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

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      6 hours ago

      Like Snopes, they had a decent start but ran aground when they allowed their liberalism to creep in more and more as pushback against reactionaries. When chuds got upset for being called out as the conservatives they are (instead of getting called “moderates” or “centrists”), they aggressively tried to discredit the site. MBFC doubled-down on stuff like the New York Times being “leftwing” because obviously if the far right says something is far left, then it must be far left because why else would they hate it?

      “Do you really think conservatives would do that? Just lie about their beliefs while accusing their opponents of hiding theirs? Surely that would be irrational and in bad faith!” thinks the libs over at Media Bias.