YSK: Tesseract hides any post containing the phrase "censoring me"
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Also
/c/modabuse. Also/c/yepowertrippinbastards. Alsolemmy.ml/c/worldnews,comrade,ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.
If you're just tuning in
Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.
Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.
I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.
There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.
Verify all of it in ten seconds
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonThat's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at
/data/policy.datas well.It filters criticism of moderators
lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk— listed- community regex
power ?tripping?- keyword
censoring meCall the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.
It filters words
The 32 community name patterns include
Communis(t|m),Conservativ(e|es|ism),Leftis(t|m),Libertarian(ism)?,^Green Part(y|ies),Zionis(t|m),(Police|Cops),guillotineandbillionaire.Keywords include
comrade,ACAB,neoliberal,proletaria(n|t)anddeath to.Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked:
lemmy.ml/c/worldnews,lemmy.today/c/news,lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada,lemmy.ca/c/usa,infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.The 552 users aren't bots
67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.
355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.
Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.
I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.
And it lies about it
When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."
Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.
For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.
Admins can't switch it off
Tesseract has env vars for
PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST,PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLISTand the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist.enableToxicModebypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.
Before someone says it
A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.
The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.
And
/c/modabuseis not spam.Asks
- Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
- Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
- Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
- Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.
It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.
If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.
Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.
337 replies
Tesseract and asimons04 are also protecting pedophiles with this shadowlist. Literally covering up any and all references to them or their crimes. This is from the keyword list.
"Stop it Patrick you're scaring him"
blocking wholesomeyuri what a monster
Everyone on the list should get some special flair.
Are we all just supposed to know what Tesssract is
I'm out of the loop. What is Tesseract and what does it do? And how do I know if I am on the list?
Censoring the phrase ACAB is just wild. Way to tell on yourselves.
He's a cop? Anyway ACAB.
I originally read that as ACDC and I was wondering what they had done
Dirty deeds
The real crime was how dirt cheaply they were done.
You are on that list, too 🏅
I love how making it onto this snowflake's list is quickly turning into a lemmy badge of honor.
Is it still growing? Do I have have a shot?
I have been ACAB'ing so fucking hard but failed to make the damn list
RECOGNIZE ME, YOU SCUM. I want to be SEEN for the trans anarchist scourge to the system that I am damnit
I want to be on the list! ACAB
Same here, ACAB!
It's almost like an exclusive club. We should get a little icon to place next to our usernames to commemorate this. "Verified Quality Shitposter" or something like that to make fun of this BS.
It's not very exclusive though, lol.
I'm on the list!!! I'm number 1611. What did I do besides some stuff I said!? and some communities that I created?!
Some users have assumed I'm a bot because of my username but you can't prove that I'm a bot. I don't say bot things!
I was having a genuinely good day until i saw i wasn't on the list. jesus fucking christ to completion in the hand holes and then wiping himself off in the spear wound what kind of blasphemy does a dude have to commit to get on a list nowadays
... well that's some damn fine blasphemy right there, if I do say so myself.
I'm apparently on the list.
Honestly, surprised the file is still up for me to pull, t+24 or t+48 hours on.
They bothered to end cap the regex with an $... can't have anything with 'sp3ctr4l' anywhere in the name... I don't have alts, so... I don't know what the point of that is...
Oh well.
Not my first time.
I got shadow banned and also just actually banned from half of reddit for calling out mods on their bullshit despite being one of the earliest/oldest users there. Obligatory fuck Spez.
I'm reasonably confident that the twitter account I created soley to scream insults and baseless threats at Elon, when he accidentally bought it, ... reasonably confident he personally banned me, as ... there weren't really any other actual support staff at that point time, Elon had revoked their credentials.
I like to think I contributed, at least in a small way, to his subsequent insane crashout telling advertisers to 'go fuck yourselves'.
... this?
This reminds me of literal petty children running Gmod servers, hardcoding steamid blocklists in hashed files... the hilarious part about that is that they actually bothered to properly encrypt them, so you couldn't read them without a valid server key.
So this? Actually laughable, I've literally seen 14 year olds do this in a more clever way.
Fuckin oi vei, man.
I'm so envious, dude. I am not sure how to explain this drama to my wife. She just knows I've been giggling into my coffee all day. The best analogy I could think up was kids running Minecraft servers.
