I took a look at the content of Tesseract's filter list
I don't really know where to post this but this community felt relevant, apologies if this is not welcome here, feel free to moderate, ping, and redirect me if I should share it elsewhere (especially because I'm not a good fact checker, but I felt like it would be interesting to have a level headed discussion about this drama).
I originally posted to [email protected], but a moderator there banned me and deleted the post, I'm guesing the Tesseract dev feels harassed by the whole situation, and do not want to hear about it any more. The community is now locked.
My original post read as follows:
"Was curious about The List™ and took a look at what it contained. There's interesting stuff that tells us more about the intentions of whoever made it.
I'm not making this list to pile one the current drama, I don't plan on being added to The List™. I just thought that, when something like this arises, one thing the Tesseract dev could have done is explain why some individual keywords are included, this would have been more transparent. Because when you look closer, there's some absurd stuff in there, which can lead to confusion as to why some are filtered out.
I can't be bothered to go through content posted by each individual user and community that are filtered out, so I skipped those.
::: spoiler Community names
- ~25+ occurrences words referring almost exclusively to leftist political activism including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia...
- 4 occurences of anime related content
- 3 occurences of right wing related content (Libertarianism, Conservativism, and a conspiracy theory)
- usgreenlandwar
- "Collapse" (discusses the environmental (and more) collapse of our civilization)
- any word referring to the green party of UK (their main platforms: anticapitalism, ecology, progressivism)
- "death to" (understandable, but depends on context)
- 4chan (and similar imageboard names) + greentext formats
- "billionnaire"
- "anonymous"
- 1 specific username and variants of their spam accounts / communities
- "Police" or "Cops" :::
::: spoiler Keywords
- ~30+ occurences of usernames, website urls, company names, sentences, to filter out spam / scam
- ~30+ occurrences of various sentences almost exclusively used by leftist circles, including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia...
- 🥺?👉👈
- "What would (france|the french) do" (probably to prevent referring to the guillotine or the french revolution, still funny)
- "chatgip+ity+" used when someone criticises OpenAI's LLM
- "censoring me" (maybe because conspiracy theorists often claim to be censored)
- 4 Occurrences of sentences mentioning when an article is paywalled
- "pedophile" (can't talk about it?)
- "rap(e|ing)s? (kids?|child)" (can't describe the actions of the above?)
- "Perchance" (random LLM related website)
- 1 dead instance link, which was used by a computer science student that hasn't posted in 3 months
- "neoliberal" (can't even name a specific political and economic ideology?)
- "death to" (that one is understandable)
- "pray for nuke" (same as above)
- "remove from reality" (same as above but euphemism)
- "Kirk(e|'|’)d" (used to refer to the murder of Charlie Kirk)
- whenever any post is crossposted from a list of already filtered out instances
- whenever any user from a list of already filtered out instances posts or comments :::
::: spoiler Website URLs
I started this whole summary ~2,5 hours ago based on my search history. There about 300+ direct url entries and I can't be bothered to check every single one of them (I've been looking up their domain name on google, then directly entered their url in a separate browser, and searched the domain on lemmy). I went through about half of them before thinking I had better things to do, here's the pattern(s) I noticed so far:
- 4chan
- Any Blogspot blogs
- Any website hosted on Infinityfree
- Lemmy instances the Tesseract dev considers to be extremist (some are part of the free anarchist flotilla (btw quick fun fact, FAF is short for fascist in french, it's ironic for us french lemmy users))
- Any gumroad page
- Any itchio page
- Bunch of url shorteners
- Bunch of piracy related sites
- Bunch of cryptocurrency related sites
- Some are obvious scam / spam / typo squatting sites NOT shared on lemmy
- Left-wing related websites outweight Right-wing related websites 4 to 1
- A lot of links are just random companies over the world without them ever being shared on lemmy, or being scams, or spamming the web about their services
-
- there's a heavy bias against indian companies
-
- very few of them were probably filtered out because of their company name, for example a printing company from chicago has "freaks" in their name
-
- There's a french rodent control company that was filtered out, this one is interesting because its domain name is also the initials of the main left-wing french politician, but it could also have been filtered out because it obviously uses negative keywords related to their field. I feel like this perfectly highlights the flaws of this lists logic.
