Spyke

Syndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.

View original on quokk.au

Tesseract dev injects malicious code into browser to illegally DDOS the dbzer0 instance

As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.

View original on quokk.au
1373

485 replies

This is an important post and I appreciate the insight into the happenings on the Fediverse, but the comment chains are going off the rails and I’ve issued a number of bans from this post alone.

Locking.

9
lemmy.zip

I don't think I've ever witnessed someone going so hard off the rails. It's been an entertaining few days really.

447
lemmy.world

It’s what happens when someone with underdeveloped empathy gets caught doing something they know is wrong, resulting in emotional overload.

It’s textbook toddler tantrum.

With stunted empathy, people seeking an explanation and apology are met with increasingly greater resistance.

And like textbook, they claim to be the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.

What’s crazy is they could have simply:

  • Apologised
  • Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
  • Agreed there was a lack of transparency
  • Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

But no. They were caught while they were secretly trying to play internet dictator and refused to empathise with others that were hurt and shocked to find out a tool they were using was receiving undisclosed payloads to use to censor communities and individuals.

I strongly implore everyone to leave this developer alone. Jokingly asking to be added to the list etc empowers them to continue to play the victim. They do not deserve attention.

246
Coelacanthreply
feddit.nu

What’s crazy is they could have simply:

  • Apologised
  • Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
  • Agreed there was a lack of transparency
  • Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.

But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.

Second it must be opt-in.

Third, it must clearly say somewhere that "this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences". There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.

And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more... well-balanced individual.

76

Anyone who thinks "yeah lgbt stuff should be hidden because we want to attract people who don't want to see LGBT stuff" is someone I don't want anywhere near the fediverse.

109
Coelacanthreply
feddit.nu

Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.

46
Baŝtoreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Tbh for me it was more outrageous how it interferes with moderation. There are admins from big instances who weren’t blocked themself and mods from big active communities on that list. If they write warning comments, users of this frontend will simply not see them

And tho user and comment regex is a mess, partially containing very random things. Lot’s of possible wrong matches. This whole thing is from no viewpoint a good idea

38
T156reply
lemmy.world

Also from the other end, because of how the filter works, mods using couldn't see messages the user put, so they'd have been free to do whatever, until caught by either a bot, or moderators not using the frontend.

One of the reasons it was found to begin with was because the db-zer0 instance was on it, and the admin, who was using tesseract, suddenly couldn't load any posts from the instance at all. As Tesseract presents it as a compatibility issue, they were trying to track down the fault at the time.

4

Very good point, that’s horrible. And blocking "your own" instance is pretty dumb. I wonder if db0 would also not been able to read own posts if the instance wasn’t blocked.

2

Full agreement. Part of the problem is that the blocklist was kinda bonkers in who was included

14

Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they're on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they're banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.

A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It's up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don't trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.

56
ramble81reply
lemmy.zip

Not every admin has the time or skill to curate. As long as the dev is open about it and there are configurable features to disable it, I don’t see what the issue is. Ultimately it creates no difference for a user if the admin creates it or the Dev does as long as it’s communicated.

The advantage of the fediverse is “don’t like it, go to another instance or build your own”, not to tell devs what they can and can’t do. Hell I never even interacted with Tesseract since I use a different client and an open instance.

8

The issue is that it's one person shadowbanning people without their knowledge for any arbitrary reason across instances. Like even if it's opt-out, that's still problematic since it makes the default experience whatever that one person thinks it should be. Why should one guy get to decide across the entire fediverse whether your posts are opt-in? That is antithetical to the very concept of the fediverse.

10
ramble81reply
lemmy.zip

Except one guy isn’t. You have to choose to install the software. It’s not included by default. I’m running a local client (Voyager) and never dealt with any of that because the admins of my instance don’t use it either.

-6

And every user that uses that software for whatever reason, superior features, easier on the eyes, more popular it's what everyone recommended will get their curation from that one dev.

5

Which is why it’s ultimately the decision of the admin. Don’t like what the admin of your instance is doing. Go make your own. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. It’s choice all the way down. It’s not like Reddit where you’d be stuck.

0

I dunno, I can understand a curated blocklist, topic-based. Obviously not what this is - if things were up front it wouldn't have been an issue - but maybe someone just does not like memes. A curated meme community list would be handy. If someone didn't want to be on a more curated instance like blahaj but still wanted to filter out specifically problematic anti-trans users, that would be useful.

Just like its up to the users to decide what instance you want to join, it also should be up to the user to decide if they want to take that further, and a front end would be the appropriate place for that (especially since its not baked into lemmy or piefed to have an imported list).

The problem has nothing to do with the option of centralized blocklists, but the hidden nature of the one in tesseract in its entirety.

6

I am sorry, but I disagree with the "centralised blocklists" in a:

Decentralized social networking platforms...
Source

You should be able to block and unblock freely whoever and whatever you want.
The "centralized" may be suggestions (i.e., toggleable), and only, where instances with opt-in keep them implicit/optional, and instances with opt-out explicitly warn about them during a registration.

5
orlyowlreply
piefed.ca

It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev.

Can you elaborate on that? Asking for curiosity, not to challenge you.

2

PieFed has a default list of domains/instances that are blocked when you do a fresh install for a brand new instance. A critical difference between PieFed and the Tesseract blocks is that any of the blocks in PieFed are completely visible to, and under the control of the admins of the instance. So, ultimately, it is just an out-of-the-box default, but the instance admins always have ultimate control over moderation/federation choices. This Tesseract stuff is taking those powers away from the admins.

6

The two main lists that are implemented by default are a defederation list and huge huge listof blocked domains which includes wikileaks for instance, there are other lists (I don't know if the "trusted instance" list comes prepopulated) and almost all can be emptied or added to. But that means that an admin that sets up the software has to go through a whole rigmarole to get the instance to neutral before being able to do what they think is best. And hope they didn't miss anything.

In the case of the blocked domains it's particularly grating since it has like 4000 entries that you either have to delete one-by-one or have to do a manual db transaction to empty the list and that is by design. Plus all you get as a warning that such a list exists is one line during the setup that says Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon but it's definitely not just QAnon links.

3
wjs018reply
piefed.wjs018.xyz

FYI, next version of PieFed has an "Unban All" button for clearing all domain bans to try to make this easier.

Screenshot from my instance:

3

Oh that's good to hear. It sucks that people have to constantly fight the dev to keep his opinions out of the code though, must be tiring for all involved surely...

4
lemmy.world

Honestly, I can see a "curated" list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.

30
lemmy.zip

Yeah, either that or at least if everyone on the blocklist was like nazis or something it seems like he would've had at least half a leg to stand on. But the fact that the most random and benign users showed up on it and he was still trying to justify it as "making the experience better for the fediverse" showed that he was just some asshole completely convinced of his own righteousness.

22
Xerxosreply
lemmy.ml

If he had just implemented the list as a default that anyone could edit, he would have gotten pretty much what he wanted. I mean, some people would have edited the list, some would have deleted the list, but most people are lazy or uninformed and would have simply accepted the default.

16

I really hope the tesseract fork implements this feature.

Nothing would prove him more wrong than actually implement what he wanted in a sensible, non-dickish way.

8

I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.

100%. I'm willing to bet he didn't even receive any threats. The guy was a short-lived lolcow.