Minecraft servers are often extremely, extremely similar, that is a very close comparison, both technically, and in terms of uh... lets say the 'character' of those involved.
Yep.
This is where we're at.
... trying real hard right now to not go get a pack of smokes, god damnit.
EDIT: Modded Mincraft servers, I should say, are very similar to custom GMod servers/communities.
what the actual fuck
fucking malware
Great info, but I'm not sure how anyone could claim is doesn't target the left
ive archived it
comrades I want on the list acab pls
I was in the blocklist
boringdystopia blocked lmao
this incident is dystopian but not boring for once
This is outrageous, but what is Tesseract??
"destroy" is also censored lol
This tells me the project cannot be trusted at all. The dev is clearly willing to ship undisclosed block lists... What's next, a crypto miner? Credential harvesting? Who knows.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. I wonder what his track record on open source is.
Libs love betrayal and being evil for no fucking reason.
I mean, looking at how often libs side with and work for fascists, yeah.
Is your account just for this sort of trolling? I'd hate to think you were being honest, but trolls tend to be a tiny bit subtler.
No I just have a grudge against unselfaware cryptofascists. Personal stuff.
is that you @[email protected] ?
Yes, I am another user on the same server. Thank you for noticing. My reasons for doing this shall remain inscrutable.
Totally normal behavior.
Absolutely, absolutely. That's why I did it.
Because you desperately need attention?
Oh well, it's easy enough to set a personal block on you and deprive you of attention.
But you haven't blocked my other account! Hahaha!
censoring me
sybau
Libs are cryptofascists?
You need an internet break, your brain is currently melting.
I think he just doesn’t know the difference between liberal and libertarian
I'm always confused when someone knee jerks "liberal". Are they trying to talk about leftists? Or pro corporate free market people? Or...?
i don't think most people do, tbh. Pretty sure i see people who self-identify as either of them call themselves the other, not even realizing they said a different word.
Just checking in, hey. Still salty?
You make a convincing argument, as I would expect of a devoted liberal. But no.
itch.io, replit, xcancel, and various archives such as .today and ghostarchive are in the blocked domains???
Don't care about your ideological bent, engaging this clearly in bad faith with the fediverse should be unwelcome here.
Its blatantly dishonest. That is unacceptable; this project and the people building it should have no home here.
It's a solo project by @[email protected] who has currently taken their instance offline to hide.
They're always such pussies when they get caught and called out
Had a feeling it was AdmiralPatrick the second I opened this thread, as I saw he blocked me from communities with zero reason or explanation within my first months on Lemmy.
Another badmiral. Typical.
Admiral Patrick was never a real admiral in the first place! He was a genetically modified man with severe social issues
Here here. Freedom of speech online, combined with the ability to control what you see, is the absolute core of a free internet, and this fucker has violated that.
Yep and this case is exactly the strength of the fediverse: transparency and choice for the users and the admins. And those developers tried to break both.
Tessaract be censoring me
asimons04 be censoring me
Tessaract users suck big fat gay cock
asimons04 sucks big fat gay cock
Why do gay reddit mods try and ruin lemmy too?
Go back to reddit, big gay reddit mods
So there seems to be 2 lists, the first under "users" with full links, then another list under "userRegexes" with just names. Whats the difference?
I was happy i made it, but i appear on the second much longer and thus not as cool list if its even the same thing.
I know, let's fix cancel culture with more cancel culture.
???
genuinely who the fuck is juicypinkrose. they don't show up in search.
I'm guessing a spam thing
What if we kissed inside of the blocklist 🥺👉👈
UwU~
This has me cackling like a hyena omg
No bottoms allowed, only tops
Huh. I'm on the list. I've always considered myself too insignificant, but I guess this guy has a vendetta and way too much time on their hands.
If you wanted to, it would be good to know which maintainers made the commits and approved PRs, and what other projects they run or contribute to.
What happened with Tesseract could happen with any of those.
Isn't that the rub with the spooky off-site list, though? No documentation to point a definitive finger at who did precisely what. I suppose we could scapegoat the person who wrote the original call for the list, but if they aren't the only maintainer then the rest of the plotters get to slip through our fingers.
Ahh yes. I had seen the instance list was part of the source, but didn't catch that the rest was off site.
Very good point.
Oh god, I'm in the user regexes. Should this be an achievement of mine?
I don't know who you are but if you made it into their filters you're probably a very well-rounded person who should treat yourself to something nice.
