Tesseract is a web client for Lemmy that was found to be secretly and arbitrarily blocking users, communities and even entire instances. You can see if you’re one of the kool kidz by running

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

and grepping your name / instance. Further details can be found in this post.

The poem above is adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s The Burning of the Books, which can be read here. If you would rather read it in the original German, go here.

  • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
    21·
    3 hours ago

    To all the users who made the blocklist, your Lemmy experience has been greatly degraded by not interacting with the users of tesseract. The fediverse may never again know their like. They few, they few, they happy few You will think yourself accursed for not being there. You will hold your manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks of tesseract and the ban list of this day.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
    8·
    11 hours ago

    So… 560 users banned by name (I can’t believe I made into the list!), 2200 username regexes (I wonder how many false positives there are), 98 communities banned by name (a lot of non-radical politics, but stuff like “movies” made into the list too), 33 community regexes (it would be a nice game to make false positives of “^Fuck.*US”), 54 instances, 354 domains, and a “clbuttic” filter with 296 forbiden content regexes.

    Does the application actually show any content?

    • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
      4·
      12 hours ago

      An even more fun game might be to create communities to be banned where regex would ban other communities.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
        5·
        11 hours ago

        It’s to be expected that the author blocks anything that can refer to keyword blocking. But “perchance” is as random as the movies community.

        The json is also full of inconsistent formatting, what probably means it was all written by hand. The author put a lot of caring into disallowing communication in his communication software.