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.
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.
My point was that what they’re calling for here already exists natively within the federation framework and this hidden filter that the dev made doesn’t even need to exist as a front-end system that mods/admins can use as a result. And that some of the more egregious instances on this list are already on the defederation list by default and that admins are free to add or remove instances from that list as they please.
In short, that this hidden filter is not only unnecessary but that it also only exists to secretly censor what users on an instance can see on top of what instances are already defederated by the admins and would have no purpose as a publicly available system.
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.
The other thing is that the developer of Tesseract doesn’t have the authority to block servers they don’t like on other people’s instances. It is a major overstep from him to do this, and a severe breach of trust. You really have to hold yourself or be held to a high standard when writing code that runs on other people’s computers.
Putting in a backdoor so you can get in is really bad. Putting in your own hardcoded ideological filters isn’t as bad, but it’s almost as bad.
I agree, I’m just saying that it sounds like what they’re talking about is something that’s already natively built into Lemmy and doesn’t need to be built into a front-end. Especially since I believe some of these are already defederated by default and you would need an account on an instance that has gone out of their way to federate with those in order to see/interact with them in the first place.