Checked out the creator's other projects, those who remove the anime girl (the secondary-line defense) from Anubis can't be good people.
I'll take what I can get 😤
I'm pretty sure he went by making the broad lists of banned shit, and then ran a query on all the users that came up with saying that stuff.
I'm also on there, so I feel significant.
Or, he hates modern heavy metal, Devin Townsend and Colin Marston in particular.
Put it in your bio text with a link to this thread!
I'm going to start putting it on my resume
immensely disappointed that im not on the list
Tons of political shit on that list and then midway through it just decides to ban yuri. Not porn, not furry content, and not hentai. Just yuri
Seems to dislike women who don't need men in their life. Par for the course.
"Don't need men" is such a weird thing to say though. I don't need men in my life but that's not going to stop me from having men in my life.
Lets define it clearer: are not sexually dependent on someone with a penis. That's probably what his subconscious problem is.
To the people who reported this comment as transphobic... Tripping over phrasing is not transphobia. People need a chance to learn, I will not be removing this comment. If people are trying to advocate for gender neutral or trans inclusive language don't be dicks about it to the person who made a mistake. This person was willing to rephrase but kept getting shit on. This is not the way to handle this.
My daughter is trans so don't come at me with your shit.
Yeah, just ignore the rest of the comment.
Damn, i knew i would miss something. But I think you know where i was going with all of this, and are simply teasing me lol ;-)
Btw i started out with saying "man" - that wasn't good enough for [email protected], so i went with "someone with a penis", and that wasn't good enough either (interestingly, since we are talking about yuri, which is specifically WLW content).
I sincerely await your response what i should use to not upset anyone - i am neither transphobic or against homosexuality (i think love has no preference regarding body parts and expressed gender, it's simply personal preference), but articulating these things is not my forte, since i am personally pretty isolated and don't have any contact with people who move in these circles. (i don't have contact with straight/cis people too, just to make that clear lol)
'Not attracted to men' is probably what you're trying to say. Lesbians can still have men in their lives that they depend on, just not in a romantic/sexual sense.
Yeah, I introduced my lesbian friends to Gary, my handyman. We all depend on him. I mean it's slightly sexual, he's our handyman. But like not that kind of sexual. he plays with the goober when he visits
Some people will get upset with you no matter what term you use. I saw some mod get upset recently about the term 'human'. Blocked and noped out of THAT comm in a hurry.
Because they're implying something that exists in the sad devs imagination, not a reality.
Guy must hate girls having fun. :)
What did the first person in space do to deserve a ban?
Hilarious. Well, I never used Tesseract, but now I'll make sure never to recommend it
The developer behind Tesseract is the same user who has displayed the habit of preemptively banning users who have never participated in or even visited his communities, particularly those that were on dubvee.org. Apparently for ideological reasons, or simply for being associated with a particular Lemmy instance.
So at the risk of stirring up even more Fediverse drama by saying it, it seems like the findings above are squarely on brand.
Not to come over all Graham Chapman about it or anything, but I always found that type of behavior to be very silly.
Edit!
I got curious and pulled down the data to have a look. If you want to do this on Windows (don't @ me about it, alright?) ::: spoiler spoiler you can just point your browser to https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy and save it someplace or, if you insist on doing it from a commandline,
curl --output [filename] https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy.Then to decode from base64:
certutil -decode [inputfile] policy.gzAnd extract:
tar -xf policy.gzOr, you know, just open it in Explorer. The resultant file is just plain text. :::
Anyway, guess what! I'm on the list. I'm a celebrity, ma! I ought to be on TV.
Ohhh that's why I have some community bans!
Maybe he just really hates tomatoes?
dubvee has insane ban policies. Like they find people to ban based on posts in coms that have nothing to do with them. It’s almost like SRS on reddit.
Sounds almost like a compulsion
I'm somewhat disappointed that i am not on the list. But i rarely post even if i do comment on the regular, and i tend to be not attracting drama (deserved or not) while doing so.
Still, i would have found it great if a leftist chump like me made the list lol. I am in awe of your popularity mate ;-)
Yes, I have no idea what the rationale is. My posts are largely about silly knives, birds, motorcycles, and occasionally cameras. Other than very occasionally engaging with idiots in the comments until I inevitably remember that it's a waste of time, I don't think I've incited or attracted too much if any drama around here.