-
-
- edit: that one was actually shared twice on lemmy by a user asking relevant questions, my guess is the dev added them preemptively to prevent spam
-
- Some are links to website shared on lemmy, of those:
-
- a lot were obvious scams / spams
-
- some were ai related websites
-
- few were just devs asking ONCE for feedback on their project :::
Anyway if anyone is motivated enough to take a deeper look and share their findings, or correct me if I missed/mislabeled something, feel free to tag me!"
109 replies
Clandestinely censoring public internet fora is some military-corpo-spook-industrial-complex type shit. And he thinks he’s providing “normies” a valuable service.
He belongs on the cover of Malignant Boundary Issues Monthly.
Anyone not on the list is a bot
I'm not a bot.
So... Gumroad and Itchio were blocked? I guess fuck small time indie devs/hobbyists, huh?
I never would've guessed that acknowledging a paywall is so extreme as to be worthy of censorship.
Holy shit this is REAL CENSORSHIP??? I thought this was an optional blocklist on an optional ui on an optional instance that anyone can easily disable via the UI
holy shit censorship wow this BAD
EDIT: wait if everyone is censored how come I can still read their comments?
Calm down
Why would they, they don't like people pointing out how shitty of a thing they did and that no one liked the dev doing darvo in their apology
I am calm, I was feinging outrage, I don't actually believe the narrative that being on this list is censorship, or harmful in any way.
It was a joke making fun of all the similarly fake outrage in this thread people are using to claim a false victim narrative.
Lol
if you don't believe shadowbans are bad, why don't you go use corporate social media? I'm here specifically because I like transparency
then you have a deep misunderstanding as to how activitypub protocol works
no. I've been using the fediverse since ostatus. you intentionally obfuscated the bans. it's as close as the fediverse has ever seen to shadowbanning
Pretty funny that this guy could just have used the standard features of the Fediverse to build a server for "non-toxic" people that just didn't federate or engage with all the evil woke ones, and yet a part of him must have known that it would have been about as popular as the stand of an Abstention Society at a Fresher's Fair. So, stealth censorship layer, I guess? I'm sure a corner of the fediverse where everyone is just civil, never talks about politics, and also conspires to secretly to mess with each other's feed could be nice though.
Oh they did do that, but either stopped wanting to run one or didn't like that no one wanted to be on their personally curated instance so shut it down last year and appears to have just put that curative process onto their UI.
The optional UI used by the optional instance with an optional feature that can easily be disabled in the GUI is "censorship"? Gee I wonder why he wanted someone like you blocked!
Maybe if you jump on the harassment bandwagon he'll go away and you can win (just kidding I know you will find some other reason to be the victim)
This is how talking with the dev about the "optional" censorship goes:
They made it "optional" and then buried the documentation deep so it was difficult to find. They even admitted as much.
What someone else does in their own free time affects you in any meaningful way. You are not the victim here.
Lmao
That doesn't address literally anything at all. When did I even say I was a victim?
Riddle me this: were they too fucking stupid or too fucking technically inept for this to auto-disable on dbzer0 (and other blocked instances) so no one would have ever found it? Like even just a little bit of forethought could have allowed them to do what they wanted (which DID impact people lmao) and people would have been none the wiser.
when you attempted to morally justify your participation in this harassment campaign. Being blocked is not an attack, yet you are using the fact that people are on a blocklist to justify harassing someone. Its reprehensible.
Harassment campaign is now when people call you out for your actions.
No wonder .world loves ya
Also that's a wild read of our interactions lmao
ok
We know it’s you, you dimwit 😄
um excuse me this is doxxing sir
Pretty cool to know my satire is provocative enough that it pushed someone to try and get rid of me that way.
I'll keep going, if it pisses them off I must be doing something right.
You called out their favorite rich politican, that's too evil.
This is the right attitude, it seems a lot of grown adults in this comment section view being blocked online as an invitation to escalate contact with someone who has told them no. It's gross kiwi farms behavior and mods need to step up.
It is a huge overstep on their part, and their reaction to the drama was extremely poor. Not surprising they ignored the accusations about blocking trans communities in their filterlist, as well as trying to censor leftists and leftist spaces.
