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.

Genuinely WTF

Blacklisted: Tesseract.

Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need

Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration

I can forgive someone with a passing exposure to it not knowing, but MBFC is notorious for having biased rankings.

The regular example I use is the Guardian being placed on the same factuality ranking as breitbart (the nazi rag), but it's not one case, there's a general right-wing bias in the rankings.

The developer of this project is very clearly just trying to put their finger on the views of their users

Don't get me wrong, but this is a solid proof of the beauty of the Fediverse and FOSS in general you can do whatever you want and so can other people

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.

Haha! Now y'all know how it feels lol.

Oooooh we're blocklisted too! I guess we're too radical for them!

Any idea why MULTIVERSE is blocked but quokk.au isn't? Maybe they don't think you guys are as radical as us :P

Ah yes, the famously leftist and trans-friendly instance: maga.place

Deliberately missing Blahaj.zone?

Huh?

You can see the list, you focused on one shitty instance and ignored countless leftist and trans friendly ones in attempt to discredit the issue.

The fact that it's on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.

I wasn't ignoring anything. But you have a history of maliciously mislabelling people as anti-left and anti-trans, so worth pointing out that you're doing it here too.

It’s a crosspost, I didn’t make the post nor the title.

Make up all the excuses and deflections you want. There is zero reason for Blahaj.zone to be on this list except blatant transphobia.

Having a look, your mod log is pages long of bad faith and trolling. Seeing as you’re a single user instance and defending transphobia right now it’s probably best to just go ahead and not with bother with your nonsense any further.

defending transphobia right now

It is amazing that you offered up a textbook example of what I accused you of right here.

Absolutely nowhere have I defended transphobia. It's disgusting how often you try to discredit people using that tactic. It totally devalues real criticism of actual transphobia that hurts real people.

And if we're comparing modlogs, apparently I'm in good company with a racist, violent troll.

Just looked and Breitbart is listed as extreme right and mixed factual reporting.

The Guardian is listed as highly factual and left-center.

What are you referring to?

Try not being an asshole and maybe people won't want to block you so often

Holy shit have they finally updated it?

They had Guardian as mixed factuality for years

Unless they've completely overhauled all their rankings though, I expect a lot of the more subtle biases will still be present

Edit: from a year ago https://web.archive.org/web/20250816111509/https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/

And it had been like that for a number of years (I don't make a habit of checking it regularly given my distrust of it)

Honestly after looking at the list aside for blahaj (wtf I know) most of it is basically internet hygiene. Please look at the full list I wouldn't be surprised if the dev got in a fight with someone from that instance and childishly just black listed the whole instance.

Edit: after further inspection I was wrong and the dev has mentally derailed

Did you reply to the right comment?

Yeah, it sucks! I used to use Moshidon until they blacklisted the only Mastodon instance I use lol

I asked the dude who made it to fix the blocklist and he said no

It's a deliberate hate list for queer folk and leftists, pretty nakedly obvious. Calling that "internet hygiene" is a bit ridiculous.

I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social.

• Copied link
• In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post
• "Post not found". Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already???
• Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article.
• After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to !fediverse@lemmy.world , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It's missing.
• Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even.

So why can't I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?

Piefed.social is run by an admin with similar views on censoring leftists as the Tesseract devs. There was a whole fiasco about it a few months back, where the lead Dev of Piefed kept lists of Leftists and other users they permabanned for pointing out issues with Piefed's code.

OP is on that list.

What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.

Lead Dev is a crusader for establishment liberalism, essentially. Hates conservatives but also hates leftists. This puts them at odds with much of the fediverse, who lean more left than liberal.

One of their last changelogs they posted on Lemmy 11 mounths ago (halfa year before injecting said blocklists) considers content filtering: https://lemmy.world/post/35006054 They wrote it was a huge undertaking for them to rewrite the filtering engine specifically. Welp, it went out of hand.

