In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer.
Who, ME? Surviving a mass ban event? 🥳
seems like a good move, thanks Ada!
Marked safe from Tesseract blocklist!
Poking through both /src/lib/blacklists.ts and the double-secret policy file that gets pulled on load (see snot flickerman’s comment on how to look at it), I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the end goal of blocking this specific set of keywords, fediverse peers, communities, users, etc.
You’ve got radical right stuff in here with radical left stuff, lots of lie-peddling news outlets and state-backed propaganda sources as well. Lots of focus on Russian-sourced content, and some attention paid to American MAGA crap. It’s quite strange to find blahaj hostnames and users among them.
My best guess is that this is a hammy attempt to make Tesseract a more bland beige version of fediverse content with the pointy jagged parts filed off. But porn is a-ok.
Really weird choices.
He still doesn’t get it.
That’s not for him to decide. Ever. That’s for end users and mods and admin of instances. Not some random fucking interface.
But random UI designers know best.
If he actually cared about making the fediverse less toxic, there are ways to do that. Working with instance admins to create up to date filter lists would be valuable, effective, and something no one would take issue with.
Or even being up front about it would have been fine. There is no mention of the blacklist on the main page of the github. If tesseract were a sanitized, curated fediverse client that described itself that way, it wouldn’t be an issue. Clear disclosure and consent count for a lot.
Instead he literally built a trojan horse for the fediverse. Unjustifiable.
There’s certainly a subset on the Fedi who seem to desperately want it to become a massively popular thing that persists through the ages instead of small but deep and worthwhile community growth among those who do choose to participate. Will it last forever? Probably not, most things don’t. Friendster died before MySpace and people forget it even existed (I mean, it was legitimately terrible)
It makes me wonder if this person thinks that they’re making the Fedi more palatable for “normies” or something.
Because that’s what popularity always brings, a marginalization of already marginalized communities. This comic sums it up pretty well.
Honestly, I think as long as we stay small and have our own community existing under the radar so to speak we have less likelihood of being invaded by even more numerous asshats than we already do. Lemmy or Piefed becoming massively popular could actually be a detriment, especially in terms of hosting costs, since most instances are funded via donations or the admins own personal income.
We don’t have to stay small, we just have to kick out the bad and not put up with it.
I know this site was not designed this way but MetaFilter has always had a small one-time fee to get an account, because it puts weight on having the account and weight on being banned. It always helped keep out a lot of the riff-raff.
I hope you understand how similar that is to irl laws for which the only punishment is a fine, meaning it’s a law that only restricts poor people. Charging a fee for an account just assures people with money have a disproportionate say in things.
I dunno, $5 for a lifetime didn’t seem too restrictive to me as a poor person, but I understand what you’re saying and that’s definitely been a problem on MetaFilter at times for sure.
However, that money does go to good things. They are officially a non-profit. They hold elections for admins and moderators and support staff. Admins, moderators, and support staff for MetaFilter are full time paid jobs, not volunteer gigs. So it’s got positives and negatives.
I’ve been a part of online communities for a long time. The ones I value most in retrospect were relatively small, niche and disconnected from grand global everything-platforms.
The fediverse is a step towards an internet of a million weird micro communities, finding ways to talk to each other.
Desperate centrists who believe the axiom that all of their beliefs represent reasonable moderate positions no matter what are some of the weirdest, most ingrown people next to rightwing chuds.
I don’t think this is even something centrist, centrism is all about blandness, a la “whatever doesn’t offend people that aren’t batshit insane”.
Maybe “centrist radicalism” is a better word, in that someone tries to gather everything crazy.
As an anarchist/council communist, it is my belief that whether you are communist, socialist, christian democrat, liberal or not, as long as you oppose fascism and whatever’s more right wing, you’re my ally.
Sure, with some I’ll agree much more, and coordinate more. But either way, either someone’s a fascist or is not. Those that aren’t, oppose fascism, and therefore must be called upon to grow labour’s democracy, as fascism is a danger to everyone, fascists themselves included.
I see what you are saying and I am not arguing some opposite radicalism, but where your approach fails is that nobody is a monolith, we are many people in many different situations and it matters which version of people we feed energy and validation into… thus we must be concerned with how within each of us there are many potential fascist selves and thus what it means to be an antifascist/normal decent adult as a verb is to commit to continually re-examining the growth of our feelings and ideas and pruning away the things that begin to become ingrown.