15

Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Not sure this would help in itself, even though more flexible blocking would ironically be nice. The value in such a list lies in how it's curated, and the guy is still certifiable and about 3yo mentally, tops.

15

I don't really go on a blocking spree much. How would a front end's block list implementation be different than the instance's choice of software's block list implementation?

I hardly browse All and Local. I am on a piefed based instance, and leave "Enable Automatic Follow of Feed Communities." and "Enable Automatic Leave of Feed Communities." on. So kind of my subscribed feed is semi automatic as long as I follow a broad topic.

3
volorereply
scribe.disroot.org

I agree, I'm almost sad it's (presumably) over now.

Then again, he already "left" once before (and came back), so who's to say? We might be clowning on him on and off the rest of the year if he keeps it up.

49
fizzlereply
quokk.au

I saw a vaguely similar situation a long time ago where someone was a positive, contributing member of the community and then they fell from grace somehow and basically no one was thankful enough so they were banned and they just kept evading the bans and posting smut in the forums for weeks.

The way this guy has really thrown his weight into this but still obviously feels like the victim is really reminiscent, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some more to come.

25
Monumentreply
piefed.world

That’s weirdly sort of how I got my job.

Apparently my predecessor was a nice guy with low boundaries that (at the time) lacked managerial support. When he painted himself into a corner on his commitments, didn’t get the accolades or raises he thought he should get, he got bitter, started to act out, stopped doing work he should have done, and finally, when management started pressing him to clean up some messes he had created over a year+ of neglecting his responsibilities, he left an unsigned resignation letter on his desk and didn’t come to work for a few days.
He called to discuss the terms of his return, expecting a raise, and they just told him they accepted his resignation.

30
fizzlereply
quokk.au

LOL. Sounds like an idiot. Even if the guy was really needed, you can't have someone like that on your team.

15
piefed.zip

Just another reminder, no one cares about you in the slave factory. Prioritize yourself over work and don't build up loyalty to a rich asshole.

20
fizzlereply
quokk.au

Thats not really the right lesson to learn here.

Just have real, non-combative conversations with your colleagues and supervisors. Don't communicate with stupid games and manipulation.

9

You are talking about the aftereffects whereas mine was about the cause. Mental health is important.

5
0opsreply
piefed.zip

Yeah, best case scenario they work out some kind of deal just to keep the machine turning for a little longer... but he can bet his ass that the second he steps out of that room they'll be putting up job listings for his replacement.

2
Monumentreply
piefed.world

The manager they brought in to bring him in line has been one of the best, kindest, and most human managers I’ve ever met. (But she doesn’t fuck around.)

She’s also an absolute shark at knowing the system, and without going into specifics, has done very well for everyone on my team that has been even modestly competent.

I honestly feel bad for the guy. He was too far in the hole of anger and resentment to realize that he’d been handed a whole new opportunity before he squandered it.
Shortly after I was hired, several other people were hired in to help with the flow of work, and my team went from being sort of an embarrassment to one that, quite frankly, is awesome. (And we still have a good work-life balance.)

3
lemmy.sdf.org

They basically did, it shows to anyone that visits dubvee.

Which should only be viewed though an archive site as it could cause bad things to db0

And thankfully others already pulled the text so no one has too, but should still get it archived

https://lemmy.world/comment/24975427

25

Which should only be viewed though an archive site as it could cause bad things to db0

or with a JavaScript blocker

6
Leonreply
pawb.social

It’s okay, they are a measured and non-violent individual that just wants Lemmy to be friendly for the “normies.”

They’re a good guy™︎!

18
jimmy90reply
lemmy.world

so true

I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance’s top admin.

you're the good guys wooooooo!

go fediverse!!

-12

Right, because all of us personally sent harrassing messages, death threats, etc.

See I don't doubt that he received harrassment, hell I can even believe he got death threats. And that really sucks, I'm sorry he experienced that.

Isn't it convenient how there are no receipts of them though? Or any trace of the supposed dude egging people on to do it? It's a diversion tactic that's honestly becoming quite old.

19
dilreply

Half your comments are complaining about commies like it's the cold war

5

Honestly it was pretty common on classic Reddit. Usually a modder. Often times a script kiddie/chrome extension.

It feels nice to see it here and it really takes me back.

9

Nice! I needed something to read at work tomorrow.

2
lemmy.ca

In case somebody wanted confirmation. Maybe don't visit the page with Javascript enabled.

172
egretsreply
lemmy.world

And that full text, also to avoid extra visits:

You crazies won and proved me wrong. The fediverse isn't worth saving after all.

Over the course of the last several days, I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance's top admin. This is unacceptable for all of the reasons in the world, and while I won't give you the personal satisfaction of having won, you've definitely proven me wrong about the fediverse being something that even can be saved from itself.

Even people around here I'd interacted with positively for years and had grown to respect because they seemed level headed and above the immature and sociopathic bullshit that dominates this platform showed their true selves. That completely shattered any and all illusions I had that this place has a hidden core of users that I should try to make more visible amongst all the rage, rage baiting, propaganda, harassment, rumor mongering, trolls, conspiracies, purity testing, witch hunts, and violent rhetoric.

Like many of the rational people before me who called this place home, I'm done with this place.

I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.

Then you have entire instances whose admins call for the death of others, harass other users, and lead harassment, brigading, and DARVO campaigns against those who dare call out their bullshit or decide to disassociate themselves and their work from them.

Lemmy.World was so close to doing the right thing after instance-that-will-not-be named's admins were calling for the death of LW's admins while spreading rumours and labeling others in such a way that painted them as targets for murder. All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they 'caught' and should be killed.

.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.

"We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it." they probably said.

Bullshit.

I'm one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse. If I can stand up for what's right and deal with the blowback, so can you.

Fuck lemmy world's admin team for condoning that behavior and letting the human skidmark db0 DARVO his way out of the situation while brigading with his army of malcontents whom he wields like a cult leader. He knows exactly what he is doing, and you all continue to allow him to get away with it.

Nah, fuck this whole place. I've let too many things fall by the wayside IRL because of dealing with all this fediverse bullshit and trying to give it the slightest bit of polish both visually and atmospherically. Mythbusters may have proven that you can, in fact, polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it's still a shiny ball of shit.

For the few people left who didn't turn out to be psychotic, I'll think of you from time to time when recalling something you've posted or commented that genuinely made me laugh, made me think, or otherwise put a smile on my face or in my heart.

Everyone else, though, enjoy your toxic, xenophobic, knee-jerk-to-violence, purity-testing, and harassing-anyone-who-doesn't-fall-in-line cess pit. One day you, too, will do or say something that doesn't toe the line and you'll be right where I am.

P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you're welcome.

113
Martineskireply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

The disconnect from reality is insane. They completely ignore why people got mad and make up imaginary reasons for why they got the hate while painting themselves like some hero trying to stand for us but getting betrayed in return. It's both hilarious and sad. I hope that they will have time for self reflection once they get off the threadiverse and become a better person but I don't have much expectations given how deep they are into the delusion.

99
Leonreply
pawb.social

I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance's top admin.

I'm getting pretty sick of this kind of claim. Like, do I believe he's been harassed? Yeah, that seems likely. Death threats? That's definitely possible. What I take issue with is the way it's brought up.