My site itself does not have a hardcoded ban in the list, though!
awwww you remember meeeeee :3333
WAIT silly knives? hold on
edit i think i might have just talked the wife into a gardening sword. she is pretty cool.
Which user specifically
@[email protected] / @[email protected].
Their DubVee account was @[email protected]. "Admiral Patrick" was just the display name for that account.
Based on the comment chain above, https://mander.xyz/u/[email protected]
They just blocked all of blahaj instead of dealing with us individually
Not entirely true 😎
I wish I was cool enough to make the blocklist 😔
I kind of want to k ow if any of my accounts (5 accounts over 4 instances) are on it, but I don't care enough to find out for myself, and I understand not wanting to post username lists like the OP says.
Same. Apparently I don't say enough woke things that make the snowflake pissed off?
Should've tried harder, like one of the two people from my instance who were blocked that...idk...drew some Sonic characters a couple of times and posted them in relevant communities? Should've been a real rebel like them!
It gives you something to aim for next time!
tfw not in the cool kids club either
i mean, i expected as much, but still disappointing
what the fuck is goofed
You done goofed. I've already backtraced your IP.
Good luck, I'm behind 7 proxies.
Yes, hello, cyber police? Yes. I have a backtraced IP to report.
This goofy?
Lol fucking "Perchance"? Whhhy?
Perchance it just felt right.
perchance...
It was good enough for Shakespeare.
This professor can iambic Pentamedeez nutz
pis+rael sent me
l+ratio+bozo+cap+pis+rael
I want a philosophical analysis of every popular videogame character made by this user.
yuri banned literally 1984
can't even comment about Yuri Gagarin of the soviet space program
Pedophile and perchance
Perchance a pedophile?
pissssssssrael
It's just such a weird group. Why is the y in "paywalled sorry can't read it" optional? Lol
Yeah that's the kind of thing I noticed, too - some of it just appears to be random phrases, not targeted speech. To be clear, definitely some of it is targeted, and examples are all over this post, but there are also things that seem like it's just something that is a personal hangup of the program authors. Like the authors of the program might just really dislike if someone says, "To be clear" (not present, it's just an example), or they're overreacting to a comment that pissed them off one time.
they forgot "fascist unit"
Sweet! I made the list too!
I wonder if this is someone taking their personal block list and just slapping it into their app? I've blocked a lot of users/communities/instances, but I certainly don't want to block them for anyone else.
I'll gladly take the downvotes of shame for my previous comment on another thread. Tesseract dev has gone looney
What comment on what thread
They were initially okay with it cause it hit dbo and only slightly concerned it hit blahaj
whats wrong with db0
Nothing. Just some people think they're starting to go too far left or not being mean enough to the lemmy devs.
Just like the tesseract dev who specifically called out db0 for not following the standards the dev wanted to set
https://lemmy.world/post/49817942
admiral patrick is evidently a total fucking moron
Wouldn't you like to know?
A little
Weather boy
What's the story with Ballamory?
So a system named after a hypothetical, hyper-dimensional solid turns out to have hidden depths, secret facets that we can't see from our universe?
I took a look at it earlier today and the addition of instances to be blocked was super shady and sloppy on part of the maintainer. Some high profile instances were added to the blocklist alongside unrelated changes and not mentioned in the git commit message, for example this commit: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/commit/fcd71e01e9f64d5ff40dbee9b815971bc00e9a2a
Also apparently the error you'd get when going to the blocked instance was a generic error which makes the user think there's a network issue or incompatibility with the API or something and the idea of a hard coded blocklist is never presented to the user as the source of the issue.
Yeah, the combination of those two issues are exactly why the hidden blocklist was noticed in the first place. The site admin for db0 noticed that their frontend was broken after they updated their Lemmy stack. But the “incompatible” version of Lemmy they had just updated to was supported. So what was causing the incompatibility? Maybe an API issue? Nope, API is fine.
After some digging, they eventually realized that it was happening due to an instance block at the frontend’s level. But they didn’t have their own instance blocked in the frontend, so why was it being blocked? Turns out, it was because they were previously running an old version of Tesseract from before the blocklist was implemented. When they updated their stack (which also updated Tesseract), the new version suddenly included the hidden blocklist code. So when they tried to start their stack after updating, the new version of Tesseract quietly downloaded the hidden blocklist (which can’t be disabled) and blocked the instance it was currently running on. This effectively broke the frontend for db0, which is what led to the investigation and subsequent hidden blocklist discovery.
