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

  • acargitz@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcore such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.

    • stoly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      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.

    • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auOPEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • acargitz@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        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.

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        Actually… it is toggleable (though not customizable):

        from src/lib/policies/system.ts:

        export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {  
    if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {  
        SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)  
        return  
    }  
   // auto-update of blocklist continues below

        This feature definitely needs greater transparency, and people can debate whether and how offering a “toxicity filter” at all offends them (especially if they are caught up in it), or the way it was implemented, but the reporting on this issue could also definitely stand to be more rooted in facts as opposed to tribal politicking. The fact that the OOP gives extremely strong indications that it was written by an LLM also does not help matters any.