Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:

And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.

"Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!"

Damn, Admiral Patrick makes so much sense now...

Somebody fill me in on the drama here? db0 has pissed me off when he decided certain political opinions where more important than free speech.

From another user:

Big frontend called Tessarect did a sneaky.

They made a hidden shadow-ban list of instances, users, and phrases, keeping it secret from users and admins by not including it in the open source code and instead loading it at runtime, and added in there all non-centrist (instances, users, and phrases) they could think of. They also lied about it, by claiming it to be a technical issue, when any user looked for the banned instances from the front-end, instead of calling it what it is, a targeted exclusion.

Essentially, hidden censorship, and sliminess.

Its a kind of administrative abuse of power that has been slowly destroying the fediverse from the inside for a very long time. And it's not unique to the fediverse. But it's unique within the fediverse, in that the fediverse is a community built specifically to go against this kind of abuse of power.

We've been having a laugh about it but it's actually such a senseless abuse of trust and power, it's challenging to imagine them being anything less than a paraiah for all of time for doing this. Its implementation was quite clever and very insipid, because the snuck the ban list in in such a way you couldn't review it or even know of its existence.

Edit: I wasn't aware of the full situation when I wrote this post, so take it with a grain of salt. Holy shit.

I really appreciate the statement. I don't agree with the action and think they are stupid and dangerous for the Threadiverse, as a frontend shouldn't decide what the user sees, the instance administration is the one to decide. If an instance want to go beehaw, to build a peaceful place and attract Normie's, that is great. But it's not for a frontend developer to decide. If the block list and block policy would have been communicated very prominent for everybody to check out, fine. But this is just stupid.

And by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of OPs opinions. The Threadiverse is toxic on many occasions. Instances like Lemmy.ml and dbzero are problematic and probably partly responsible for the Threadiverse not to grow. But again, it's the instance administration who should decide what the user to see. It is just not understandable for the user to have multiple levels of administrators.

You've got it backwards. Its the heavy handed administrative approach which stalled out growth in the fediverse. Not users you find personally annoying.

lmfao, that (linked) post. Read four words and almost fell backwards off my chair due to the sheer concentrated dipshittery, it's like taking a firehose to the face.

Oh that's a top tier temper tantrum trying to justify themselves. They got caught and they're real mad about it.

Read the context and if anything, it made me want to use the app. Can't find it though, links are all dead.

/edit
Yeah, that was a dumb take. Just heard about the script in his farewell message that would ddos am instance. Fuck that shit.

So what's your solution? Because we can't just have less moderation and administration without something to replace it. If you want to move it to the frontend, then at least make it opt in and tell people (except spam)

Like in the bluesky model (atproto) you can pick and choose between appview, clients, moderation lists, etc. You can even bypass your current appview (frontend server) to fetch directly from a user's host or from another index (appview or relay)

You're also ignoring that there are many different types of users, and that lurkers drastically outnumber active posters. You lose a few active users from strict moderation, and you lose masses of lurkers from obnoxious users flooding every thread. And you get new active users from lurkers.

Fediverse growth is stalled for the same reason every alternative stalls: there's no one here, so there's no reason to join. Add on that there's no way for content factories to recoup the costs of content creation, no way to ensure their work reaches maximum eyeballs, and you pretty much guarantee a niche platform.

It''s the whole reason I'm here. I'm not interested in bullshit engagement-bait or people competing for imaginary internet points. Administration is going to do whatever administration wants, but if they're open and explicit about it, I can shop around for an instance that fits me. If they obfuscate their heavy handed administration, then I might as well go back to the algorithm.

Here's the full list, my revenge for not being on it:

Who knows, right now the small size may actually be a straight up benefit. Yes, there is almost no content compared to Reddit. But we're also so small still that it's not particularly worthwhile to have bots going here compared to Reddit. So there is a much higher percentage of actual human interaction here. The other place is almost all bots now, it's actually unbelievable.

Hahaha thank you!

anarchism means we are free to play the victim anytime we want

That post from the creator reads like a 4chan chud who escaped containment and is mad about their stinky diaper. Honestly, having read some of their little hissy fit about being caught, fuck that friendless asshole.

With a blacklist like that, I'm surprised any content appeared at all, the instances listed cover most of what I see on All

Upset? Everyone who's on the list sees it as a badge of honour

This isn't the full list, some people were on it regardless of instance. I'm on it, but it's any user who has my name and any numbers after it for some reason

Do you know a good place to upload files? I'll upload it for you

not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.

Lmao because nobody knew until db0 pointed it out. Do you really think the community at large would've taken it well if they had known?

I don't mean this ironically but this person needs to touch grass. Go offline. Disengage.

Why are you being such a whiny bitch about this? Are you his alt?

Like Charles said this is just the direct bans, there's a whole regex section that goes one step further

Long story short, at some point, the Fediverse stopped growing organically and simply became the dumping ground for all of the people too radioactive to be platformed anywhere else in civil society.

