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What's going on with Tesseract and why are people upset? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 11 hours ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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I have no clue what Tesseract is, but we're several days in and now I'm seeing memes of people not being on some list. What is Tesseract? What is the list? Why do people want to be on it?

Does this have something to do with the OCR software?

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[–] 58 points 9 hours ago* (3 children)

Long story short:

A snowflake created a frontend for lemmy in which they added a hidden blacklist of communities, people and even words that were shadowbanned for everyone using it without informing first, so if you used it, you'd be seeing a censored version of the fediverse based solely on one person's opinion about what you should be seeing there.

Some smart people discovered this and the community didn't take it too well for how it was made (in particular, how it was not optional but forced on the user).

The dev of the frontend wasn't happy about it and ragequitted with a letter in which they basically say that we are all mad here (except them) and that the fediverse can't be saved because we are all pissed about this (as if they were our one and only saviour or some crap).

Edit: forgot to add: of course, the people and communities targeted on the ban were, coincidentally, lgbtq or allies and you know, anything that would piss a fascist.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 hours ago

    For anybody who doesn't know what a front end is, the job of the front end is generally to take data from the back end and present it to the user. So for the fediverse, a front end might be the web page or app. The back end is the actual instance where you made your user.

    Lots of front ends do filtering, but at the explicit instruction of the user. It's better to do it on the back end if you can because it's wasteful to send data to the front end only to throw it away. But there is a place for front end filtering, just not in secret.

    So in this case, a person who used tesseract as well as, say, a lemmy web page interface, would probably expect to see the same data in both places, but the tesseract front end would actually be hiding a lot of stuff.

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