cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299
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.
The first list is not hard-coded, as it depends upon an instance-set environmental variable.(Edit: I retract this statement as I may have gotten confused between the differences between the two lists.)This other, hidden list though… that one is a lot more dicey. It can also be disabled wholesale, but is not easily discoverable nor editable, it is essentially his personal blocklist shared with everyone who uses Tesseract. (It could be nice to open that up as a more fully fleshed out feature where instance admins can more readily control whose personal blocklist gets pointed at, or even allow an individual end-user to input one?)
Though his latest manifesto says that it can be disabled, both by instance admins and by individual users (Edit 2: or maybe not? Admins can disable the ability to users to UNBLOCK the content, but not as readily simply disable the blocking in the first place?).
Anyway since it can be disabled, it’s not a “hard-coded block list”, as in mandatory.
No he even wrote it into tesseract himself apparently, taken from what you called his manifesto:
and readily admits
Yes, I am glad for db0’s correction. I already edited my comment that you replied to here but our messages got crossed while you were typing, anyway thank you for this clarification as well.
It seems like instances on ptz’s personal shitlist need to use db0’s fork from now on, or like blahaj just abandon Tesseract altogether (as you pointed out, the author even asked for thus:-P).
I was objecting to your claim that admins can disable it. This is not possible by design, every user has to do it individually.
Fair, that is the part that I know the least about but at a glance… it does look like you are correct. I will edit my comment above to reflect.