let's goooooooo

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?

took me a while to realize that tesseract is also the name of a lemmy frontend. because there's also tesseract-ocr which is used for optical character recognition. (i started using tesseract-ocr yesterday to scan all my meme images for text to make them easily searchable).

I just logged in this afternoon and saw all this going on with Tesseract. Does anyone have a link to an article or summary of what is going on? I heard of this program until lemmy got a bunch of posts about it. lol

Looks like it's now been removed from GitHub too... That chode went from 9 to 8 repos.

What a sad loser. May his days be short. 👍

The fuck?? Why in the world is a front end blacklisting people or instances??

ETA: This is literally the first thing I see after coming back from a break. Also, I'm so sorry you have to deal with this Ada, the dev sounds like a jackass

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, @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ? Seriously what the flying fuck.

What's the deal with this Tesseract developer? Did they just block everyone that has ever looked at them funny? I looked at the blocklist and saw all kinds of people: trans-oriented, piracy-oriented, and lots of tankie-oriented instances. And a lot of users I'd never heard of.

Now they've taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won't have to answer any questions.

Why are some people so batshit insane ???

I'm a bit miffed that I'm not shadow blacklisted.

But also wtf

And lastly, porn is ok but GirlsFrontline is banned? Lol. It's like an anime style game. Looks kinda stupid to me but i wouldn't be shadow banning it

I used to use that frontend, and I am in that block list. What irony!

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.