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.

  • OpenStars@discuss.online
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    24 hours ago

    When asked about this HARD-CODED feature that was barely announced when it was slipped into the code, the authors’ response was:

    If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

    - source

    Oh wait… my bad, that was Nutomic, speaking about Lemmy. Tbf, after a huge outcry, they did later relent.

    I guess software having ideology injected right into it is par for the course these days. It takes an ENORMOUS amount of effort to find any workable solutions otherwise. Compromise is an art, and all the purity testing among leftists works against it (which btw is why conservatism and fascism is winning across the globe right now, at least initially, bc they are willing to set aside their differences in order to achieve a common objective).

    Fwiw I would suggest removing this particular feature from a front-end UI alternative and leave such matters to the back-end. Being able to personally block instances is superb, and offering a visual guide to which ones that someone might want to block would also be great, but hard-coding a dedicated list is ineffective at best, especially when the instance admins simply remove it from the code as they run the software without it.