Also, what is considered bland and what is considered radical are some of the most political battlefields in society.
I prefer the Nazis honestly. At least they don’t pretend not to be pieces of shit.
Probably promoting his own biases while also blocking spam to justify its existence.
Whelp that explains why I’m experiencing login-loop at the blahaj.lemmy.zone landing page… I liked the UI & UX of Tes. Oh well.
Same. It was my default lemmy UI.
I’ll keep using the default Lemmy UI no matter how many times it breaks lmao
EDIT: OMFG it’s like it knew I said something, I got errored out for a moment I’m fucking dead 💀💀💀💀💀
Probably its sleeper agent got activated the moment you said remotely anything that isn’t batshit insane
welcome sib, you are one of us sick wackos now /j
literally me_irl
We contain multitudes
I audibly cackled at that image, thanks for making my day :)
Can’t we just fork it?
I think someone at db0 forked it. If someone does so and actually keeps it up to date and maintained I could see it getting added, but I can understand why the admins would want to hold off for now.
They did and it should work just fine like that until Lemmy 1.0 drops since the API v3 compatibility is slightly broken in 1.0 unfortunately.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone could probably add this fork back but it might not seem worth it because it will break in Lemmy 1.0 and it’s still software made by a transphobe.
If Tesseract was the only alternative UI, I’d probably keep a fork of it available for folk. But there are enough other UIs out there that I’d rather simply drop it and forget that it exists
let’s goooooooo
It never ends. I’m sorry and thank you for everything you do for us. We value your labor on our behalf. 💖
Doesn’t piefed do this too?
Just in a different bend?
Nope. All of the piefed stuff is clearly visible, labelled and optional.
Is someone going to spill the tea on this ?
The fediverse seems so petty.
The tea done been spilt, and although the document itself seems to have been created with AI assistance, it’s fairly accurate.
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45726226
This is the code to check it yourself:
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonEither open the JSON file in a text editor with a search function or just do a grep of it looking for “ada” and “blahaj”
I love that you provided the code like that. Truly a community conscious thing to do :)
Well OP in the other thread provided it, I’m just passing it along. I thought it was the most salient takeaway. Seeing for yourself beats trusting someone else’s word every time. Trust, but verify.
Amen to that!
Still, even relayed, it’s an extra bit of effort, and that’s what makes a community a community
Am I an idiot, or is the source no longer reachable?
I ran the command and got nothing back, but my dyslexic ass can’t be sure I didn’t screw something up
No, someone else pointed out that the dev took their entire site down, so the source is no longer available. I’m sure some people have copies. I didn’t keep mine, I didn’t even think others might want it if it got deleted d’oh!
Whew, I thought I was just dumb lol. Wait…
Bad jokes aside, I appreciate the response :)
I just read about this and it’s kind of insane. Thank you for all your efforts!
I honestly didn’t catch that this server was one of the blacklisted ones. Seriously fucking wild.
Those db0 kids are chill.
They got my piefed account too!
It really roils me because you seem to be one of the most level-headed people in the Fediverse. I love running across your comments in random threads because you always have something of value to add, and you write well, to boot.
As you said yourself, it’s not the blocklist that’s the issue it’s that it’s not documented, seems somewhat intentionally hidden (including the apps claim that blocked sites are “incompatible”), and so the people deploying it aren’t even aware it’s there and don’t have the option to disable or change it to suit their needs. It’s very, very sketchy behavior on the part of the developer.
Well said. Ada works hard to achieve a reasonable balance, and is vastly underappreciated.
Thanks, Ada.
I was peeking around on db0’s post about it, and somebody mentioned that it’s really bad code structure, too. Which is true, hard-coding lists is atrociously hostile to convention and clean habits. It would be like if a chef never washed their hands because they thought it added flavor.
Hard coded lists are sometimes ok… but not for something that will change frequently like a ban list of websites
I mean, in really really really small, personal projects, I suppose. But again with the handwashing/sanitation analogy… It’s better to just wash your hands and make THAT the habit.
