tesseract/src/lib/blacklists.ts at main · asimons04/tesseract
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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.

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
    20·
    6 hours ago

    Why the fuck are trans-friendly instances blocked too?? They just make wholesome memes and once in a while come over to comment “:3”

    • Abyssian@lemmy.world
      10·
      4 hours ago

      I blocked a lot of them because I’m not a fan of seeing the same shit page after page. For instance the flood of selfies recently.

      But deciding what a user does and doesn’t want on their feed should be the user’s decision, not some sneaky hidden bullshit pulled by the world’s lamest dev.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
    521·
    13 hours ago

    You don’t understand! Freedom of speech is only good when it’s freedom of their speech!

    But seriously, this recent shift of project leads deciding what users should and shouldn’t see is concerning. And honestly, I could give them the benefit of the doubt if they added it as some sort of opt-in list. But no.

    They will force their narrative down the users’ throats.

    I might not always agree with db0, the Anarchist Flotilla, or the “Tankie Triad”. But whatever shakes Lemmy right now, consider me an ally. Whatever these egocentric folks attempt to create, it is everything Lemmy was created to replace.

    Also, that’s a lovely list they made of places to follow.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      72·
      7 hours ago

      I agree. People who do this are emotionally compromised and in my opinion can’t be trusted when writing code. There was a different developer who through similar political convictions made his software wipe PCs that were in Russia or Belarus. Maybe that seems more extreme but it comes from the same politically charged and emotionally compromised place.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    362·
    14 hours ago

    Fuck me…

    ugggggghhhhhh

    Our ‘liberals’ aren’t liberal.

    That comment you highlighted just reads like a jordanlund modlog defending genocide by way of banning someone who says ‘genociders should die instead, actually’.

    They can’t help themselves from being elitists.

    Its like they’re hardwired, they’re so incredibly insecure that they front this moral superiority god complex, and anything that challenges the actual logic of that morality is fundamentally evil… because they can’t be wrong.

    These people are confused… they’re reactionary conservatives, they’re wannabe politicos/consultants… literal thought police, frame keepers of the overton window.

    • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t really know who Jordan Lund is or what he’s about, my first thought was Jordan Peterson who I think is a pretty unhinged UofT professor, someone cut together this rant about “rat desire” from that guy, it’s quite funny with or without context. I just looked up if that was the same Jordan, and the only rat related Lund is a Zoe Lund, https://www.zoelund.com/lund/rats/rats.html

      Anyway I keep seeing their names pop up and I have no real context for what they are about, and looking at Google results it’s just some whitewashed stuff about J Lund doing Shakespeare.

      So what is up with that guy?

      • AzuranAurora@piefed.caEnglish
        6·
        4 hours ago

        Think of your stereotypical power-tripping Reddit mod, in both behaviour and appearance. That’s Jordan. He is a moderator of several lemmy.world communities and never faces any consequences for being a PTB since he has the backing of LW’s admin team.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            1 hour ago

            Yeah that’s not… the same guy, no.

            I am genuienly amused that you are this curious about him. Sorry I was a bit grumpy earlier.

            Because I care about you…

            ... be warned, he literally is the perfect visual stereotype of a neckbeard

            https://www.opb.org/news/series/racenw/race-northwest-united-states-jordan-lund-portland/

            Hilary stan, actively worked against Bernie when it could have helped him, then decided Bernie was neat after there was no realistic chance he could be Presidenr.

            Cares more about his neighborhood being quiet than the lives of black people, thinks protests should only be held in areas designated and pre planned by the authorities.

            Is seemingly unaware that … the reason Portland doesn’t have much black population these days is because I5 got built directly through the neighborhood they lived in, and everywhere else in Portland was redlined, so they had to leave, they weren’t welcome anymore.

            But that doesn’t matter to him, because he works in tech, and that’s all ancient history.

            What he notices… is anti-male bias. Surely its simply because he kept incorrectly calling his trillby a fedora, for a while.

            On that note… If I can websearch this in 2 seconds… whatever, mods remove this if this is too much:

            https://www.stackforce.co/talent/6a5dfa305b4c16902e24eed9

            Yeah he ran a betting website for a while…

            Then went to work for Adobe Marketo, for a decade.

            You know… advertisements. Social Media. How to convince people they should subscribe to something, maybe even how to moderate something like a Reddit community, maybe. Who knows!

            Now he’s retired and owns a book store, aw, how Portland.

            In summary, he’s got 10+ years of corporate social media management under his belt, is painfully white, thus ridden with misplaced white guilt, and a Hilary Clinton style Zionist.

            There. Because you asked.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    442·
    15 hours ago

    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.

    As of that commit (April 29) the instance blacklist didn’t even include lemmy.ml !

    confused travolta meme, no text, transparent background

    … but i see a month later they added us in this commit, while removing a large list of specific users and communities which they were also previously hiding content from.

    • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
      493·
      14 hours ago

      Well well well

      export let CONTENT_WARNING_INSTANCES = [
    {
        domain: "lemmy.dbzer0.com",
        reason: `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.`
    },
   
]

      identity politics

      GODDAMMIT I HAVE TO FIGHT THE WOKE WITH MY CODE!!! frothingfash

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPM
      231·
      14 hours ago

      There is a good reason to have crowdsourced filters for spammers and chuds, but this shit ain’t the way.

  • oats@piefed.zipEnglish
    641·
    16 hours ago

    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

  • hatingfedizen@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    441·
    15 hours ago

    I had stopped using it, but I found the Bias checks useful, but then I looked more into https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ and how the classify certain sites (like Times of Israel somewhat is left-center-leaning lol) and gave up on it. This blocklist of instances is ridiculous.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      16·
      12 hours ago

      Like Snopes, they had a decent start but ran aground when they allowed their liberalism to creep in more and more as pushback against reactionaries. When chuds got upset for being called out as the conservatives they are (instead of getting called “moderates” or “centrists”), they aggressively tried to discredit the site. MBFC doubled-down on stuff like the New York Times being “leftwing” because obviously if the far right says something is far left, then it must be far left because why else would they hate it?

      “Do you really think conservatives would do that? Just lie about their beliefs while accusing their opponents of hiding theirs? Surely that would be irrational and in bad faith!” thinks the libs over at Media Bias.

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    711·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPM
      462·
      18 hours ago

      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.

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        30·
        18 hours ago

        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.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPM
          441·
          18 hours ago

          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.