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.
And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is everyone always pretending discrimination is “so big”! And “worse than it has ever been.”! It’s not, it’s a small minority and the left and right are both just as guilty. And I tipicaly only see this behavior online. However I kinda touch grass on a daily basis and have noticed the real world is far from what the internet portaits it to be. EDIT: typo
tesseract is Ubuntu’s optical character recognition tool in my mind
At the very least, any software that produces error messages that lie is extremely annoying.
What a crazy coincidence. I was just checking out this GitHub today. It has a project called Anewbis which is
A fork of Anubis without the cringey anime catgirl. This fork provides no other changes. It just updates from the main project and removes the stupid catgirl.
She’s not even a catgirl. Anubis is a friggin’ jackal or, if you must, at minimum has a dog for a head. She’s a puppergirl.
and removes the stupid catgirl.
Blasphemy! Someone fork the fork, call it AnUwUbis, and readd the catgirl.
Catboy? Thoughts anyone? Thoughts? Cat boy?
Or dog boy to fit the anubis theme.
Sooooooo just renamed Anubis? Daring today, aren’t we?
Some people have no whimsy
There’s a commercial license you can use to replace the image
I mean. If you want to use it in a serious project, that anime-looking girl is completely out of place.
People say that but it wasn’t a deal breaker for the United Nations.
The United Nations can say what they want, but I wouldn’t want it on a serious company websites
Are you Swiss German by any chance?
That’s why the author offers a commercial license with custom image and serious name.
deleted by creator
Maybe ask the author for what to do? I’m sure they are receptive to arguments.
OR apply that guy’s patch to get the same shit for free
(nobody tell corporate)
Ah yeah let’s just fuck over the open source dev cool.
Even if taken literally, the second part would still then be my “sincere view” and therefore “the correct opinion”, no?
@Quokka Wait a moment. Is it the same tesseract that develops the OCR? Because I sometimes use that OCR for NVDA screen reader (non visual desktop access). If so, I’ll take it off immediately! This kind of hardcoded deny list, is an abuse. Worse than the one I noticed 25 years ago on MSN messenger where you couldn’t label yourself as “John Doe - webmaster of [project]” but then if you named yourself “I’m the drill for young asses” (said it less rude than it was), Msn messenger let you place that display name upfront.
Let me say that if you develop a software where you deliberately block pro-trans, pro-sustainability or topic you dev potentially dislike, your software shouldn’t be distributed to the public.No, different Tesseract!
@Quokka Sorry, and thanks for explanation. It’s a serious situation anyways. This kind of devs shouldn’t be accepted into open source community; maybe I’m too extremist
No you’re absolutely not. Allowing this in a community is tacit agreement with discriminatory attitudes against queer people.
@zqps I’m afraid discrimination has become mainstream. Against queer, against black, against people with disability…
Doesn’t piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it’s a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.
Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content.
Because you mention OCR; people seeing this: it’s not the OCR tool.
I keep hearing so much shit that piefed does but also see a ton of people either ignoring it or praising it. Does piefed have some sorta propaganda team or something?
And here I am, going WTF is a piefed?
It’s similar to Lemmy, but with more features and has better integration with Mastodon.
Oh if they do that’s great, the main dev of piefed went on a hissy fit because other instances used AI tooling, for them to be doing the same is just perfect. Gotta love hypocrites
From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcode such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.
GUESS WHAT https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Please un-.ml your links.
The markup for that:
[here](id)EDIT: nvm doesn’t w*rk reliably (thanks, nutomic), here use the .world original (copy link and paste into search box)
ah good catch I meant to link hte original
read edit mb
I mean it works by just clicking the fedi icon
? I’m not sure what you mean with the markup.
It also displayed bogus error messages, as if to appear to be a technical issue with the community instance, while hiding the black list deep in code. So the point here was to deceive and manipulate.
If it was a toggleable and customisable list that would be a good feature for instances.
Therefore the “deception” would be discovered the moment anyone tried to debug exactly those error messages in this …open source application.
Bike fall meme material.
Which is how this post came to be, by db0 discovering it.
Tada!
There is also a penchant amongst some tech types to force their worldviews. Look at all the AI people, Zuckerberg, and so many other tech leaders.
“I know better than you”
(This person does, in fact, not know better than you)
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?
Same folks that complain endlessly about Far-Left censorship and militant authoritarianism, no less.
I wonder how many of the developers on these projects are spill-over from the reactionary shitholes of Reddit.
Surprise, secretly fascist the whole time! 🌎 🧑🚀🔫
I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social.
- Copied link
- In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post
- “Post not found”. Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already???
- Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article.
- After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to [email protected] , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It’s missing.
- Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even.
So why can’t I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?
Piefed has a shadowban/defederation tool. Like, I can post in piefed.social communities but they don’t federate for anyone to see except for the individual user responded to. It’s a way of moderating without it showing up in modlogs.
What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.
My strong guess would be that the turbolib Zionist mods/admins of lemmy.world are at it again.
lemmy.world of course being… you know, mostly ex reddit power mods, from the US.
On an unrelated note: We all know Ghislaine Maxwell was also a reddit power mod, right?
Also, apparently, Jeffery Epstein was a big Quora power user.
So was Jordan Peterson
Shitty Piefed dev -> lemmy.world mod -> ex-reddit power mod -> Ghislaine Maxwell
makes about as much sense as
“We shouldn’t have people starving in the streets or paying $35,000 to visit the emergency room” -> socialism -> USSR -> Stalin -> Holodomor
Sure, the links are there, but what a silly series of connections to reach to in order to paint your target as the worst possible thing to confuse the impressionable.