Also:

Please do not take anything personally if you show up in the screenshots of my filtering preferences. These were either chosen at random because they were at the top of the feed at the time of testing or were chosen because they have both Lemmy and Piefed versions/alts and were used to test wildcard and regex based filtering.

It's funny to read it alongside their pretty opinionated commentary in blocklists.

☆ I want to log it: at the time of writing, no one brigaded the linked post or sub, upvotes on old 8mo old posts were in positives, lets not interfere with what's already dead.

we got no clue man

Self awareness will help you understanding why you're in the wrong here

I would recommend switching to piefed.ca

It's definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.

Thanks for the info!

I'm definitely biased as I'm a communist myself, but I'd argue this is more reflective of the politics of both sets of devs. Lemmy devs truly believe in the communist principles underlying the FOSS, federated project they have, while Piefed is unapologetically biased against that and towards liberalism. In other words, the principles speak for themselves in both projects.

No problem!

My strong guess would be that the turbolib Zionist mods/admins of lemmy.world are at it again.

lemmy.world of course being... you know, mostly ex reddit power mods, from the US.

On an unrelated note: We all know Ghislaine Maxwell was also a reddit power mod, right?

dbzero has always been very pro ai maybe thats why, odd that they blocked it tho, main one for piracy

The fact that it's on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.

Explain how blocking a single instance means someone is incapable of making a different block for transphobic reasons.

Why? I didn't make any such claim.

I literally quoted you claiming you had debunked the claim the block was transphobic. All you did was show a MAGA instance had also been blocked. Explain.

An anti-Leftist and anti-trans blocklist would not include a pro-Trump instance.

A blocklist designed for a number of other reasons could.

If the evidence for the claim that it's an anti-Left, anti-Trans blocklist is to look at the code and ignore the parts that don't fit that narrative, we can safely dismiss that claim.

I see zero justification in the git commit for the addition of blahaj, and you have failed to offer any explanation other than ‘not transphobia’ on the basis that a MAGA instance is also on the list.

You don't have to be a pedant. You can have all of a set inside another set. The title can clearly be read to mean that and the post seems pretty clear to me.

Shitty Piefed dev -> lemmy.world mod -> ex-reddit power mod -> Ghislaine Maxwell

makes about as much sense as

"We shouldn't have people starving in the streets or paying $35,000 to visit the emergency room" -> socialism -> USSR -> Stalin -> Holodomor

Sure, the links are there, but what a silly series of connections to reach to in order to paint your target as the worst possible thing to confuse the impressionable.

That's honestly probably a good point, yeah. Still amuses me.

They explicitly mention that dbzer0 is "extremist," ie that it has too many leftists.

Yep, one of those moments that feels pretty validating for my worldview, and proves the Lemmy approach to be correct.

I see zero justification in the git commit for the addition of blahaj

So? You not knowing the reason doesn't make it anti-Left or anti-Trans.

and you have failed to offer any explanation other than ‘not transphobia’

Right, because I'm not out here making strong positive claims about the devs motivations. I'm specifically criticizing those who are.

Specifically Mia, who baselessly accused Rimu of this same thing fairly recently.

I think its pretty obvious that I'm just throwing out something that is almost certainly not related, at the end.

I did literally say its 'unrelated'.

Because sometimes I'm a petty little bitch, just like you'd have to be to surreptitiously write an ideological ban list into some open source software.

I'm just illustrating a similar level of dirty play here... if that confuses idiots, I don't care, in fact that's part of the point.

Also, why am I talking to a throwaway acount right now?

Too cowardly to say something on your real account?

You can have all of a set inside another set.

Sure, but just because you can doesn't mean you do, and it makes the strong positive claim extremely flimsy.

So? You not knowing the reason

It's so interesting that until someone writes 'I'm doing this because I'm a transphobe' in the commit file, then it's wrong to suggest it was transphobic. Not at all suspect to silently hide the largest trans instance with zero comment! I'm sure it's a secret, very good reason that isn't transphobia that they just won't reveal for some reason!