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.
Didn’t help that the latest update opened some doors to the all-oppressing chinese botnet scrapers and brought the instance to its knees. I was up until 3am firefighting yesterday.
I thought you were running iocane or one of those fake link mazes?
Did it have some way to hit the DB past it? How?
Man remember when it just kinda worked to use robots.txt (ok Baidu always misbehaved but it didn’t always exist). The internet used to be so cool if you were one of the weirdos initiated to the mysteries.
I 'member. Capitalism ruins everything…
We do run iocaine but that only takes care of known spam subnets and scraping agents. You need to know who to target to send in iocaine first. In front of that we have haphash which is a PoW. We don’t use it site-wide though, as we’re ok people scraping well-cached things like our frontpage. We use it on dynamic content like comments which scrapers love to scrape by the millions, each of them causing a DB query which we cannot cache.
It seems that new lemmy added some new url paths which I didn’t know about (I think
/comment/is new, before it was all just/post/) which the botnmets discovered after a few hours and started scraping. On top of that I noticed that some scrapers were using random wildcard domain to go to the main site, so I punted those to iocaine as well.