He frames that it's a campaign run by a particular individual targeting him, but there are no receipts. He's using it as a shield against critique, shutting down any discussion around this by pointing at something and screaming about how he's a big victim here.

54

Same thing the last time, a claim of coordinated attacks (of which there were none), and anyone who dared say "well thats not cool" were targeted, myself included.

Though I surprisingly didn't make it into this list, but considering my commenting on it since, I'd probably make it into their next one.

These claims seem like a go-to for anyone caught doing something they know they shouldn't have in a way they shouldn't have.

25

All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they 'caught' and should be killed.

"We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it." they probably said.

I lol'ed

32

I am shocked and appalled that the Admiral himself would use such toxic language. Perchance he needs to review the bad words on his list with those used in his rant.

/s

19

This just honestly sounds like he really does need to step away. Like this clearly seems to be giving him some kind of mental breakdown. It kind of seems like it stated with good intend and quickly spiralled into a god complex.

This mixed with other things I've read about him, I just wonder if he needs a little mental help. Or maybe he just needs to disconnect from the internet for awhile and live in reality. Either way, I don't wish to shit talk. I just hope he gets what he needs in terms of help and support in the real world. Mental health is no joke.

17
Lucireply
lemmy.ca

Yes, I was following the orders of db0 and ada when I did it o7

16

that even can be saved from itself

Huh, didn’t know the fediverse needed that. Oh wait, it doesn’t.

11

Wow. I consider myself a pretty frequent user of Lemmy, and I have no idea what they're talking about here. Any of it. And if it doesn't concern me, then it sure as fuck doesn't concern any "normies". Normies aren't doing deep dives into Lemmy politics. They don't know, and they don't care---just like I don't. It's a classic case of taking a personal vendetta and pretending it's some grand crusade for decency and normality.

This is the worst case of needing to touch grass I've ever seen. Maybe before posting something like that, go take a walk first? Get some fresh air.

7
Linkreply
rentadrunk.org

What are the vote quotes they are referring to?

5
sh.itjust.works

Just before this whole thing, the piefed dev pushed an update that capped how many up/downvotes piefed users can do per day. They set the cap to effectively punish like 3 users who posted all day everyday.

One of those users had a "I will leave unless you reconsider." moment and they didn't give half a shit. And they didn't even make the list. None of their communities did.

So just a couple devs thrashing around causing as much collateral damage as possible.

15
piefed.ca

Also punishes those who vote frequently, as I often do. I thought Voyager was having issues until I read the Piefed changelog. Unless my instance admin removes the limit I'm likely going back to lemmy.ca because I shouldn't have to ration my upvotes. I like being able to boost engagement while also making it easier for me to see which comments I have or haven't read yet.

21

Yeah the whole concept was dogshit from the beginning. It solved no problem except as an exercise of control.

16
Linkreply
rentadrunk.org

Thank you. I do prefer Piefed but without all the restrictions he is imposing.

Is there perhaps a fork of it without these restrictions?

2

Right but there are other restrictions too such as hiding posts from certain websites I believe.

1
Victorreply
lemmy.world

Expert dev. Doesn't even know the attribute for setting the language in the script tag is type, not lang. Not to mention that you are encouraged to omit the attribute altogether if the script tag contains JavaScript...

Petty, and a bad dev. Big yikes.

29
Leonreply
pawb.social

The random strikes me as curious too. I don't see the point in doing (100 - 1 + 1), you could express a random number between 1 and 100 in a simpler manner. Then he gets another random number and reuses that three times, for whatever reason.

Then again, none of his other decisions make much sense to me so why would this?

19
Victorreply
lemmy.world

Yeah the - 1 + 1 was weird to me too, serves no purpose.

I can see how choosing a new random number for each fetch would prevent the server from caching the response, I suppose.

I can't imagine this code was written in any other fashion than completely rage-induced, with shaking fingers and high blood pressure. 😂 What a putz.

19

I can't imagine this code was written in any other fashion than completely rage-induced, with shaking fingers and high blood pressure. 😂 What a putz.

lmfao

I've drunk coded before (gotta hit the Ballmer Peak) but I don't know if I've ever rage coded before.

9

I guess it's just a pattern to easily get a number between a and b, going (b - a + 1). Or maybe this is just vibecoded lol

Seeing (100 - 1 + 1) definitely bothers my brain lmao

Looking closer, the whole calculation bothers me now. Why do floor() + 1 instead of just using ceil ... arghhhh

11

There are a lot of these sorts of things. Look at the RegEx used in the block list. The author will likely be surprised that RegEx supports * and +.

2
gruereply
lemmy.world

To be fair, it's not as if it supports languages other than fucking Javascript anyway, so it mostly doesn't matter.

Edit: I don't want to split hairs about modules or json or whatever; I just want to be salty about how we could've had Scheme or Python in the browser.

12

The type attribute is not only to specify the language. It's like one case out of several. It definitely matters in those contexts where you want to do the other things you can do with the type attribute.

10

We could have had VM languages also like C# and Java and had web that was actually fast.

4
Muehereply
lemmy.ml

Well the script tag has a deprecated attribute called language, so in older code and media you will see <script language="javascript"> a bunch. The weird thing is they instead used the lang attribute which just doesn't exist.

11
Ftumchreply
lemmy.today

There used to be a language attribute, but I don't think I've ever seen lang before.

5

The lang attribute exists for other elements, but not on the script tag. 👍

8

I think this is the first time the whole fediverse agrees to who the asshole is.

Thanks, dev of Tesseract, you actually left a positive impact on the fediverse. Please don’t come back.

135

It'd be hilarious if this dude went to prison over this, because it seems like he finally crossed from "annoying and unethical but legal" to straight up illegal.

133

I could understand hardcoded blacklists if Tesseract was meant as a frontend for a Lemmy instance tailored for a specific purpose, and not intended for general use. But this, to DDOS a website because the developer is a whiny baby who can't take criticism? This is a new low. This is disgusting, and damaging for the Lemmyverse as whole.

119
Jayreply
lemmy.ca

I doubt he's gone, just hiding under an alt.

40

Then may he read and seethe at all of these comments and hopefully one day realize he’s wrong (I know, long shot)

14
Prunebuttreply
slrpnk.net

I sincerely hope for his mental wellbeing that he doesn't.

10
piefed.ca

He absolutely is. He was trying to defend himself under his Kirk@ startrek.website account constantly these past few days.

19

Knowing ValueSubtracted's history, that's not surprising in the slightest. It is very suspicious that this happened right after the Kirk account became active on every thread defending Patrick's actions, and suddenly ST.W has an issue out of the blue with dbzer0. There's likely something more to this behind closed doors.

11

makes sense why I was banned from there the other day when I started calling his alts out.

4

I've never seen a dev do something like this. Pretty incredible that he put that in the code. It just shows the maturity level of these guys.

92

"Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate."

I think this is the best part of their message

79
lemmy.nz

Did you learn your lesson?

(I like the chandelier one, nice misty contrast and off centre composition)

28
lemmy.world

Thanks!

Some of my favorite pictures aren’t well-loved by Lemmy, cause I’m a weirdo with weird taste.

13

I don't think you can take great photos without a bit of weird in there personally - keep on posting them, I know ive enjoyed them!

