Tesseract is/was an alternative frontend for Lemmy sites. Its developer — asimons04 — hid malware in it. It would secretly download an obfuscated ban list with instances, communities, and people that asimons04 wanted to personally discriminate against and it would silently shadowban them from any site that used Tesseract.

The bans were heavily anti-fash leftists and queer folks, including yours truly.

This was discovered through some community sleuthing in the last several days. Asimons04 has since deleted their repos and accounts and disappeared moved repos to break forking and posted an unhinged rant to dubvee.

@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has forked Tesseract since it had some nice features and they seem to be working on thoughtfully removing the malware.

Those finding their name on the list are treating it as a badge of honor, since it shows that asimons04 was a conniving fascist bigot.

The rabbit hole begins here.
https://lemmy.world/post/49778353