I don't buy that his intention was anti-spam and I don't think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He hid the commits knowing people would fork his repo and remove it, and also call him out big time for this if found out (what's happening now). He added spam lists for plausible deniability. So he could claim it's for anti-spam and so more charitable people would claim that as well. Not to block leftists and trans people which is what the main purpose is. As well as anyone else he doesn't like. It's structured this way so instances who use Tesseract also block these people he has a problem with without them knowing, possibly against their wishes since he put two lists in there, including one he can update on the fly, which is base64 encoded and compressed. I don't know how someone can look at this and claim he did any of it in good faith when he took the time and effort to hide it.
Oh they haven't stopped, and keep getting worse
Someone doesn’t like competition, maybe?
Thanks for doing this breakdown.
Can anyone tell me what is it about? My whole feed is filled with I am in tesseract list but I just can't figure out what it is lol
Tesseract purported to be an interface for Lemmy. It appeared to be an alternate web frontend that instance operators could run that makes lemmy's UI a little different. Other examples of frontends are Photon, Alexandrite, mlmym. Your instance seems to be running the Lemmy default interface.
Tesseract instead was trojan horse malware, it disguised itself as an interface to hide content that the developer personally didn't like. Any instance running tesseract would secretly have a bunch of content hidden from all users.
A few days ago the developer added dbz0 and blahaj to the filters, which made people notice, and they dug deeper and found more. Tesseract had a built-in blacklist of instances, but it also downloaded a secret blacklist from the dev's personal server that would block individual users.
Many of those listed by name on the secret blacklist consider it a badge of honor, and are posting about it.
The blocklist that idiot made wasn’t just secret, it was hidden under several layers of obfuscations, so that no-one could see any sign of it but the dev.
Not only that, but it didn’t generate a ‘this person/instance has been blocked by the dev’ message for the list; it just made it so the ones on the blocklist didn’t exist at all when viewing the fediverse through tesseract.
That dev was trying to curate the feed of everyone using tesseract to his preferences, which appear to be ‘don’t show anything to the left of Regan, and also don’t show anyone who’s hurt my feelings in discussions’.
It’s a type of (otherwise good) software that some people use to access Lemmy / fediverse content - but it has a secret blocklist that its users weren’t told about.
Not secret, and fully optional! The claims this was closed source and/mandatory are just being used to justify harassment (probably why they ended up on a blacklist)
You're not fooling anyone.
you have the right to believe whatever victim narrative you want but you do not have the right to contribute to a harassment campaign
Believe me, if I were harassing you, you'd know about it.
I obviously already know about it?
No. (source)
Lying through obfuscation is still lying.
people who got banned from everywhere else creating an alternative universe in which they are the victim because it's easier than examining their own behavior
Tesseract is an optional frontend ui for Lemmy that has an optional feature that hides users known to behave, well, like they are behaving here lol
the victims were anyone who was not aware that their feed was being manipulated by an outside force in secrecy to further their own goals… so that means all of lemmy.
You know... I see a lot of people pointing and laughing at how pathetic it is... And not a lot of people playing victim.
Huh maybe I already blocked all the namecallers
This is like a list of every active user. Haha
Seeing how PieFed has tried to stop active users from trying to even interact with the platform, it makes sense to these people.
My take on it is they wanted to tone down Lemmy, likely to appeal to a broader audience. Not saying it’s right, just my impression.
Guessing they were filtering political content as it can wear people down being hit with it constantly.
The reason I’d guess there’s more leftist keywords on the filter list is probably due to Lemmy just being more left. You don’t see a lot of right type content or communities here (outside of very specific instances usually already defederated).
Lemmy can also get pretty extreme at times which can be off putting to really anyone. Things like calls for violence and the like. Noticed he had “death to x” filtered, “guillotine” etc. so probably trying to filter out those type of extreme comments.
Not defending their imposition of their filter list on unsuspecting users, just my attempt to make sense of their reasoning behind it. Like, they could have offered this as an optional setting to people with what’s on it listed upfront. People already create their own block lists and filter lists, so having done the work for them, why not offer it as an optional feature? Lots of users hate seeing political talk around election time. Boom, already an option in the client, turn it on and off at will. It’s like having ad block list options.
I’m sure the dev is over it all with the slew of “I’m on the list”, “Why aren’t I on the list”, “Can I be on the list” type of posts beating down on them as they’re banning people for that. Gives the poster YPTB content tho, so win-win? But yeah they sorta brought the ridicule on themselves with this. Can’t be blamed when you break people’s trust and ruin your credibility like that.