7

As a goth with blackout curtains, this is a welcome and comforting composition. Just have to avoid the beams.

7
Selenireply
lemmy.world

Those pics are awesome, especially the coast and the Seattle skyline shots!

Which is just further proof that twat had no taste lol

2

Thank you! I'm working hard out here! I just got back from a huge three-day art shoot in Seattle, so for the next few days, all my titles will be "Seattle, WA." until I get back to shooting Portland content again.

1
anarchist.nexus

Well, there's another one going down the deep end. Can anyone enlighten me why there are devs losing their minds on the regular and pulling everyone else into their shitshow? Most of the time those people are actually skilled, but something goes wrong and they become megalomaniac, believing they are the arbiter of truth and a gift from god we all should be thankful for while they pull more and more insane shit.

72
Zronreply
lemmy.world

It’s dictator syndrome. There’s always going to be a subset of the population that, after acquiring the faintest whiff of power or authority, seizes it like a drowning man.

78

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

You all made some very good points, and I think the answer lies somewhere at the focal point of all your theories at once. It takes a special kind of mentality to start a project like this, and factors like pressure, emotional baggage and/or instability, narcissism, autism, ADHD all come together, explaining the exceptionally violent breakdowns we're seeing in the solo dev field.

13
INeedManareply
piefed.zip

I think it's the pressure and the solo developer model

You put something out. It seems to be running. There are bugs. You fix them. There are more bugs (pareto is a PITA). You fix them too. Someone accuses you of sacrificing kittens in the basement. There are ideas for features and more bugs. Some worded in an entitled or just tone-deaf way. Very often you're the only one working on the project and saying "I accept PRs" somehow became received as a FU. It becomes hard to put the project away for just a week
You are perpetually in "I-fix-it" mode
Not to mention that in order to even start a project like that one needs to have at least a bit of "fuck it, I'll do it myself" mentality

It's a pity that ![email protected] wound down. I hoped it might have been a space for projects to find communities. As we see around, it doesn't require a 10 person team with a kanban board to write something that works. But on the other side of the spectrum I think a project needs some sort of community around it. So even if there's only one dev, someone else could write the tutorials, less technical parts of docs, help new deployments etc

39
deegeesereply
sopuli.xyz

I’m sorry but that excuse is bullshit.

That is when they have a meltdown and quit the project because demand for bug fixes or new features it too much pressure.

This guy promoted a secret block list of leftists and when discovered, lashed out at his critics with a DDOS script.

Just another thin skinned fascist crying because their scheme was exposed.

15
INeedManareply
piefed.zip

The question I responded to was rather a general one. And I think that seeing all dev-related dramas as "that guy was just fascist all along" is similar to saying "all X are thieves" - a simplification that is easy to choose because it addresses our emotions regarding what has happened but not necessarily always the best explanation

That is when they have a meltdown and quit the project because demand for bug fixes or new features it too much pressure.

That requires self-awareness to ask oneself "maybe I need a break?" and I think such decision can be hard to make due to sunken cost fallacy. I think that with the pressure of the pings about bugs and requests etc, it's easy to get into mindset of "it's either on or off" with nothing in between. Because 5 bugs solved means only 3 other to go.
And the second option is to dig in harder and in this case "curate the feed. All of it. Whatever that means"

I'm not saying that that person did not act out of an agenda. But I can imagine a set of choices that lead to a catastrophic breaking point

10

Yeah exactly. The dev had been talking for a while about how lemmy wasn’t good for their mental health and they weren’t enjoying it. Even a year ago they made a post saying they quit. But for some reason they came back a couple weeks later. And I guess over the past year it’s gotten worse and worse. I guess we’re witnessing a mental health crisis :(

5
deegeesereply
sopuli.xyz

Nobody wakes up and decides to be an asshole, it takes a lifetime of poor emotional self regulation.

2
INeedManareply
piefed.zip

Ah, but you see "asshole with a lifetime of poor emotional self regulation" is not "scheming fascist with an agenda". That's what I'm arguing with in your take

And in the scope of the question, which used plural "devs losing their minds", I think that it would be a vilification to effectively say "they snap because they are fascists"

There are and will be non-fascist (and IMO also non-asshole) devs who snap. And I think some times it will be because of the feeling of responsibility for something, "either I fix it or it won't get fixed" situation, lack of social/team/peer safety net, ... (in my first comment I tried to rather portray the situation than name all those things because I just can't name all of them)

14
Wrenreply
lemmy.today

I, for one, appreciate the post-mortem you're doing here.

Calling someone an asshole and a fascist does nothing to show us how we got to this place. Stress and a lack of emotional regulation is a nightmare when you're building in public.

7

considering the state of the world… the formation of the list and its secret origins for the explicitly stated purpose of regulating content to change the dynamics of power and silence of dissenting voices of the marginalized is fascist, and so the fascism steak happened before any fallout or pressure and was not a factor in reliving the possible pressure if there was any.

the list and his intentions are far worse then the attempt at DDOS, which even without detecting the code would have been identified almost instantly as if there wasn’t already reason enough to deny requests from tesrsserect. the attempt to explain the shit behavior does not follow the results

1

Being an open source dev requires thicker skin than you'd think, and even thinker than most people have.

Either you go the community route where you build a loyal user base, listen to feedback, and have q community of contributors as well.

Or you go the 'I made something cool for me, and its open so anyone can use it too!'

The former is sustainable, the later is not if you domt maintain the idea that its yours first and only.

Once you start half listening to people using your stuff, but believe what you want is right, starts to isolate you.

You think all your users are stupid for their feature requests, because you don't need it. Plus you alone are in charge. Its your repo.

This ego can continue to inflate to this point. I've seen it in both closed and open source (anyone remever when the FSLabs A320 for Microsoft flightsim with malware? Just me?... Okay).

But this is by no means new.

20

Speaking as a nearly lifelong developer of one kind or another, with ASD and ADHD... there's a big ol' overlap. I'm not talking "the venn diagram is a circle" level overlap, but it is significant. Lots of people with these traits have personality quirks, differences in socioemotional processing from the "typical" stuff, experiences in early life, and other things, that can cause some pretty intense rabbit holing/spiraling when things get overwhelming.

To be clear though, this guy is obviously just a major dipshit. Nobody deserves being lumped in with that.

18
1984reply
lemmy.today

People who are attracted to computers often have emotional baggage. As a kid, I liked computers myself for that reason. I could escape the real world and have fun. The computer would do exactly what I wanted all the time.

Today, you have all kinds of emotionally unstable people using computers. The trans community are very much into computers as well, for the same reasons I did probably. Because it's a safe space when you are different.

And yeah, some people will use their tech skills to cause damage. Others to build something useful.

15
RustySharpreply
programming.dev

I think you're projecting a little. People act like this no matter the field. We swim in the tech pool, so we mostly only see the shit floating in our pool.

I can assure you the neighbour's pool also has their fair share of floaters.

24

Would make sense, yeah. But different personality traits are attracted to different professions. They just have other issues if it's more of an extrovert profession.

1

I'd say everyone has emotional baggage. I don't see a single person growing up on this planet that can possibly not have emotional baggage.

The difference is about how you handle it. Emotional baggage and emotional instability are NOT connected.

