Are you on the list? If so, congrats!

More info: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45728788

Hey! I'm in that list and I have no clue what any of this is about 🙂

What the hell is Tesseract?

Wow, this dev must be an absolute chud, in which case I'm honored to have triggered them so. Tongue punch my fartbox, loser.

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 🙂

Yep, I'm on there.

delighted to see that a username I used to go by on a couple instances has a regex entry, somewhat disappointed this username isn't in there. Clearly I need to step up my game on this account.

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.

Yup, and this is just speculation, but I guess it’s supposed to be an anti-spam thing, but it targets a lot of people/communities/instances that post actually good content

Disappointed I didn't make the list. How many cocktails do I need to Molotov to get the recognition I deserve?

Awww dang, I'm not on there. I guess I should be a bit more venomous in my comments.

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.

I'm not on the list, I feel deeply offended, I need to work more actively to improve this site.

Why would anyone want to use software under those conditions?You have to be a real loser to not be able to interact with all those people and try to prevent others from doing so as well.

It’s not anti spam at this point. No one obfuscates something that much for antispam.

ME ME ME ME ME ME ME

RICKYSWEEP2026

I'm honoured!

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

I'm surprised I made the list, I'm not terribly prolific and mostly post animal memes. I guess I should feel seen!

Just say things like ACAB and trans.

I'm so envious.

Just like my school repoets: I must work harder [to make the list]

It's also a weird place for anti-spam, to have it be client side. That should be done on the server, rather than the various clients handling it.

I post leftist, feminist, gay shit all the time and didn't get blocked. They just shadowbanned my news coms. This is outrageous.

Hmm this version has 8 more people on it than the one I saw yesterday. Maybe it's being actively maintained, despite the attention.

True! Idk, that part is just speculation, hence why I said I guess, not I know. Either way, they did a shitty job that should be shunned.

I make leftist anticapitalist posts comments all the time. How TF am I not on the list?

Any idea what the regexis mean? I landed there which is funny because that means my .world, dbzer0, ml, mbin, piefed, and hexbear accounts would all likely get pegged under the same name, lol.

No idea why I'm on there, but I am.

I feel like we should form a veterans league. Call it Adrian's Heroes or something.

Do I even interact with this front end as a lemmy.ca user using old.reddit sytle viewer?

I'm on the list and I haven't noticed anything.

Maybe he just doesn't like cheeseburgers

I'm on the list and I've never even posted anything. I do comment a decent amount, though, but I wouldn't consider any of it to be spam.

Don’t you do something similar with piefed? You don’t block them but you tag them for all users as “problematic” etc, iirc?

It would be hilarious if the dev cant even see these posts because they are all made by blocked users and such. Think they use their own frontend that way?

Shit, I gotta dial up the woke more.

Human rights for everyone, I guess? Will that do it?

PieFed does all kinds of stuff but I talk about it in public.

e.g. https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

Despite this I'm sure someone will arrive shortly to describe all the times I didn't document or communicate clearly enough.

The Admiral posted this to his com: https://lemmy.today/post/57096701

Pinned and locked it, too. Apparently nothing was blocked, you only need to enable "toxic mode" to see the banned content.

To disable them (referred to as enabling Toxic Mode in the settings), it’s as simple as:

Settings -> Advanced -> Click the "I feel like some content is missing. What's up?" text at the bottom -> Enable Toxic Mode

I didn’t want to add that option, but I conceded nonetheless, and it’s been available the whole fucking time. I’ll admit the fine print buried at the bottom of the advanced settings isn’t the most upfront place to put it, but it is there, and there’s nothing stopping you from turning it on.¹

¹ Admins who deploy Tesseract can opt to disable the availability of toxic mode, but it is available by default.

It even flat out says why that exists:

Tesseract attempts to filter out as much baseline toxicity as possible in order to make the default experience welcoming and round off some of the Fediverse’s rougher edges. This is particularly important for attracting and retaining new users and for facilitating long-term growth of the platform. If you absolutely must, you can enable ‘Toxic

When non-toxic becomes toxic. I don't object to the idea These include very vanilla users, left, right, center. What is this person's criteria for "toxic?" but yumpin yimminy the wording...

PeteLink is on there, and he's very nontoxic, unless posting about genocide is toxic.

I'm there.

I dun good

It's bullshit, I know. The block list even included my tiny 115 subscriber community for independent canadian news. He must have had to dig to find it and then find something wrong with it.

How the fuck am I not on the list.

My understanding of regex is used to capture certain words used together, so it might catch life and choice, or some other combination deemed bad

https://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.php#ref

“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

Call attention to genocide/ethnic cleansing.

Oh so that's cool

Wheeeeeeee, I'm in the user regex!

Why regex? I never used that name anywhere, could have added my user directly and saved some compute?

WOOHOO!

Maybe he's just offended by your username, there's no such thing as too many pancakes