’s already familiar with both stories has already connected the dots. It was pretty fun to witness the “holy shit it IS the same story” realization in real time.

I watched an extended breakdown on YouTube of this dude who’s been an absolute villain of the Skyrim modding scene for like over a decade. I honestly can’t recommend anyone watch it because it’ll just make you angry. I was happily playing modded Skyrim for years without knowing anything about him. After I learned of his existence, I realized that some of the issues I’d had with modding Skyrim over the years were actually deliberately caused by this guy when I’d assumed it was due to the general flakiness of modding.

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?