I don't think there is a particularly higher amount of people in tech that become insane at the first feel of power. They just often have a higher impact. Just look at the corporate world. The amount of power tripping managers is pretty high as well.

14

Confluence of stress burnout, and character traits.

Is worthwhile to explore both the psychological and societal precursors to such.

... Probably worthwhile looking into narcissism too. Albeit many perspectives on the topic, there are common themes and distinct insights to catch, that are sometimes difficult to really have sink in, so distinct and alient an umwelt exists behind the contrastingly "normal" facade. Until blow-out.

... Probably worthwhile looking into autism too. Maybe AuDHD specifically (whom are the majority). The absence of the socially normativising stuff, from the different neurophysiology, almost like we're having to do all the work of the cerebelum, the gpu, in the forebrain, the cpu, with the neuronal journeys having more finegrain, less pruning, and fewer main reinforced trunks, and so experience far more of the intricate detail all the way there, and all the way back... it's not just exhausting in itself, the extra brain power required for all the meta-navigation, only having the intricacies of side roads of working-it-out-now, none of the popular motorways of presumption, but also exhausting from the resultant clashes, and the cassandra syndrome, putting up with a majority who dismiss what you see in preference for their shared reality, regardless of how well it can be seen otherwise... no judgement on who's right or wrong there, only a consideration of what it's like, having to live like that. ... I can imagine that adds a whole other dimension of burnout to be experienced. And then when having found something that can accommodate you, avails a space where you're finally allowed the control you need to soothe your fine-grain sensitivities from that different awareness frequency range, gives you that peace, and then that area expands back into the social space, where there's still a different umwelt clash, each modality appearing stupid to the metrics of the other modality. And in the absence of support nor aptitude in that other's stubborn paradigm, for your own stubborn paradigm, whether you try to brashly persist in your integrity, or you try to bend to fit, it exhausts, either way. And then melt-downs and rage-attacks and so on can happen. Especially when got so close to it, and identified with it, this new thing you made that availed you such grace, that could save the world, that's part of you... and then these ungrateful swine come along and threaten it!? Yeah, I can see how such blow-outs could come about.

Especially bad if one has both autism and narcissism. The narcissism would preclude their any will whatsoever to self improvement. They'd have total aversion to accountability. No real introspection, and thus no real regret or apology is possible. Only pretence. If even that. Sometimes the grandiosity slips out of the mask of even the most covert narcissists (and community narcissists, martyr hero narcissists, vulnerable narcissists, etc). Narcissists, especially the true ones, where it has become their personality, and not just a rare incidental moment or rarer trait, in having itpped past the point of introspection, into delusional non-reality in fantasy love of their self image, no longer able to distinguish other people as other people, seeing them only as means to their own ends, and lingering in that, growing more machiavelian, psychopathic, even sadistic and demented. And in a way, a bit of a saving grace for us all, if the autism's louder than the socially manipulative covert machiavellianisms. Better the devil we can see [because they lack the social aptitude to hide], than the devil we cannot see [because they hide among us, pretending to be the paragons of virtue].

14

Oh, it's skill alright. If we look at e.g. Empress who was bonkers insane at the end, she was the only one far and wide who was actually able to crack Denuvos antitamper at that moment in time, a task many believed to be actually impossible.

10
lemmy.world

What an actual manchild

People who are actually done don't write several essays in a week and set up targeted DDoS

Imagine having such an oversized ego to think that your views are the only correct ones, and then that it's your duty to enforce them on others in clandestine ways.

Particularly when those views are ultimately not much more developed than those you'd expect a child to hold

66
SupraMarioreply
lemmy.world

Considering the guy had a list of what looked like 1k+ users being blocked, which honestly confuses me how he managed to get that many users together. I don't even remember most of the users comments after each post, let alone the massive list he had. His ego must be massive to create a curated list like that, which means he took issue with each one of us on that list or built a script that created it based from trigger words from our posts and comments... either way it's not a good look.

32
amioreply
lemmy.world

The way it was written suggests either LLM slop or just being an obsessive dumbfuck with way too much time on his hands.

9
SupraMarioreply
lemmy.world

His "I'm leaving and taking my ball" rant sounds like option two.

9

I know, right?! Although to be fair they are very far from mutually exclusive. Looks a lot like both.

2
[deleted]reply
piefed.world

He probably just used his personal block list as the basis.

7
SupraMarioreply
lemmy.world

O shit, that's a lot of bans. How many are duplicates? I guess I'm still thinking about how small the fediverse is but that's probably not true anymore.

3

The 3000+ was from blahaj alone, and I set it up to go from newest to oldest, and skip accounts that had been unbanned, so no duplicates. I ran it through blahaj first, and then dbzer0, and there were only 500 additional unique bans from from dbzer0 over the last year

3

Ah, and my bad, when I said duplicates I should have said people creating new accounts to bypass the ban. Or was it done via IP as well?

3
Baŝtoreply
discuss.tchncs.de

It was a very sloppy list. I searched for a few regex terms and there definitely some who only matched two nicks and were way to general for that. For example blocking every nick starting with urheber, which is German and means originator, to just match two accounts who are exactly named like that. It could also be that he put some nicks in the regex just make the block less obvious

6
AbidanYrereply
lemmy.world

I'm pretty sure he also had "kate" in a regex too, which is a reasonably common woman's name in English.

3

Just Kate, yes: "^Kate$",

Those are dumb, but there are also a lot of regex without the $ (so any can follow) and a few without the ^ (so it can be anywhere in the name).

2

No, we use it mostly related to authorship. The German version of copyright is basically called originator rights (Urheberrecht) and is designed to protect the rights of the original creator.

Aside from legal context it is rarely used and rather for somebody who started a riot and such

2

think its your duty to enforce them on others...

Thats the wild part of all this.

There are ways for users to filter things themselves. Its not hard, and that is the user's choice. I filter out several instances, but its MY CHOICE. And if others want to read those, that is fine, its THEIR CHOICE.

10

Dear Lord, please grant me this level of pettiness and the presence of mind to wield that pettiness only against those who deserve it. Amen.

64
mander.xyz

I was suspecting this guy might be a fed just because of their actions, but this crashout has proven me wrong, he was doing it for free.

62
jaybonereply
lemmy.zip

This person is most likely mentally ill. I tried to point out a bunch of weird shit that the dubvee instance was doing two or three years ago. I was mostly ignored and made to feel like I was crazy. So I just dropped it and tried to block and ignore anything from Dubvee on my own clients. So it’s quite vindicating to see this asshole get totally blown up for days now all over the fediverse. But also kind of tiring, like we’re reverting back to bean memes just to get a break from this drama.

53
ani.social

we at the fringes are fated to share space with the mentally ill forever i guess

14

Pinpointing and neutralizing potential leftist organizing. You don't have to be big or doing meaningful organizing/actions for some guy to justify their paycheck, it's been that way for in-person organizing since the 60s at least, and online since the early 2000s.

Despite being tiny, we literally have multiple accounts which exclusively repost pro-state-department news stories.

13

I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren’t me actually want a place that’s not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.