Sure but, if that really is the case the dev could just go ahead and... say... that? It could have been a transparent declaration or they could have made this at least "opt out". But instead it was done in the back, not documented or justified in any way.
That’s what I’m saying. Dude 100% could have had a completely different outcome had he been upfront, made it opt-in, and been transparent. He could have had a great feature of filter lists, instead he hid it and forced it on people without their consent.
Would have had a wildly different outcome.
Still would have pissed some people off who felt targeted by the filters, but again, opt in.
It is opt out, and the dev did post the reasoning both before this kerfuffle and again, but they were harassed by users on the blocklist (proving they were there for a good reason)
So what did trans people do to you, Patrick? Since this is one of your alts, why do you hate trans people?
Wait, this guy is an alt of the dev?
Would make sense... He's being very personal in a lot of the comments here.
Only after the filter was discovered. That's not transparency, that's backpedaling.
intentionally misconstruing the facts in order to perpetuate a victim narrative is probably exactly what made them want to block you lol
Just accept that someone doesn't like you and move on grabbing your pitchfork like a creepy stalker just kinda proves their point
I have no idea what you're accusing me of. I didn't even make it onto the list.
I'm accusing you of intentionally misconstruing the facts in order to perpetuate a victim narrative
I haven't misconstrued anything. Nobody knew about this until the whistle was blown. The dev even said in their own words that they were banking on people not noticing. That's not transparency.
He was making excuse for his shitty block list. People was so right to call out his bullahit and get mad. It is not opt out if you don't know the block list exist
I think what's problematic is some of the bans seem to target the LGBTQ community (blahaj and wholesomeyuri being notable examples), as well as smaller news comms.
Another bit is how broad and sporadic the user ban list is. Sure some of the users appear to be of the abrasive type (like me for example, I get the feeling I could be nicer at times). But a lot of the names on it simply aren't problematic and have clean comment histories, empty of any political comments even.
I'm fairly certain Admiral Patrick was running a custom fork of his front end with a "ban from tesseract" button he'd use whenever someone seemed to mildly go against his world views.
It was slipped into his front end as well in a way that qualifies as malicious imo. He is an admin of his own instance, he could have simply blocked everyone at an instance level with the normal Lemmy modding tools. This was a way to circumvent the modlog so it wouldn't show and it was hidden inside a front end solution he was actively trying to distribute. It's incredibly shady. I left Reddit in part because of the shadow banning and hiding content, and this guy is trying to recreate it and spread it like some kind malware.
It feels like it goes against every principal the federation system stands for. I trust my instance admins to make the banning decisions, but he wants to add an extra hidden layer without informing anyone, hide it and then distribute it? It's highly unethical and frankly arrogant.
Well you see, people being different is political. Will drive normal people(TM) away.
He is also hiding comments with word lists. If you have "Zionist" or "Epstein class" in your comment it won't show. A lot of the user bans use regex so at least one other user caught a ban because they have "grimy" in my case (asgrimyr). It's quite insane tbh.
Yeah the user bans and the like, I got nothing. Your explanation would make sense. Idk how you end up with that many users on a filter list.
I did get a chuckle seeing beep on there after all the drama
There's so realm where any of this is ok. There's no reasonable thought behind mass banning anyone you might disagree with, or to make that choice for the rest of us. He didn't "ban politics", he banned left wing politics.
He didn’t ban anyone. It’s a filter. Is it right that he shipped this to people without telling them or asking for their consent to it? No of course not.
You act like it’s targeted specifically at left wing. Lemmy just happens to be more left wing, therefore there was more to filter. There’s right wing shit on there as well. If right wing bs was more common on Lemmy you’d probably see more keywords matching that.
You could be right tho. I know absolutely nothing about this dev, and wouldn’t if it weren’t for all the drama. I’m just making assumptions about their intent and thought behind it. All I can do is guess at it with what’s in front of me.
It sounds to me like he didn't ban anyone on purpose and implemented this list in lieu of blocking or banning people so that there would be no mod log paper trail. Because he is a mod and therefore could have just banned the accounts from his instance.
He did tell them, this was never a secret, admins cannot ban people from instances they do not own even if they wanted to, this is not a default Lemmy UI and the feature is easily disabled in the GUI for those that opt in.