Sure, the links are there
I mean, we had Joe Biden force the sale of TikTok to a cartel of Silicon Valley fascists based on some spurious links to Chinese communism. If you can get from “Tankie TikTok Post” -> “President Xi Jinping undermined US electoral security” and enshrine that belief in federal communication policies, I don’t think “Shitty Piefed Dev” -> “Ghislaine Maxwell” is that big of a joke.
Double, extra, plus, too, you need to keep in mind how much influence Steve Bannon had back in 2016, largely by organizing and deploying white nationalists out of 4chan and the grosser corners of Reddit. And Bannon was bosom buddies with Epstein.
I honestly don’t see how those two are related but I do think it is interesting that the person I replied to insists they were joking while you insist they were not.
Schrodinger’s Douchebag at play.
I honestly don’t see how those two are related
They’re both (ostensibly) oligarchs and political insiders dictating the operation of mass media.
I think its pretty obvious that I’m just throwing out something that is almost certainly not related, at the end.
I did literally say its ‘unrelated’.
Because sometimes I’m a petty little bitch, just like you’d have to be to surreptitiously write an ideological ban list into some open source software.
I’m just illustrating a similar level of dirty play here… if that confuses idiots, I don’t care, in fact that’s part of the point.
Also, why am I talking to a throwaway acount right now?
Too cowardly to say something on your real account?
You were obviously being sarcastic with stating it was “unrelated” and you’re obviously playing dumb, also in bad faith now.
You’re deliberately trying to confuse the “idiots” that agree with you, not the idiots that support this ridiculous move.
My username is a pun. You’re welcome to get bent out of shape over it if you want, but I hope people reading this realize you’re doing further bad faith tactics by tossing in this Red Herring as a cherry on top.
Shhhhhhh.
Quiet now, no one cares what you think.
Be respectful please.
I was curious to see if you were simply so passionate about the issue you were accidentally commenting in bad faith because you lost your cool or if that’s just something you double down on because you’re a troll.
Given it’s the latter, enjoy the block!
we got no clue man
I would recommend switching to piefed.ca
I can see it on the NZ PieFed instance. Interestingly on Lemmy/Voyager I can’t see that it’s a cross post, nor the original post text UNLESS I go to reply to the post.
Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need
Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration
I can forgive someone with a passing exposure to it not knowing, but MBFC is notorious for having biased rankings.
The regular example I use is the Guardian being placed on the same factuality ranking as breitbart (the nazi rag), but it’s not one case, there’s a general right-wing bias in the rankings.
The developer of this project is very clearly just trying to put their finger on the views of their users
Just looked and Breitbart is listed as extreme right and mixed factual reporting.
The Guardian is listed as highly factual and left-center.
What are you referring to?
Older versions were crazy, guessing they’ve finally got it roght. I think they should have launched with a “In beta, algorithm is learning” message. People implemented it right at launch and had expectations, and it was just not ready, total dumpster fire.
Holy shit have they finally updated it?
They had Guardian as mixed factuality for years
Unless they’ve completely overhauled all their rankings though, I expect a lot of the more subtle biases will still be present
Edit: from a year ago https://web.archive.org/web/20250816111509/https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
And it had been like that for a number of years (I don’t make a habit of checking it regularly given my distrust of it)
It still thinks “The Economist” is ‘Least Biased’.
MBFC equates political centrism as being unbiased, which is fundamentally flawed.
I think it could be from a different person doing the rating for the update.
Which really reinforces how terrible their rating system is
Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on its story selection, which moderately favors the left. We also now rate them High for factual reporting due to minimal failed fact checks in the last five years. (5/18/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 09/26/2025)
Blacklisted: Tesseract.
Genuinely WTF
Don’t get me wrong, but this is a solid proof of the beauty of the Fediverse and FOSS in general you can do whatever you want and so can other people
One of their last changelogs they posted on Lemmy 11 mounths ago (halfa year before injecting said blocklists) considers content filtering: https://lemmy.world/post/35006054 They wrote it was a huge undertaking for them to rewrite the filtering engine specifically. Welp, it went out of hand.
Also:
Please do not take anything personally if you show up in the screenshots of my filtering preferences. These were either chosen at random because they were at the top of the feed at the time of testing or were chosen because they have both Lemmy and Piefed versions/alts and were used to test wildcard and regex based filtering.
It’s funny to read it alongside their pretty opinionated commentary in blocklists.
☆ I want to log it: at the time of writing, no one brigaded the linked post or sub, upvotes on old 8mo old posts were in positives, lets not interfere with what’s already dead.
Oooooh we’re blocklisted too! I guess we’re too radical for them!
Any idea why MULTIVERSE is blocked but quokk.au isn’t? Maybe they don’t think you guys are as radical as us :P
Honestly after looking at the list aside for blahaj (wtf I know) most of it is basically internet hygiene. Please look at the full list I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev got in a fight with someone from that instance and childishly just black listed the whole instance.
Ibbit.at is just an rss feed instance. lemy.lol and thelemmy.club haven’t done anything iirc. And I could be a bit biased, but I think blocking dbzer0 is bs as well.
I’ve seen quite a few trolls coming from those instances. Yes dbzer is odd but I understand that the red line was crossed with the blahaj one I’m surprised I didn’t quokk on it (or maybe missed it?). A lot of odd things are happening on the threadiverse lately and it seems like some groups are trying to deive wedges between us.
dbzero has always been very pro ai maybe thats why, odd that they blocked it tho, main one for piracy
It’s not very pro AI, it’s just not rabidly anti AI. There have been too many pitfalls with AI causing major issues in the piracy world to be very pro AI as pirates.
Either way, nothing on this list seems to be for AI acceptance reasons.
