Here is one of the post that should shed some light on the situation.

https://lemmy.world/post/49778547

Basically a Dev who made tesseract which is a front end for fir many web UI’s and apps shadowbanned users, communities, and key words and had it buried deep in the options and code and I believe they have stated that you could always revert back to having to go through advanced options and turn back on “toxic” mode.

This was found out out by some very savvy users and db0 community members. It seems that this Dev just made a list of things that they did not like and communities they didn’t like and decided to push it towards everyone else using their software without explicit notice. I think they have taken down their website due to the backlash and I’m having trouble finding the post where they were explaining themselves, but it seemed like it was heavily banning leftist,trans, socialist,anarchist communities and some odd ones like girlsofthefrontline ( basically anime women characters).

This list of all this randomness and banning of users and shadow banning them reeks of somebody who had a little too much time on their hands and was trying to force their own agenda, secretly and silence a lot of people without letting people know upfront, who are using their software that this was going on.

But I’m just a nerd and I dabble a little bit and here and there but that’s the gist of it. This and piefeds similar shenanigans Is just a reminder that even though it is fast that we need to be constantly on guard and protect our little part of the Internet :)