Everyone making up facts to justify their victimhood is demonstrating exactly why someone might want to exclude them from an instance in the first place.
You:
Him:
So why you are spreading literal disinformation?
Kirk is an alt of Admiral Patrick/ptz. he is the dev in question
this
Thanks for admitting it finally, only took days of lying ❤️
I don't consider things posted in a public repo with clear labels and instructions to be "secrets" but I also don't live my life looking for tiny details in other people's behavior that I interpret to pretend I'm a perpetual victim all the time.
If you don't like tesseract then don't install it on your instance but please PLEASE stop ruining our feeds with your collective victim complex it's probably why you ended up on a blocklist of annoying people
Crazy that the whole tesseract sub got deleted 10 minutes after you commented here. You realized you were outing yourself during the unhinged rant. Pathetic.
hey please dont call me pathetic
I'm sad that I already have you tagged (can't say as what, would be ad hominem) and thus can't tag you again right now.
ok
I agree, I also would like sometimes to not check Lemmy/mastodon and immediately get angry, but dev could've worked in a very different way to let people who don't want too much of that content. For example if a user wanted none of cat videos and pics, a simple customizable exclusion filter would take care of that, using a list of that sort (and hidden on top of that) makes me think the aim was another, and more personal.
The dev posted a response in c/Tesseract but you're mostly correct. They wanted to make it easier for like minded future admins to be able to spin up a Lemmy instance without having to know all of the lore.
I have to imagine the dev is enjoying all the attention because it's basically free advertising to anyone else out there who wants the same kind of experience. Since the fediverse is decentralized, there is infinite room for all kinds of moderation styles.
Well, except they pulled it because they were getting raked over the coals, and rightly so, for hiding something like this and pushing it on people.
FYI, you're replying to the dev. This is one of their alt accounts. They're attempting damage control on all these threads with it.
Do you have proof on that? Genuinely asking. Haven’t been keeping tabs on it too closely aside from the main post that went up about it cross posted everywhere and the shit posts about it
You can check their comment history. They've confirmed in other threads when called out, and they also just replied to my comment above, confirming it. Granted, they gave a relatively sarcastic reply, but I don't see any /s, so...
They're making an effort to track down and counter every negative thread about Tesseract, then acting like a chud when people counter them, so whether they're the actual dev or not is kinda irrelevant at this point. They're 100% in support of Tesseract's ban list and they're working tirelessly against everyone trying to make that information publicly known.
Oh interesting, their last active period more or less corresponds with the previous hiatus of the Badmiral...
Sarcasm doesn’t always come with a tag. Based on their comment history, they seem more like a troll to me. But 🤷♂️
yep confirming YET AGAIN its me i made a malware shadownban forced censorship ban machine to delete all of you from the internet permanently but also i dont use it for some reason its true
hes right i went to great lengths to create a super secret hidden private conspiracy uh, ui frontend? to block all of these people, that's why im able to talk to them now it makes perfect sense they are 100% the victims here
this is correct I'm replying to all the people on the secret evil shadowban malware list because the truth is I didn't actually block them! my evil plan was only a ruse to get lemmy users to harass me because I am desperate for their attention
that's right I don't actually want to block these people!! they are all so pleasant to interact with and they are so emotionally mature and respectful I wish I could interact with them all the time
Put me on the list you bloodmouth scum
you know you that if you want to be a victim you dont need other people to do anything you can just say you are a victim? like just delete your account and say that the dev harassed you or something its a lot easier
But are you really an alt of Admiral Patrick?
?? can you not read??
Gonna need some proof
Eh I think it's a great feature but thankfully nobody here gets to control how I use my own computer.
The fediverse is big enough for everyone!
Listen, I'm all about not harassing you personally, but when you come in here with an alt and try to act like an impartial observer, it really seems like an asshole move and I start to reconsider that. Why not come in here and defend yourself if that's what you're going to do? You're just digging a deeper hole for yourself.
Because I don't see a need to defend myself.
But hey I'm glad to see someone else on team "harassment is bad"! Thanks for using your voice and speaking up. I suggest reporting to your admins to block the harassing users and instances that allow it.
:Doesn't see need to defend self:
:Uses alt to defend self:
I'm criticizing, not defending, the people (like yourself) who pretend that they are a victim as justification to attack someone else because they were told no. It's pretty fucked up stalker behavior! No means no!