100% that dude was running an op. If you want to "carve out" such a space, that would be an instance for the "non-crazies" where all "those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies" were banned or filtered out. You can block and filter however you want on your instance. In fact that is one of the expectation one has of an instance and how one chooses an instance. I chose blahaj because of how the admins, you know, administrate and curate the instance. Writing a front-end and smuggling in a blocklist via other commits (no commit message ever acknowledged the blocklist as it was being built afaik) and having a central point of truth for what and who gets filtered is not how you "carve out" a space, it's how you try to shape discourse on an entire platform.

That DDOS attempt is him being extremely mad at db0 for thwarting this before his front-end became the de-facto standard for power-users, especially mods and admins.

.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.

Oh yeah they just silently dropped it, they still owe db0 an apology for throwing all this shit at them right immediately after the nazi allegation got debunked.

I’m one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse.

You already had ragequit the fediverse last year remember? This is just lolcow behavior at this point.

P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you’re welcome.

I sometimes do wonder what goes on in the matrix rooms around the fediverse lol. Seems like someone fell out of favor with even the most liberal of the anti-tankies.

58

Oh yeah they just silently dropped it, they still owe db0 an apology for throwing all this shit at them right immediately after the nazi allegation got debunked.

Still waiting for their update on that saga and the flat world rule adjustments. Any day now

8

As for those 3 people, how much you wanna bet they're the admin team of startrek.website? They just sided with Patrick and defederated from dbzer0 while also refusing to share any sort of evidence of any harassment or serious wrongdoing on the dbzer0 community's part. Instead of just one clown, we've got a circus forming.

7
lemmy.world

I still don't know what Tesseract is and now I guess I don't need to care.

50
VitoRoblesreply
lemmy.today

It's a frontend. So literally a skin to make a website look prettier and more organized.

Imagine a waiter starts telling customers what foods they are allowed to eat. He wasn't the chef, the manager, the owner, anybody.

That's how stupid it was.

29

More like the waiter starts crossing out everything on the menu that’s not to their taste and telling the diners the kitchen ran out.

It was an overstep of authority AND total dishonesty.

20
lemmy.world

And then when the customer pushed back against his advice, he added rat poison to their order.

17

And then shit on the floor screaming about how it's all the customer's fault that he's losing his job, before storming out of the restaurant.

12
jaygray91reply
piefed.zip

It's a front end to change the UI of lemmy, and others like lemmy. you can see some examples of others here: https://www.lemmyapps.com/ . Filter by web app to see some of the other popular ones.

7
jaygray91reply
piefed.zip

It kind of is, considering it's still an app of sorts, but using the web browser. I just keep using "front end" because that's what others call it. I see it like an app. but yeah, it's to change the UI if you don't like the default lemmy UI.

4

Don't have to install anything. Some instance make it the default though, but I think most front end like Voyager or Alexandrite (or tesseract since we are discussing it) you can visit their web page and point your home instance to use their UI.

Edit; I'm copying a comment someone else made here https://piefed.zip/comment/6322459 since it's pretty consise than what I explained 😅

It's a frontend. So literally a skin to make a website look prettier and more organized.

Imagine a waiter starts telling customers what foods they are allowed to eat. He wasn't the chef, the manager, the owner, anybody.

That's how stupid it was.

2

I can see that someone wants to feel big, but once he was ousted, we could all tell how small and fragile he is, and he had to make himself even smaller.

This is so pathetic it's hilarious!

49

Unhinged enough at least, to be somehow a centrist radicalist - taking all radical views at once, so you're perfectly in the 'middle' of radicality.

17

And that's how you go from loser troll to criminal. 👋

43
lemmy.world

You know, I think this whole situation could've been boiled down to just make an instance and defederate, instead we got the FediKaren of the year with their silly obscured list and petty shoddy ahh ddos script.

43

He actually did make an instance (dubvee DOT org, but please don't visit because the dev added JavaScript that tries to DDOS dbzer0 every time someone accesses dubvee).

33
Zomgreply
piefed.world

Just say ass, you can curse on the internet

20

It's just honestly sad. How do you get lodged so far up your own ass that even the ones you trust and "interacted positively for years" with can't even demonstrate to you that you're plain wrong.

34

Genuinely think this post should be pinned for prosperity and a warning to others. Lemmy does not appreciate censorship.

31
lemmy.nz

You want to make a place that carves out crazies, good someone should do that. I believe a frontend isnt the place but i also think there is a discussion to be had and an approach where it could work. Most instances already defed these instances already.

You want to crash out and add a bunch of people to a secret blocklist, fine it kills the rep of your project but whatever people can stop using it.

You want to add malicious code to your project, thats disgusting and unironically you should be jailed. You cannot DDOS people because you dont like them. You cannot hijack peoples computers to DDOS. That is unacceptable.

31

There is a pretty thick line between hater and criminal and this guy crossed it.

21

Can someone explain what the hell this whole situation is? I didn’t really even know what tesseract even was before this happened.

28

Is this an honorary ban to just exist as a dbzer0 user?

Edit: is it just me, or is that script written funnily. Then again, I don't code in JS

28

I still don't know what Tesseract is, but I take it's not something I'd want to use.

27

Can someone ELI5? I’m way out of the loop and almost too afraid to ask at this point.

Is tessaract an instance? My understanding through memes is that they hardcoded a blocklist of users and instances and it became a badge of honor to have your name on it.

27

I wasn't on the list but I feel included now. Thank you deranged manchild of the fediverse.

26

I'm 2 days late to checking the banlist and even though I didn't make the exact user match, I did make the regex match lol.

25
lemmy.world

What does the farewell message say? Don’t particularly want to go to their site now.

23
quokk.au

Bye

You crazies won and proved me wrong. The fediverse isn’t worth saving after all.

Over the course of the last several days, I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance’s top admin. This is unacceptable for all of the reasons in the world, and while I won’t give you the personal satisfaction of having won, you’ve definitely proven me wrong about the fediverse being something that even can be saved from itself.

Even people around here I’d interacted with positively for years and had grown to respect because they seemed level headed and above the immature and sociopathic bullshit that dominates this platform showed their true selves. That completely shattered any and all illusions I had that this place has a hidden core of users that I should try to make more visible amongst all the rage, rage baiting, propaganda, harassment, rumor mongering, trolls, conspiracies, purity testing, and violent rhetoric.

Like many of the rational people before me who called this place home, I’m done with this place.

I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren’t me actually want a place that’s not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.

Then you have entire instances whose admins call for the death of others, harass other users, and lead harassment, brigading, and DARVO campaigns against those who dare call out their bullshit or decide to disassociate themselves and their work from them.

Lemmy.World was so close to doing the right thing after instance-that-will-not-be named’s admins were calling for the death of LW’s admins while spreading rumours and labeling others in such a way that painted them as targets for murder. All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they ‘caught’ and should be killed.

.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.

“We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it.” they probably said.

Bullshit.

I’m one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse. If I can stand up for what’s right and deal with the blowback, so can you.

Fuck lemmy world’s admin team for condoning that behavior and letting the human skidmark db0 DARVO his way out of the situation while brigading with his army of malcontents whom he wields like a cult leader. He knows exactly what he is doing, and you all continue to allow him to get away with it.

Nah, fuck this whole place. I’ve let too many things fall by the wayside IRL because of dealing with all this fediverse bullshit and trying to give it the slightest bit of polish both visually and atmospherically. Mythbusters may have proven that you can, in fact, polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it’s still a shiny ball of shit.