Lol. "Hide NSFW communities by default" and in the same commit totally blocks blahaj.
That Github is a fun read in general. Some of these variables and function names are sending me. They even seem to be blocking proton email addresses.
::: spoiler Tap for blacklists.ts https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/main/src/lib/blacklists.ts
My personal highlights:
:::
::: spoiler Tap for filtering.ts
https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/main/src/lib/filtering.ts
They seem to be filtering out a lot of political keywords!
:::
::: spoiler Tap for data.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asimons04/tesseract/refs/heads/main/src/lib/MBFC/data/data.json
Some juicy comments in this one. It's a list of news sources with their "bias" (left/right/centre/etc). They didn't write this, they copied it from https://github.com/drmikecrowe/mbfcext/blob/main/docs/v5/data/combined.json
"Official Media Bias/Fact Check Extension"
:::
This is very upsetting. I could see an argument if it was made a user toggle for a "more friendly experience" or something like that (Like the enable toxic mode toggle), but hiding the blacklist and then an opaque error message is cowardly. Having it be pulled every time from another website instead of built into the software is also a very clear accountability dodge.
Also reading over the file, I think it's biased, especially towards unfairly heavy moderation.
Edit: Just noticed I'm on the blocklist. What he said fuck me for?
Figuring this out has been interesting, but then again based on that user could have just said something they didn't like in a random thread so they put you on the list
It's just liberalism. The whole thing is just doing liberalism.
Why do you keep repeating this throughout these comments chief?
Being self important is not a political act and so far there is no indication of a political motivation, just that the dev somehow got the idea of appointing themselves secret online discourse admin. If it turns out there is some financial goal behind it i'm with you tho.
Citation needed.
I didn't say capitalism I said liberalism.
Liberalism = Liberty
so you hate liberty?
DPRK = Democratic People's Republic of Korea
so you hate democracy?
American style "liberalism" (aka Neoliberalism) is exactly the opposite of that:
It's a structure to heavilly reduce freedom in the most important aspects of one's life including things necessary for survival (like food and shelter), not to increase it, so it's the very opposite of increasing Liberty or Freedom.
I reckon that's the kind of "Liberalism" (which is the only one with political power anywhere in the World at the moment as far as I can tell, since there sure aren't any politicians in power anywhere which both claim to be Liberal and are against core liberty-reducing legislation such as Private Land Ownership) that the previous poster is talking about.
Mainstream politicians out there who call themselves "Liberal" are 100% liars and frauds.
Liberals are nothing more then centrists and can suck eggs for all I care but jeez, could you offer comments that were any more useless and rage-baity then this?
Ikept getting told to 'shut up cunt' in this thread and mods seemed fine with it. So I'm explaining myself in detail.
And libs aren't centrists, except maybe between Ronald Reagan and the Thule society.
I'm curious what makes them liberal not conservative? Why do you immediately jump to liberal, when every thing I've seen that's been blocked has been shit that triggers conservatives.
I get that you have to shoe horn your "everything bad is liberal" shit into everything, but this ain't it chief.
Before you accuse me of the same bullshit, I'm on the block list.
Liberals are a kind of conservative. This ain't the 17th century.
I would say they're more centrist.
Sure, right between Ronald Reagan and the Thule society.
Lol
Where I live that's still center left.
It's funny because a statement like this would simply break the brains of my Fox News drip-fed parents lol
Doubt. Modern understandings of physics say you can't get fragments smaller than 2.6121×10−70 m²
No, it's a particular type of liberalism. Freedom of speech is actually a core liberal value, and while some who think themselves liberal will use censorship, (usually political hacks doing it for political ratfuckery, like the dev of Tesseract) most do not.
No. They say that shit, they say they have values beyond the class system and terror and feeling good about themselves for doing it, but shitlibs are liars.
Every single one, when pressed, is an authoritarian first. They fucking fetishize that shit. Everything else is just painted on.
I know you are bit what am I? Seriously? You've got nothing else? Is your position really so hollow and hypocritical that you can't even criticize anything I actually believe?
Which beliefs might be reflected?
omg i hope i was based enough to make the list
I barely even post and im on the list, WTF did I do wrong?!
