Are you on the list? Do you want a badge?
No, I'm serious.

Or just steal this .gif!
Are you on the list? Do you want a badge?
No, I'm serious.

Or just steal this .gif!
making a list of undesirables to disenfranchise is a rather alarmingly faschy thing to do >.>; just sayin'...
i've been mulling it over and it creeps me out more and more. all too easily, a misplaced sense of self-importance in a principal administrative figure can spoil like milk forgotten in a hot car. I've seen this sort of thing happen PERSONALLY.
Someone I had known became the big fish in their small pond. They began systematically ejecting and excommunicating anyone who didn't agree with them. Eventually the only people left in their circle were exclusively yes-men who did not DARE to challenge or question anything--lest they were to dispose of said yes-men too. Yes-men incentivized to say 'yes' to, and thereby condone, and then encourage, increasingly outrageous and deranged impulses.
The first domino has fallen over and struck the second, which is now tilting past any point of equilibrium. For a while longer, everything will be fine; the people who ingratiate themselves will be selectively immune from the same criticisms that get others blanket-'disappeared'... so hey, one might enjoy using that frontend for now...
...but I implore mindfulness and wariness. Very seldom do I see someone cross the first line without crossing the rest of them eventually. It's not impossible, but it's far from common. Anyone still using that frontend, if they start seeing "a certain kind of person" being bolstered exceptionally at the expense of everyone else, it's time to bail.
While it's not my place to dictate what the tesseract dev does, I do recall reading that they specifically were feeling dissatisfied with the work, and disappointed by the way their users were acting, and had been considering abandoning the project. While I can't speak for this developer, obviously, I can't help but imagine myself in their position... and on that basis I for one believe I would have sooner relinquished the project and walked away entirely rather than see myself turn it into a tool of targeted harassment and marginalization With A Cheerful Coat Of Paint.
.......
it's just setting off my alarm bells real bad. This looks too much like other abusive shit i've been through over the decades.
but eh. maybe i'm just paranoid... grain of salt, mileage may vary, et cetera.
I just want Lemmy to have a better, more wholesome, and welcoming experience for new users, as such I've decided to block the things I think we can all agree are bad:
Hey! I'm in that list and I have no clue what any of this is about 🙂
What the hell is Tesseract?
It’s really just a custom ui/frontend that admins can run for their lemmy/(piefed too?) instances.
Well, I quickly read through that list and I'll say this: considering the insane amount of stuff that gets silently filtered out, whoever views Lemmy through that thing must think it's pretty quiet 🙂
And that’s a large part of the issue. The frontend doesn’t actually disclose this blocklist at all. In fact, it actively takes steps to obfuscate things and make it appear as if the blocklist doesn’t exist at all.
For example, attempting to view a blocked instance shows a generic network error, rather than a “this instance is being blocked by your frontend” error. And blocked users aren’t simply flagged and/or collapsed. They’re entirely hidden, as if they don’t exist at all. So someone using this as their primary frontend wouldn’t even know that they’re missing entire posts and/or comment chains, because anything from the blocked users is simply gone.
Additionally, the blocklist is downloaded (in plaintext, over http) when the frontend is booted, so it’s not a file that gets updated with the git version updates. Meaning the dev can silently update it even if users haven’t pulled new versions. Simply rebooting your frontend would be enough to pull an updated blocklist. This gives the dev an extreme amount of censorship power, because they can effectively change users’ configs without any action on the users’ part.
It was only originally discovered because the admin for db0 used the frontend. And notably, db0 is on the block list. They were previously using an old version of the frontend that didn’t include the hidden blocklist yet. They updated their Lemmy stack a little while ago, and suddenly their entire frontend was broken (the entire feed was completely empty) and showing a generic version incompatibility error.
After lots of troubleshooting, the db0 admin eventually discovered that the frontend was downloading a hidden blocklist and automatically blocking the instance that it was running on. Because when they updated their stack, the new version of Tesseract included the secret blocklist. So it downloaded the blocklist when it booted up, found that db0 was on the list, and silently hid every single post because they were all from a blocked instance. This resulted in a completely empty feed.
Considering the amount of effort put into the blocklist by the Tesseract dev to keep it hidden, you would think they would have included an exception if it was running on a blocked instance to help keep it hidden.
Feeling offended now, going back through my comment history and thinking "Why did that not get me on there?" Am I too tame?
It's probably because I spend 60% of my time on here overthinking and eventually deleting my posts before posting them...
And 30% writing the posts that never get posted.
Yeah you'd be overthinking it since the dev wasn't doing much themselves. The blacklist was not put together coherently and appears to be mostly built by emotion, especially in light of the dev's "I'm not sorry at all" response.
The dev is a part of a corporate structure they formed where they're named CFO. They are, in their mind, Fediverse C-suite, and they act accordingly.
Wow, this dev must be an absolute chud, in which case I'm honored to have triggered them so. Tongue punch my fartbox, loser.
There's a user regex section for people across multiple instances, so:
"^cheeseburger$",
I guess that means all my accounts are covered 😄, but why? Who the fuck am I to this fool? What an absolute clown.
“Kate” is also on the list 🫣 am i the only kate on lemmy? i don’t know of any others but i guess we’re all in this together if so
I post leftist, feminist, gay shit all the time and didn't get blocked. They just shadowbanned my news coms. This is outrageous.
I suppose this means the guy in question prefers velociraptors over people, otherwise I can't explain why am I on the list.
"^hierophante",
"^HistoryLOL",
"^hitstun$",
"^holyclergy$",
"^HomeInvasion$",
Oh, so that's why I can't find my own posts in Tesseract. I'm surprised they didn't block my whole community.
I haven't even used this site in a year. Dudes butthurt at lefties and it's so cute

How the hell am I on this list? I barely post it comment on anything.
I'm on the list, this account is only 3 months old, no posts, 41 comments.
Who and how the fuck did I piss off, lol
YSK I have a personal black list of users that I never will see again. If you can still see this message you’re fine.
Made it!
Found myself. What's this all about then?
OOOOHHHHH, so this is about Leftist cred. I see. ;) I guess this proves I'm not a misogynist, like the Admins on 196 seem to think.
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