For the few people left who didn’t turn out to be psychotic, I’ll think of you from time to time when recalling something you’ve posted or commented that genuinely made me laugh, made me think, or otherwise put a smile on my face or in my heart.

Everyone else, though, enjoy your toxic, xenophobic, knee-jerk-to-violence, purity-testing, and harassing-anyone-who-doesn’t-fall-in-line cess pit. One day you, too, will do or say something that doesn’t toe the line and you’ll be right where I am.

P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you’re welcome.

54
lemmy.ca

'I'm not the problem, everyone else is'. 🤦

I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind.

All he had to do was make his own instance, where he can defederate from/block whoever he likes. Let users decide if they want to be a part of it.

Good intentions don't justify bad actions, and abusing the trust instilled in you as a developer of a popular tool is rarely taken lightly.

Imposing your own personal opinionated blacklists on other peoples platforms without their knowledge and consent was never going to go well, no matter what your intentions are. ESPECIALLY in the fediverse; a system built to prevent exactly that behaviour.


The DDOS code however....

Frankly that should be considered criminal. This dev should be facing jail time for that alone.

44
slrpnk.net

He did, his instance was dubvee(.)org. i guess that wasn't good enough 🤷

24

Oh, I misunderstood; I thought this code/sign-off was a commit to tesseract (I've not actually looked at the repo)

What a child. People don't want to play in his sandbox, so he goes and takes a shit in theirs.

Good riddance.

19

Turned out no one like the instances heavy handed curated experience so they decided it needed to be done to those unknowning

8

laugh I mean Rimu's code was bad enough but you could at least opt out of it. This is just petty hilarity.

16

I just want the o.g author to know, that even though its been rewritten here, I don't respect them enough to read it.

Tesseract who? Sounds like a bitch.

13

He is going back to mastering the sword it seems

5

Just for the sake of inadequacy of the sorrowful code...

And though I was banned on the /0 instance for a single message, too, with some experience in web-dev I just wanted to clarify regarding the possible immaturity of the sad malicious script authors, sorry...

That attempt seems too reckless and disregards the client optimizations, I believe, and may "choke" the JavaScript engine event-loop of common clients as modern browsers, since Fetch API is asynchronous, and not to mention net::ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES that may also cause lagging in the client.

A few milliseconds timeout, or more adequate batching/chunks seems required. For example:

async function fetchChunks(urls, chunkSize = 10) {
  for (let i = 0; i < urls.length; i += chunkSize) {
    const chunk = urls.slice(i, i + chunkSize);

    try {
        await Promise.all(chunk.map(url => fetch(url)));
    } finally {
        await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 50));
    }
  }
}

const urls = [];

for (let i = 0; i < 50; i += 1) {
    const random = ...;

    urls.push(`https://test.test/$%7Brandom%7D`);
}

fetchChunks(urls);

That would at least make it more adequate in the scope of User clients with less but still loading them awfully and disrespectfully... which is sorrowful indeed...

In other words, their current "malicious" code is just...wrong...
Regardless, such actions may tarnish someone's history much to the point their self-confidence may not recover shortly and require a great amount of time to believe in yourself hopefully again... Therefore, let's hope the people behind it will reconsider their actions as soon as possible... and won't dig their own beliefs and love too deep to search for later...

20

I'm somewhat ok with catering to a political filter in an instance/frontend, even if I prefer open inclusion. But DDOSing anyone in fediverse is bad/unacceptable.

17
mander.xyz

I want to hear from some former Tesseract users/users of tesseract instances, has your experience seriously changed in the last few days?

16
mander.xyz

Ok, but are you noticing a bunch of new content and users now?

20

Not really, but if my circumstances were different I would have. I've been super busy so I've been a very casual user lately. For me, that means mostly using my phone where I use Voyager. I also bounce back and forth between Lemmy and Piefed. I knew something was wrong with Tesseract but I couldn't figure out what it was. I wrote a comment about it in a deleted thread that I'll quote here. This is in response to AdmiralPatrick asking rhetorically if they should have been more up front:

As someone who's used Tesseract for years, it would've been nice. You said elsewhere that no one else had complained but I had no idea what was going on. I use Voyager on my phone and I had notifications showing up there that were absent in Tesseract. I had comments I'd made from my phone that I couldn't see from my browser. And, like, comments about the World Cup. Does Tesseract hate football? Sports in general? I had no idea that there was a new semi-secret blocklist and that someone else in that comment chain had committed some unknown-to-me sin elsewhere so I couldn't continue that discussion with others from my laptop. I ended up keeping a second Lemmy-UI tab open because, as much as I love it, I couldn't trust Tesseract until this mysterious problem was resolved. Not a great experience.

3

I used tesseract as my daily driver for lemmy, and honestly, it was and is the best lemmy interface I've used, at least in terms of the tools it had to make admin and moderation tasks easier.

But we were also running an older version and hadn't upgraded to the version with the blocks, or otherwise, we'd have been in the same boat as db0, because we were one of the instances blocked by the list

8

Oh wow they guy went from malware pedaler to full blow criminal. You better press charges.

16

What has the dbzer0 instance done to him?

15

I wish responses were turned on for that elephant in the room post cause:

Makes reddit clone>gets absolutely anally sore over the users>the users are banned users looking for a reddit alternative > literally can not stand the people they attracted and then decides to shadow ban people>complains about people complaining about censorship when the person knew they'd attract redditors that got banned> gets even bitchier and more Karen-y and starts going after more people and instances.

People called out the dev-mod whatever the fuck the pussy is and then they go even crazier after doing the worst form of damage control I've ever seen. Yeah maybe don't insult your user base if you're trying to do damage control over shadow banning and then tryin to say it was always able be turned off but not advertised MEANING NO ONE KNEW OF THE EXISTENCE

Then the only reason we found out is because someone had to go a bunch of ways around with coding to figure it out, to figure out what the fuck it even was.

That person got caught, then tried to save face by saying they were trying to keep the peace used strategic italics and tryed to write calm after venting AT us, about us.

I don't know if they're a dev or a mod but they did a really shit thing and now they're being a baby about not knowing how to rectify this.

13
jlai.lu

I could understand his initial intention of having some kind of nsfw filter for radical opinions, even though the implementation was questionable. And I was honestly sad about the shit storm that hit him. Too many people here pretend to be more respectful and empathetic than average, but will happily dogpile to get a piece of a person given the right momentum.
But this ddos code is hard to defend, it goes against his own initial intention. He should have walked away before reaching this point.
Can we avoid adding new events to this sad chain of events now?

11
lemmy.world

Radical opinions such as supporting trans people or being against genocide.

72
fonix232reply
fedia.io

Centrists ARE usually clueless enough to blend things together as such...

23
lemmy.world

Centrists are almost always right wingers who try and avoid the right wing label.

24
fonix232reply
fedia.io

I'd say half.

The other half is truly so clueless that they think "both sides are the same and we need to find the middle ground". Which in itself is a major bastardisation of the doctrine of compromise (which says that in a sane system, often the best solution is a compromise between differing parties).

However that doctrine cannot apply to debates about human rights, as one cannot compromise on those.