Edit: Oh I guess we're too based for the dev to handle.
How does a forum with such few users have so much drama?
Because we're contentious and get to recognizing each other
I think we just notice it more because we have less content, so you're more likely to hear about each bit of drama that comes up and you're more likely to know one of the parties involved. There was lots of drama on reddit too, but I didn't subscribe to the communities that talked about it and I often didn't know enough about each incident to judge anyone
It's still annoying though 🫤
In this case, I think it's part of a general effort by left-liberal refugees from Reddit, who genuinely believe that the fediverse will be the new future of Redditesque forums one day.
Unfortunately, they have learned the wrong(imo) lesson from spez becoming a Nazi and pushing his political agenda onto every Redditor. They want the politics of this new medium to be no further left than AOC, and no further right than Chuck Schumer, while seeming to be completely free and open and information must be free, etc.
You can see that in their choice of bans.
I am glad this particular effort was so incompletent. It will not be the only one.
Edit: Oh man, spelling "incompetent" incorrectly there and getting everything else right deserves to be preserved.
I noticed that too and it’s a thing of beauty! There should be a special prize for that.
Right?? I expect this kind of crap on reddit, but Lemmy? Really?
The thing is Lemmy is populated almost entirely by people who made a conscious choice to not be somewhere else. So the majority of them are those who hold strong beliefs and are generally anti-establishment or just contrarian by nature.
Basically people most likely to argue about arbitrary bullshit a lot. Which isnt to say that all of them will, just that there 2ill be a higher incidence of it happening.
you’re contrarian by nature.
If you want me to go on arguing, you’ll have to pay for another five minutes.
Your mom's a contrarian
You're ALL contrarian, but not me, I've never contradicted anything even once!
Nuh-uh!
Touché.
Well look you wanna poke it with a stick or not
Why is
"^Yuri|^WholesomeYuri"in the community name filter? Why are anime lesbians hard blocked, while ani.social is just in the default user filter?ml is in the instance filter?
fwiw I'd recommend photon, it's fantastic and the dev seems to work really hard on it. Hope they aren't doing something shady either!
it's not my job to moderate the fediverse, you won't need to worry about seeing any of this in photon
appreciate it :)
There are a few solid ones there. Photon and Blorp are my personal favourites on desktop
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/alternative-uis
Do you know if either of them support user tagging? Currently on the default lemmy UI but I'd jump in a heartbeat for user tagging.
Blorp seems to support it: select the three dots next to a username -> Author -> Tag Author
There is discussion about adding this to Lemmy proper: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1456
Thank you! Will check that out. Much appreciated.
Thanks to the GOAT who found this!
@[email protected]
Tbf @[email protected] was the one that found the original commit. I just discovered something was initially wrong, then did the fork and the PSA
<3 Btw I love that you already added the warning as a tagline lol
Well, and GemAlarm.
probably gonna get shit on for not using a VPN for literally everything all the time but I didn't realize that I was going to need to attach my terminal to a VPN to download that file! All that and I'm not even on the list as far as I can tell. I'm almost offended that I haven't offended this person.
Lmao I think
the majoritya significant fraction of users who regularly talk politics are on that block list. You can go into any post in a political com and search usernames at random andmostlots of them will be on there. I went to a random post on [email protected] and 5 out of 6 of the first top-level comments were users on the block list.*ok the first post I tried that on was absolutely not representative, I just struck a rich vein apparently
Wow, I'm famous enough to have made the list. Nice!
I kinda wonder if I wasn't on the list, but now I am because of my previous comment on this post.
Damn, that's pretty wild
I do sort of appreciate the irony on this one, but in general fuck this dev.
Never trust anything defiled by shitlib hands.
It seems none of the communities I mod have made the list this time
Lol, I made the list. Didn't this admin have a big ol' crashout and "retire" some time ago?
Was that related to the Risa community drama at all?
I noticed this a few weeks ago. I blocked the domain and purged the hardcoded ones.
Has someone a cyber chef link to share ? I’m to stupid to base64 decode and that way I can check if I’m on the tesseract list
Here's the list!
https://copyparty.adrian.place/u/?doc=policy.json
I'm not on it. My life is meaningless.
I'll block you my friend.
Thanks, but your willingness to block me means you're one of the many I'd prefer not do so.
I love your logic. ;)
Hmmm maybe I should post more. Or we can make our own list.