I feel attacked as someone who doesn’t wash their hands, you should be less extremist!
Tap for spoiler
/s
Oh hi RFK
So it’s vibe coded?
No, it’s spite coded.
Ah dang. Did they get my nick at all? 🤞
Nah gotta up your posting game, I got individually and regex blocked 💪
Dang, I only got regexed
Wonder if we should ask the devs of Lemmy and Piefed to somehow disable access to them, as it’s far-right idiots doing this…
As this unfolds across the comms the dev is doublefucked in the FOSS community anyway.
I’m not sure I understand, disable access to the blocklists? That’s up to the frontend Tesseract, it doesn’t interact with lemmy or piefed. It’s the frontend that is developed independently from either choosing not to display posts depending on the dev’s weird list.
As for piefed, the main dev has his own strongly opinionated lists that he maintains. Most of them can be disabled by the admins who set up a piefed instance.
I meant as in, that those who ““develop”” the crap frontend, can no longer access whatever enables them to develop it. If that’s on Lemmy’s devs, then that’s there.
Oh, that’s not really thing in open-source. The source being public means anyone can work on it. There are certain restrictions in terms of monetizing that are put in place by licensing but you can’t forbid individual people from working with, rewriting or redistributing the code (for good reason).
And tankies aren’t rw.
That too of course
Shiiiiiiiitfuuck. Gfdi.
I am disappoint.
Congrats. Well done. Happy for you.
Edit: I’m just laughing my ass off that they’re out there angrily regex blocking INDIVIDUAL people in hardcoded encrypted hidden files. The more I think about it the funnier it gets
Edit 2: okay now I’m starting to feel sorry for them. Because yeah that’s kinda sad.
Edit 3: nope, funny again hahahahahahaha
I know I didn’t expect to be so saddened about not being infamous enough to be on the blocklist.
Part of me is disappointed, but also part of me is glad the world at least still has gestures vaguely to everything this level of anonymity.
Thanks I think you’re pretty chill too.
Those db0 kids are chill.
Yeah, looking at the commit history from before db0 was officially blocked is interesting. It started with a content warning system. It was designed to give users a “be cautious when interacting with this instance, they encourage violence against people they disagree with” warning. Conveniently omitting that the “people db0 disagrees with” are typically straight up neo-Nazis and supes. Apparently the dev takes issue with “punching Nazis is okay” types of comments. And then a later update silently added the blocklist instead of a content warning.
Bet they do record numbers as a mod on reddit. This absolutely stinks of someone trying to find a way to supermod on an open frame network
Where can I read more about this? I’m new to the fediverse and lost!
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45726226
This is a big thread on it, but just a heads up, it’s definitely on the more technical side of the Fediverse workings, so if you need an explainer on some basic concepts, don’t be afraid to ask here as a follow-up to help you understand a bit better (although @raspirate@lemmy.world has a really good basic explainer here for those who aren’t super familiar with how all this works yet.)
Thanks! To be clear, its pretty common for instances to block, say, Nazi and the instances that call North Korea NPRK, right?
I’d like to view most of the fediverse. When I joined first, I accidentally joined hexbear lol, then I made it to beehaw. Am I getting the full experience?
Yes, blocking is absolutely common. What is uncommon is for a developer to purposefully hide a blocklist and now allow it to be changed by the admin who is spinning up the service. The issue is that it was undocumented and blocked many people who liked the interface.
I think beehaw is a great choice. When I came to blahaj, it was between here and beehaw, and I still am subbed to a bunch of beehaw communities. I am unsure about what sites beehaw is federated with and not federated with, but they strike me as level-headed and unlikely to be blocking anything that shouldn’t be blocked, I would think.
A piece of interface software has been coded to dictate your lemmy experience and shockingly it curates towards the right.
After the Rimu fiasco I tried returning to Lemmy and found Tesseract to be my favorite frontend primarily because of the ability to create community lists w/o subscribing to them (the closest thing I found to Piefed Feeds).
And then this happens…
I’m going back to RedditI highly recommend the Alexandrite front end if you liked Tesseract
Fun fact: your name made the list, too:
"^RockBottom", "^rockerface$", "^rockSlayer$", "^RockyDale([0-9]+)?$", "^RockyGlen([0-9]+)?$",Fuck yea, worth it!
