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.
Some of those tankie instances have been pretty aggressive with others, so I can understand that a developer wants to make its project more accessible to normal people by blocking them. Now, do all the instances on this list deserve it? I don’t know. Also, it would probably be a better compromise to have this as a visible “safe default” and let admins edit it easily.
It’s very safe to say the only reason one would ban Blahaj is because they’re transphobes.
How do you feel about quokk.au not getting the black mark? Kinda insulting ngl.
Truly horrible. I can’t believe a Nazi ignored us.
Not the criteria being used here, obviously.
Also, we have a statement of intent. There is a statement of intent here in a pr. You cannot assume good faith of shit libs. You cannot assume good faith of people who say they’re doing things for bad reasons.
I mean you can but its disingenuous and shitty and I’m blocking your instance because its so violently stupid.
Doubtful it’s tankies, this looks like it’s fascist work.
The dev of Tessaract is obviously a fascist, but oce isn’t calling them a tankie, they’re agreeing with the fascist that leftist instances should be censored, because “tankies”
Can you say why you think this? Is it this code?
{ 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.` },I don’t know if this dev is fascist I have not studied the question. Do you have some other information besides this list? Indeed, I’m not calling the dev a tankie, but rather some of the instances of the blacklist that I know of, as a possible explanation for being blacklisted. I don’t know all of them well enough to tell.
Which is ironic given that people here are upset about that mod forcing their political biases onto others.
Basically
First they came for the communists —totally cool
Then they came for my outgroup — wtf!!
Don’t forget that MAGA instance on there
First they came for the MAGA, then they came for the commies /s
Doesn’t the software package for running a lemmy instance have a default defederation blacklist that includes some of these same instances? It sounds like they’re talking about exactly that - an editable blacklist instead of hiding it as some kind of software error when you go somewhere the admin doesn’t want you to. To which I say, Lemmy already has that, it’s called defederation or muting an instance yourself.
There’s a technical, often legal, aspect to blacklists. Unmanaged and unmoderated instances can be hijacked and be an actual threat with bots and so on.
But there’s another aspect, like someone’s favorite shitposter got banned for gatekeeping neopronouns, and now the entire Blahaj instance is blacklisted.
The categories are just entirely different orders of magnitude.
There’s a difference between not federating with fascists, spam, csam instances by default and not federating with leftist instances because you think it’s scary to “normal” users.
Apparently maga.place is super leftist /s
There are a few on there I would say have issues but weirdly the consensus here is that “no of course not these are all fine sites and now why isn’t some other site on the list because it’s leftist and belongs on the list as a badge of honor!” Kinda seems funny to me that no one noticed the maga site on the list. And you are the only person here to doubt that narrative. No one else considers that maybe this dev had a few bad experiences with some of these sites that maybe otherwise wouldn’t be on the list…? I have no knowledge of most of them, but hexbear is about as head-fucked as an instance comes.
They should just add an option: OBEY=y/n