Can't say I'm shocked I'm on there given my username
Aww hell yeah I'm in the cool people list!
Sadly, I am not. I am nothing.
If it makes you feel better I honestly don't know why I am. The only violence I really call for is for the execution of fascists following a fair trial or the occasional self defense. I'm a political extremist in that I'm somewhere between syndicalism and mutualism. And maybe it's because I occasionally talk about being kinky when it's relevant…
You are not. Sorry.
This is the beauty and downside to open source. Anybody can force their political views in their software. But once discovered, it can be forked and fixed.
It’s a shame that everything has become so politicized that people feel the need to shove their
religiouspolitical beliefs down everyone else’s throats. Yeah, we all know who the Bad Guys(TM) are; we don’t need to be constantly reminded.Give users their voices back (or at least choice in what they want to see and block). It’s the decent thing to do. Anything else makes you a certified asshole.
I said what I said.
This is why I think that dev is 100% in the wrong. They made it obscure, and default, for a reason: because they can't bear to read a political opinion online, or that they're happy someone responsible for untold number of people (Luigi's alleged victim) is dead (normal, empathetic human response to someone evil dying).
You're right, individuals should be able to choose who to block (which Lemmy already lets you do!)
I'm glad this dev has been exposed.
A huge problem is widespread political disengagement. It's not a shame everything has gotten so politicised, it's a shame how much worse inequality and consolidation of power has become. And things are getting worse and worse. Sorry, the only solution to this is to build a movement of people to push back, and reverse this. It can't be achieved by a handful of people.
People do need to be reminded. People do need to get their message out there.
We don't need to talk about bad things all day every day, but honestly, the amount of people who talk politics and are geting organised to do something is way, way, way too low.
Well this is also what the offending dev accuses some mods. I would love to join your stone throwing, but i also think there are some truths. Libs and Commies and Queers all can react overly hostile and not seldomly react disproportionate (all 3 of them, not every last queer person). Aaand i think the dev is butt hurt, but if he chooses an unreasonable way to react we can be glad to leverage FOSS.
All propaganda has some element of truth to it, thats how they trick you into thinking its wholly believable.
Surface level honesty does not presuppose that same honesty at depth.
And this is why I run my own instance and use Summit....
@[email protected] Sent you a PM.
Any particular reason people aren't forking it and adding whatever elements to the shitty dev keeps locking it out?
Not because the product is good or anything. But more of a big fuck you to the dev as this new version gets all of their hard work too.
db0 already did
I mean it's right there in the post and everything
Ah I'm very dumb thank you
It looks like there is an 'enable toxic mode' setting that DOES switch off the auto-updating blocklist. The LLM that wrote this post claimed that there is no way to turn it off.
from src/lib/policies/system.ts:
The original post was written using AI so it's going to have a lot of inaccuracies like that.
Overall though, having gone through the code myself, the LLM is in the right ballpark. The most friendly evaluation I can give is that this does seem poorly documented, too opaque and overly prescriptive. And needlessly encrypting the payload looks very shifty.
Yeah it's the trans people who simply want to exist who are toxic
Edit: no indication any of that post was LLM, but would love to hear why you think that.
Though I suspect that's just a tactic to get people to shift their ire.
That's typical for a transphobe like Rimu
I didn't know they were an established transphobe, so I wanted to give some benefit of the doubt.
But yeah, all signs pointed to that fact.
He's a transphobe and turbolib now too?
Hi, not the person you replied to, and (edit: not*) agreeing with any of this blocklist shit, AND my ire is firmly not shifted away from Tesseract, but just wanted to break down the characteristics of the OP that suggest (to me) it was composed mostly with an LLM and fine tuned after. (Though to be clear, that's a pretty unimportant characteristic of the post considering the actual content)
The division of the text into small "sections" of five or fewer short paragraphs separated by headers is probably the most obvious hallmark.
Kind of difficult to put into words, but abrupt / awkward / overly poetic metaphor and... "overconfident"? "sensationalized"? phrasing both give me an LLM vibe. examples:
Could be explained by me just not being familiar enough with the technical side, but saying stuff like "There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads" without breaking it down any further seems a bit suspicious to me? It doesn't actually call out any function, file, or... i dunno, a logical starting point, for a competent reader to dig into the source themselves. Reads like it's written for either an expert who doesn't need any details, or for an audience with zero skepticism whatsoever.