Unfortunately I don’t see Tess-like community grouping feature in Alexandrite, and it doesn’t even have a setting for the default comment sorting method.
I don’t really like Tess’ UI design that much - I’m comfy with Lemmy’s default. It’s advanced features that I’m gonna miss. Alexandrite seems to be just as bare-boned as Lemmy’s UI.
But I found info on Lemmy 1.0 that will be released eventually and has most features that I want so I probably just gotta wait a little until that day comes.
That’s fair, I wasn’t aware of the advanced features. I didn’t like the Tesseract UI, so I immediately abandoned it after checking it out. Alexandrite had a similar appearance, with a UI I really like
sorry for being dumb but what was the piefed thing? i switched to it cause i thought it was nice should i switch back? :v
Piefed is opinionated software because Rimu puts his biases and preferences in to the final product. But Piefed makes them optional and puts the toggles in the place you would expect them so that admins can opt in or out of those decisions in a considered way.
Several questionable features like “reputation” (basically karma) were added in PieFed on a opt-out basis creating lots of drama. Rimu (the main developer of the project) reacted poorly to this. Then he also got into another drama related to one of .world admins and got attention of the tankies. He ended up creating a built-in banlist of people who offended him, to his instance - except that it doubles as the flagship PieFed instance so it was widely seen as a bad move.
The most recent drama was related to the ‘vote limit’ based on a observation that a small percent of people on threadiverse cast most votes on posts. He (somehow) thought it meant these people control what everyone sees so he ended up adding a limit on how many posts and comments each user can vote. It doesn’t affect most users but some very active users were really upset over it.
There are posts on c/fediverse@lemmy.world on all these events if you want to know more about them.
I just logged in this afternoon and saw all this going on with Tesseract. Does anyone have a link to an article or summary of what is going on? I heard of this program until lemmy got a bunch of posts about it. lol
Thank you!
sidenote, that mod on the You Should Know sublemmy is a transphobic cunt
Ew gross
Good. I support this decision.
Me as well.
Not sure you’re aware, but you are on the secret tesseract block list. Good job keep up the great work!
Good! If I weren’t on there I’d be sorely disappointed. Let the love flow through!
What’s the deal with this Tesseract developer? Did they just block everyone that has ever looked at them funny? I looked at the blocklist and saw all kinds of people: trans-oriented, piracy-oriented, and lots of tankie-oriented instances. And a lot of users I’d never heard of.
Now they’ve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won’t have to answer any questions.
Now they’ve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won’t have to answer any questions.
Tea is just all over the damn floor at this point.
…but like… what did they think was gonna happen? Did they think they were so clever that no one could figure it out? Even when it effectively broke functionality on sites that used it but were blocked? Like they couldn’t add in code to disable specific parts of it if it was deployed on one of those sites so they could keep the whole thing secret? Like just a little text search string to ignore any users and sites that match the site domain as its rolling out, so they would keep using it and be none the wiser because it would work for them but continue to have its blocklist maintained and secret because it wouldn’t cause any problems.
I hate that it takes me like zero effort to conceptualize a better way to have done this shady shit, but on the other hand I guess I’m just glad they weren’t that clever.
EDIT: Upon reflection, I do wonder if this was at least partially vibe coded, because LLMs don’t have forethought and can’t plan ahead for contingencies like that. Because it also seems like a no-brainer that it would lead to configuration failures if deployed on one of the sites that is blocked.
The dev was quite vocal about being against LLM usage. Most notably, I remember their April Fool’s Day post about an update that adds a bunch of AI features. The post was obviously just a big joke, full of disparaging comments about LLMs. With that said, that was April (maybe even 2025, I can’t remember). It’s possible that their opinion had changed in the time since. But I doubt it, personally.
Wondering if they’ve been hacked and a bigot took over?
Either wat, may they return to sanity in due time.
Sadly no, they posted an absolutely unhinged rant in response
truly legendary. Can we bring back copypastas? It’s that fucking nuts
Ooooh I need a link
My fave is a relatively new addition: they chose to release a “public statement” on their own instance that they could control and nowhere else then started complaining about cross linking and brigading when people shared it.
To be blunt: Tesseract is designed to attract and retain normies.