Eh, they're not wrong about a few of their points. Discovering Lemmy after being banned from Reddit is a very common occurrence. Blocking lemmy.ml also makes using the site a much less abrasive experience.

If all that talk of "tesseract is more than a client, it's an experience that sands off the rough edges of the fediverse" was true wouldn't that be prominently featured in the readme and UI? All this "toxic mode" and "extremists" buzzwords make it seem like you're protecting users, but many users of Lemmy are here exactly because of those "rough edges", fleeing from the sanitized, censored, unfree mainstream websites. Not because we're terrorists, but because we believe that saying "billionaires should be hanged" shouldn't be disallowed. Fuck facebookifying my experience by showing boomer memes and hiding real talk.

and the remaining 20% just garden-variety spammers and toxic people who scare the normies away.

Oh man, I'd rather have a list of normies that make the internet slop

I think he should be set on fire, along with all the other people I'm on Lemmy to say should be set on fire.

Wow what a cock. He thinks I fit in the category of being a "violent extremist?" Seriously? All I ever do is advocate for peacefully voting assholes out of office. Fuck this guy and his quiet censorship. May he always find a pebble in his shoe.

There is nothing to be solved? Or rather nothing to be solved in regard to silencing voices.

Don't like someone's opinion? Get into arguments with strangers online about it. Change their minds. Or don't. That's up to you. But structural silencing and obscuring of voices and communities isnt the way.

The real issue here is accountability and that we do need a solution for. And the answer is already in the fediverse, I. That we need to have a democratic approach to moderation and to some extent administration.

Take for example what happened recently with @PugJesus@piefed.social. Real permanent damage was done to our community and there will be no accountability on the parts of the admins who made those decisions.

I've watched the consequences and damage which admin and mods have caused. They view the fediverse or their subs as theirs to control, case in point.

Admiral used Blahaj as an example of a "terrorist" instance in their rant.

This confirms they are just another garden variety fascist trying to sanitize the world around them because they're too fragile to adapt, and in their psychosis they think everyone else will support their obviously broken mindset.

Yo admiral fash, if you're here with us go ahead and add me to your walmart brand palantir system. I stand with LGBTQIA, and rest assured I'd have some violence for you for silencing their voices.

Defederation, instance/community bans, and personal block lists already manage that. Pretending to curate the user's experience by using a hidden blacklist that's mostly decided by the dev's personal grievances is just power tripping bs.

Of course they locked the post so you can't reply

Fyi, that list doesn't collapse on some clients and is egregiously long. Hosting it on pastebin or something would probably be better.

Not arguing that, I'm just saying I understand some of their motivations.

Weird experience to get labeled as too radioactive for any other social media by someone I haven't thought about at all before today

Yes

every day i wake up, log into lemmy, and advocate for setting a select list of people on fire. do people use this platform for something else?

wild to see aussie.zone, but wilder to see BOTH the big furry instances. they’re so specifically non-toxic lmao

e: ada is in there by name TWICE. blocking the whole instance just isn’t enough, gotta get that clean triple shadowban hahahah

Don't know the situation, but I'm a little confused after reading the linked post. In the link post, the dev says that it was always mentioned in the app's settings with a "toxic mode" that turned off the filtering, yet everyone here talks about it as if he kept it a secret. What's going on? Was that text actually in the settings or is the dev lying here? If it was in the settings, why is everyone claiming the dev hid it?

I'm also a fan of beheadings and trying to bring back drawing and quartering.

Looks like it was added a couple months ago, see e.g. https://dubvee.org/post/5865082.

The hidden file though was not included in the code repository as would be more standard for a FOSS project like this. This alternative web UI is thus making use of the author's personal blacklist, rather than one shipped with the code and that could be modified by instance admins during installation of it.

Read more about that part here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942.

Ah OK, that's weird... Yeah, it's only mentioned very vaguely in the changelog.

What I don't understand is: where does it pull the blacklist from?

ah we frequent the same communities!

It's not an app, it's an alternative front-end e.g. you would access your existing account and instance via https://t.feddit.org/.

Your instance's sidebar text also mentions others too: Photon, Alexandrite, Next - I don't think I've ever heard of this one - and mlmym (old), apparently not aware that there is now a fork that took up maintenance.

Like the Lemmy back-end software, it is up to your instance admins to deploy and configure these alternative front-end UIs.

That's going in the Book...

Hey, that's an insult to Patrick Star

Palantemu

From his server, where only he has control.

There is also some rumblings about the fact that this list, which is pulled in from his own server and compressed/encrypted so that using file search tools on it wouldn’t turn up any results, isn’t actually disabled by enabling “toxic mode”; but I can’t prove that.

Doesn’t matter, secret block lists that allow you to basically remotely moderate instances where your frontend is installed is some Temu CIA shit. That guy can take his hubris and fuck right back off to Reddit

https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy

Full details in https://lemmy.world/post/49778353 including how to download and decompress (111KB of JSON).

Supposedly that second, larger & hidden list you can disable, it's the first, smaller & reportedly hard-coded instance list that you cannot as readily do.

That's a winner.