Link: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/main/src/lib/blacklists.ts#L2270

I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it's been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.

Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There's a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we've been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.

This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.

When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is "incompatible with that instance" which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.

Isn't it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don't just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn't it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think...

Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I'll doubt I'll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we'll bring up mlmym again now that someone's maintaining it again.

What the hell?!? Why isn't Anarchist Nexus on the blacklist? Are we not posting hard enough? 👿 /j

Congrats @hexbear for being #1 on this guy's list.

It is.

Looks like the admin is anal enough to sort these alphabetically, so it's actually abolish.capital

Oh whoops 😅. I guess we were banned before this commit?

I suspect so. I think it all came down during the big slapfight with piefed where A.N. was the first one to get pointed at for "extremism"

Some of those tankie instances have been pretty aggressive with others, so I can understand that a developer wants to make its project more accessible to normal people by blocking them. Now, do all the instances on this list deserve it? I don't know. Also, it would probably be a better compromise to have this as a visible "safe default" and let admins edit it easily.

Any chance you could post his blacklist? I'd like to know where I should be subscribing . . ?

Thanks for your great work.

I linked it in the main post

They should just add an option: OBEY=y/n

This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.

What a stirring endorsement.

I say, keep it up!

What's more anarchist than taking their code and liberating it?

Doubtful it's tankies, this looks like it's fascist work.

export const BLACKLISTED_INSTANCES: string[] = [
        "abolish.capital",
        "altmedia.house",
        "anarchist.nexus",
        "chapo.chat",
        "chatgptjailbreak.tech",
        "diggita.com",
        "hexbear.com",
	"hexbear.net",
        "ibbit.at",
        "test.hexbear.net",
        "www.hexbear.net",
        "hilariouschaos.com",
        "lemmy.bestiver.se",
        "lemmy.blahaj.zone",
        "lemmy.dbzer0.com",
        "lemmy.doesnotexist.club",
        "lemmy.durstig.online",
        "lemmy.ml",
        "lemmy.razbot.xyz",
        "lemmybefree.net",
        "lemmygrad.ml",
        "lemmyusa.com",
        "lemy.lol",
        "maga.place",
        "multiverse.soulism.net",
        "news.abolish.capital",
        "nnia.space",
        "noauthority.social",
        "r.nf",
        "realbitcoin.cash",
        "redlemmy.com",
        "welppp.com"
]

The dev of Tessaract is obviously a fascist, but oce isn't calling them a tankie, they're agreeing with the fascist that leftist instances should be censored, because "tankies"

Oh this is bullshit!

Quokk.au is both trans and anarchist; why are we not on this Nazi’s ban list? I demand the developer include us.

It’s very safe to say the only reason one would ban Blahaj is because they’re transphobes.

lmfao. What a weirdo. Gotta be top 10 most pathetic things in software dev.

Also holy fuck I would be ready with the cluebat if I wasted my time troubleshooting sabotage.

Didn't help that the latest update opened some doors to the all-oppressing chinese botnet scrapers and brought the instance to its knees. I was up until 3am firefighting yesterday.

How do you feel about quokk.au not getting the black mark? Kinda insulting ngl.

I thought you were running iocane or one of those fake link mazes?

Did it have some way to hit the DB past it? How?

Man remember when it just kinda worked to use robots.txt (ok Baidu always misbehaved but it didn't always exist). The internet used to be so cool if you were one of the weirdos initiated to the mysteries.

Truly horrible. I can't believe a Nazi ignored us.

I 'member. Capitalism ruins everything...

We do run iocaine but that only takes care of known spam subnets and scraping agents. You need to know who to target to send in iocaine first.
In front of that we have haphash which is a PoW. We don't use it site-wide though, as we're ok people scraping well-cached things like our frontpage. We use it on dynamic content like comments which scrapers love to scrape by the millions, each of them causing a DB query which we cannot cache.

It seems that new lemmy added some new url paths which I didn't know about (I think /comment/ is new, before it was all just /post/) which the botnmets discovered after a few hours and started scraping. On top of that I noticed that some scrapers were using random wildcard domain to go to the main site, so I punted those to iocaine as well.

Nice work. That guy can go fuck himself.

Politics aside, surely they must know that removing such a blocklist would be trivial for anyone technically competent enough to run a Lemmy instance?

Tesseract can be hosted open-ended. I.e. you can use it to connect to any instance. Which I guess the dev is doing. So you could use such an open-ended tesseract to connect to any instance which is not offering it directly. So in that case, it's a way for the dev to prevent such vanilla hosting from seeing leftist instances.

I wouldn't suggest anyone do that of course, especially with an untrustworthy dev like that as you'd have to trust the .js you're loading and passing your credentials or activities through are not getting intercepted for political reasons.

addy.io, mozmail.com (Firefox Relay) and even proton.me in THROWAWAY_EMAIL_DOMAINS. No Simplelogin/Proton pass though

No sopuli.xyz? Disappointed.

only palantir allowed

Which is ironic given that people here are upset about that mod forcing their political biases onto others.

Basically

• First they came for the communists ---totally cool

• Then they came for my outgroup --- wtf!!

It doesn't seem to be working correctly. I can't see any posts or profiles on dbzer0.

I'm not sure what you mean

Doesn't the software package for running a lemmy instance have a default defederation blacklist that includes some of these same instances? It sounds like they're talking about exactly that - an editable blacklist instead of hiding it as some kind of software error when you go somewhere the admin doesn't want you to. To which I say, Lemmy already has that, it's called defederation or muting an instance yourself.

Don't forget that MAGA instance on there

First they came for the MAGA, then they came for the commies /s

notice they're not denying the quoted criticisms

nice try implying that all the trans instances were banned btw, classy

There's a difference between not federating with fascists, spam, csam instances by default and not federating with leftist instances because you think it's scary to "normal" users.

This is what I saw when I tried to access !share_anime_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com. Now it shows all posts but ones from dbzer0, and it seems like every post is marked NSFW.

Apparently maga.place is super leftist /s

There are a few on there I would say have issues but weirdly the consensus here is that "no of course not these are all fine sites and now why isn't some other site on the list because it's leftist and belongs on the list as a badge of honor!" Kinda seems funny to me that no one noticed the maga site on the list. And you are the only person here to doubt that narrative. No one else considers that maybe this dev had a few bad experiences with some of these sites that maybe otherwise wouldn't be on the list..? I have no knowledge of most of them, but hexbear is about as head-fucked as an instance comes.

I wish emails/SMTP was illegal.
Hate it when I join webservices that ask me to use another protocol to authenticate my tired face.
There’s 0 reasons to 2FA, even Kerberos, outside the protocol one is using.

The commit history of that file (not naming it denylist is telling enough, tbh) is hilarious!

Shadowbanning users in the client, telling users they are subscribed to the wrong communities, it has everything lol

Amazing how these projects keep killing themselves by alienating huge portions of their userbase. Hard to survive in a FOSS environment by being extremely reactionary.

I think it works if you search for !share_anime_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com specifically. Not sure about the NSFW and missing posts, but it does come with some opionated user filters which one can disable in user settings

It's back to showing nothing again for me, even with all the filters off.

Check that you're showing read posts

You could generate a temporary mail address with guerilliamail

Someone should message them and tell them to do it

What a pathetic thing to do

We're not gay enough. Release the yuri files! Unleash revolutionary socialism! Effect the trans agenda!

I'm not logged in while viewing the posts. I'm using a private tab on Firefox.

I dunno mate, it's really not worth troubleshooting this anyway