HOLY SHIT I FUCKING CALLED IT! They’re one of those freaks who wants to make this a huge shithole like reddit.
it’s genuinely an unhinged rant. They come so close to getting it “no matter what I did the people here would screech.” Maybe, just maybe, when your idea is antithetical to the communities goals, that means you somehow think you have ownership over this community and it’s direction. Maybe people don’t like that because it’s both dictatorial and ineffectual? It’s like on some level they understand exactly why no one will like this, but instead of being like “maybe I don’t actually have ownership of the community” he’s all “No, it’s the users who are wrong!”
Further, considering their username is an aging Star Trek reference and Star Trek nerds are rarely “normies” you’d think they would put two and two together and realize they’re probably not actually a “normie” themselves and so the idea that they would know “what a normie wants” is horseshit anyway.
I won’t lie, that mention of Nicole kinda got me nostalgic. What happened to you Nicole? Why did you forsake us?
I kinda want to create a novelty account where I roleplay as Nicole, but I just don’t feel like committing to the bit.
Yeah it might make more sense instead of doing the bit at all times to set up an alert or something for key words or phrases that would get Nicole to want to comment. You could potentially have a big log of randomized responses built into a bot to just auto-respond, and then you don’t have to do the bit at all, but you’d also have to take care to make sure the bot wasn’t so intrusive that it was as annoying as the “real” Nicole.
Making custom responses in character would be most of the fun though
I’ve tagged you as “Greatest shitposter” and tbh I could see you doing that lmao.
But … where is TotallyJessica?
Idk, that’s totally not me
This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.
The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”
So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.
Do I have that right?
You win the internet for today!
This explanation should really be somewhere easier to find. Especially when you’re wondering if it will go down on your permanent record.
I’m just glad I actually got it right. I was mostly typing up that comment just to make sure that my understanding was correct. I wasn’t even thinking at the time that it would be helpful to others as well. I guess I’ve been kind of assuming that everyone else on lemmy already understood how all of this stuff works. Happy to help!
Yep, you’ve got it!
Wait, so is, for example, https://p.programming.dev/ a frontend? And https://old.lemmy.world/? Is merely
wwwas a subdomain a frontend as well?Yep. The first one is using the photon front end, and the second is using mlmym
httpandhttpsare communication protocols,wwwenables content sharing.
You use a web browser, such as Firefox or Librewolf. When you put in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/in the address bar (which shows the current URL), you tell it to retrieve that URL.Almost all websites use HTTP or HTTPS (which is more secure, as it’s encrypted). The abbreviation stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol (Secure mode).
The way of ‘retrieving’ that URL is often done through that HTTP(S). Web browsers for that reason can be called a ‘user agent’.
Search engines, such as Mojeek, are essentially websites that link to other websites, using a search query.
You can also sometimes use non-HTTPS methods, a few well-known examples are
mailtoandftp(file transfer protocol) or database access likejdbc(Java database commectivity).
The internet works by encapsulating the data into layers.
After you send in the URL and method, the browser goes to look for the page. There are multiple layers to that. HTTP(S) belongs to the application layer, which tells “I make or have this data, I communicate with the same or another host”. The
wwwuses the HTTP(S)’ rules to communicate.Then there’s the transport layer, that communicates “You’re on this host, I’m on that host”. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is one of those.
After that there’s the internet layer, which says “This is the host address, that is the host address, both worded in the same ways” and “I send this data to that data”. IP addresses are part of this one. Domains work through the DNS (Domain Name System) and you can think of them as more human-readable, more specific IP addresses.
Then there’s the link layer which says “This is how things locally communicate on the same host without intervening routers.” Wi-Fi and ethernet are examples.
There is another, that’s not necessarily part of it, but nonetheless relevant here: the syntax (or presentation) layer. It “translates what this application layer reads to another application layer”. An API is part of that.
So, then, what are front and back ends?
Think of the user interface; that is how you communicate with your computer. It’s what the ‘menus’ look like, how logos look like, etc.
If your computer is a bicycle, what it looks like (the front end) is the user interface; and how the parts are connected, is the API. The back end is managing the previous layers I’ve mentioned.
I hope that that kind of explains it!
This explains so much. Thank you for the synopsis.