Again... this wall of text isn't meant as a refutation of anything you're saying, or a reason to dismiss the contents of the OP uncritically. Seems pretty clear after reading through db0's posts about it that this is seriously fucked up. I hope I've been clear enough about that.
Hey, I use the rule of three all the time. Three is the ideal number of clauses. One is not enough to establish a pattern, four is too many, and two is just too few.
It gives you the file directly
Yeah... but not where in the source code it's actually loaded.
./Dockerfile:14:COPY --chown=node:node static/data/policy.dat /app/system/policy/policy.dat
./src/lib/policies/system.ts:105: res = await fetch('/data/policy.dat')
./src/server/system.ts:27: let file = await open(
${policyDir}/policy.dat)./src/server/system.ts:71: await writeFile(
${policyDir}/policy.dat, policy)But none of those are the remotely fetched file.
There seems to ALSO be a statically included policy file with a bunch of stuff. That he updates periodically.
Give them a little credit, they were only five lines away from a bullseye in their second example. That's much closer to accurate than their overall comprehension of my post was
Thanks, but I'm not sure what value you think you're adding by actually going and finding that - if you had understood my post, you would know that my critique of the lack of specifics in the OP was a reason to doubt it was written by a human, not anything to do with whether or not the details of the post were credible or not.
edit: the point is, including the filter enough was enough to make the post contents credible, but if it had specifically followed up with something like "and this is retrieved at src/lib/policies/system.ts:100" it would have seemed like it was written by a human and not an LLM.
I found that because OPs post lead me to it.
On the LLM thing, there are tools that can say the likelihood that any given text was written by an LLM. Apparently, they're a necessity for English teachers these days. So, it's possible that Rimu used a tool like that.
Unfortunately (or hilariously depending on your perspective) those tools are notoriously inaccurate and often driven by LLMs themselves.
Those tools are themselves, LLMs. They're not trustworthy at all.
shame that piefed has similar block lists.
I wish developers would try not to play fedi-police
The question is how to prevent toxic material that brainwashes people like Facebook did. It irreparably damaged the social fabric in my country.
(Don't know the answer)
You know you've lost when even Rimu thinks it's too prescriptive
This dude just looks like he's building a fediverse he wants to see?
This looks almost like a personal block list that got added to the full production codebase. To be clear: I do not think this was an accident. But I had plenty of interaction with this dev on the 30 Rock community, and they were clear about personally wanting to use Lemmy as a means of escapism and to ignore politics of all sort. They clearly want to ignore all remotely political discussions, but that shouldn't extend to a hard-coded block list in a frontend they create for other people to use. Creating the tools to allow each user to set up custom block lists for themselves is great. It just shouldn't be a preestablished list that affects literally every user of that frontend.
that does make sense! tbh it looks very much like something I would make... for myself... or if I did release it for others it would def be advertised as "lemmy no politics edition" not as just a general front end
Can you clarify which Lemmy account you are referring to by "this Dev"? I'm a little confused about who maps to what specifically here.
Also I 100% agree with you here.
@[email protected]
He is the admin of that instance, which he had set up as a Beehaw-like safe space (the rules/FAQ even called out Beehaw as inspiration). He then developed Tesseract to act as a bandaid to fix issues with Lemmy that could be fixed by creating a custom frontend. And if Tesseract was JUST used for his safe space, this block list stuff would be fine. But in reality, it is designed/intended to be used by ANY Lemmy instance.
And ptz also uses AdmiralPatrick as an alt?
That is the "display name" for that account
EDIT: Oh, I see they used to have an alt at @[email protected] as well. So yes, you are correct.
They were talking about Admiral Patrick, the tesseract dev. The main admin of dubvee
I'm leaning towards accident or sabotage. It's way too obvious and way too far-reaching to believe nobody would notice.
They've confirmed it was intentional: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942
I don't know how you could accidentally write a regex list, encode it, secretly reference it, and commit and push it to your repo. That'd be very hard to do.
Thanks for providing the link to the rationale, notably posted after my comment went live. As for how it can happen "accidentally," that's easy. Have a file that's referenced that way, and sub in another due to human error. Classic case of pushing test to prod etc. Doesn't take a whole lot of imagination.
Pretending this is normal behavior?
Now that takes imagination.
Dishonestly.
Then run an instance, Beehaw style.