8
lemmy.world

I have never met, seen, or even heard about this mythological centrist that isnt a hard righter in disguise.

and everything you just laid out as examples are heavily used by said hard righters in online discourse (even the ones pretending to be centrists).

2

That was me when I was, like, 15. I was between the "two sides". The Republicans I was surrounded by were nutzo, but I didn't know anyone more left, other than my parents who "didn't talk politics" (but generally were ok with the queers and not-whites in a nonspecific way). I toyed with the idea of anarchism because I hated being told what to do, settled on the label "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" with the asterisk that social programs tended to be cheaper solutions to issues than Republican. This all would have been around the hanging chad controversy. I think that's when I first noticed national politics.

Then I went off to college and my horizons expanded.

3
oce 🐆reply
jlai.lu

I think he explained the trans related instances were not blocked because trans but because their admins did not moderate the calls for violence he wanted to filter.

-6
lemmy.world

Didn’t the call for violence happened to be just a mod from another instance that had “death to zionism” that stepped down after he was called out?

23

That's roughly what I remember: the threats were against "zionists" or "genociders" or similar, not any particular user by name, but this guy basically told on himself by interpreting it personally anyway.

(It's possible I'm unaware of other, more egregious, behavior as the situation escalated, but I think this was at least the thing that started the pearl-clutching initially.)

14

Blahaj does remove calls to violence imo. He had additional petty reasons like how blahaj gave A.N. an endorsement saying "well-moderated" after the previous A.N. admin in question was no longer an admin.

17

even though the implementation was questionable

The implementation was not questionable. The implementation was blatantly nefarious and he fucking knew it, because why else would he have tried to hide it?

51

Why would you even want to defend him? Sneaking in a blocklist like that is not the behaviour of a normal person. There is nothing defensible here.

36

I think the point was that if AP had published their "filter" and made it a separate and visible toggle setting in their code, this would have been fine. They didn't choose that option though and this doubling down on the doubling down is just further proof of their disingenuousness.

Personally, I still find AP's initial attitude churlish and distasteful. The belief that there should be some kind of divider built into the platform in order to "weed out the toxic elements" goes against everything the Fediverse stands for, which is the diversity of opinion without constraint. It is literally the reason why most of the people who left reddit are here in the first place.

3
Azzureply
leminal.space

it goes against his own initial intention

It goes against his initial stated intention.

Just because he said something doesn't mean it's the truth. The way he acted about it initially and the way he acts now makes it blatantly obvious that his actual initial intentions were always nefarious, and he simply lied about his intentions to get sympathy like you're giving him.

34
Vespairreply
lemmy.zip

Literally this.

I will never understand why we keep letting obviously disingenuous right wingers act like wizards casting spells by finding the right magic words. It's this weird debate culture/internet argument behavior pattern thing that has somehow conditioned society to conflate making a defensible argument with being right.

It is possible to be not incorrect while still being entirely wrong, and I swear it feels like society not understanding that distinction is paramount to the strategy and culture of the right.

2

I think it's just sheltered people that didn't (/weren't forced to) discover all the possible evil in human behavior.

Lots of people grow up in a decent environment, without many major problems. If that is the case, it is very psychologically disadvantageous to become aware of all the evil possible by literally everybody, because this realization is extremely painful.

Ignorance is bliss and so on. Active, willful ignorance works just as well because our mind is so good at compartmentalizing. People like this can actually unconsciously be actively ignorant, because even the action of trying to be ignorant can be ignored successfully, that's how "good" at that the human mind is.

Because of that, in my opinion, your kind of comment is a little unhelpful. You're entirely right of course, but you phrased it relatively aggressive/as if it was completely obvious, as if you think people that don't believe that should feel bad. But I think the correct approach is to point your message out in a neutral/compassionate way, to make it easier for these ignorant people to read and feel less psychological pain, triggering less of the mental defenses. In any case though, I personally appreciate you :)

0
Coelacanthreply
feddit.nu

While a toxicity filter for normies as an onboarding tool is not the worst idea in the world, the implementation was. But even beyond that, the blocklist was so clearly going way above and beyond "sanding off the rough edges" and straight into just "I'm going to block everything I personally dislike". Wholesome Yuri is like, the opposite of toxic but that whole community was blocked. As was using "🥺👉👈".

30

It's so frustrating that people still want to interpret the censorship as just "going after those calling for violence." There is nothing violent about girls kissing or using submissive emojis; they just didn't like that queer stuff. There is no way to write that off as anything else. This person found queer behavior icky and wanted to hide it from view. Them claiming to care about bigotry was hypocritical virtue signaling.

23

Too many people here pretend to be more respectful and empathetic than average, but will happily dogpile to get a piece of a person given the right momentum.

"People here pretend to be nice, but get angry when I try to secretly push them out of the conversation"

Shut up, idiot.

13

Radicalism is shadoew banning anti genocide and colononization people, people trying to make a safe space for trans people and shadow banning people using the term epstein class.

7

Oh! Is that maybe why my network choked to a mere double figure kb crawl after I posted about it [~ and pasting the diatribe for posterity, and so others wouldnt have needed visit that]?

I just presumed it was the dozen distro ISO I was downloading at the time too, in a distroholic relapse.

... I'm not really paying attention to all this drama.

9

Is this why my PC crashed last night?? But I wasn't even on this debulldozer thingy!

8
lemmy.world

Can I get a tldr of the drama? Never heard of tessaract before, was it a web front end or app?

8
mander.xyz

Guy made an alternative front-end some instances used. It secretly retrieved a non-text-readable shadowban list including dozens of instances, about a thousand users, and any post including bottom face/hands, the word "perchance", and a bunch of other stuff. It was discovered when one of the instances using it updated and found the entire instance was throwing a generic technical error.

28
jaygray91reply
piefed.zip

bottom face/hands,

I usually don't like to play the "English as second language" card, as I take great pride learning it, but I need to for this one lol. what does this mean?

5
lemmy.world

I knew this was one of the things that they had banned. But I don't actually know what it means. Or why it was something someone would ban.

2
lemmy.world

Do gay people seriously still use this kind of derogatory language in referring to their partners?

Or has this been appropriated by incels to make themselves feel superior?

1

Do gay people seriously still use this kind of derogatory language in referring to their partners?

??? Its only derogatory if you think bottoming is degrading (which I mean it can be, but context is important).

I am unaware of alternative language, though in a lot of contexts its used to refer to the passive role even though most people understand it's unrelated.

3

All those repeating lines when he could have called a separate function?

I would never have passed a first year student who wrote that code. C-

5

Does that even work? I would have thought CORS would block it...

4

where i can get the list? I want to check something.

3

Am I wrong to empathize at least a little? Ive had crash outs that were pretty bad. I've never ddos'd someone but ive definitely done 2000s forum "psycho ex girlfriend" story post levels of crazy before. In your moment of rejection, nobody else matters, you devalue everyone just for that very small satisfaction of revenge.

-12

Finally, a cause we can all agree with. Bringing down that instance of hypocrites would make the ultimate act of human development, mercy, and compassion for everyone involved. It'd be the sublimest act of humanitarian achievement to grace the Earth worthy of our greatest tributes & highest honors. It'd shift civilizations & dawn a new age of enlightenment.

Such a shame that the code seems invalid. Does it even work?

Noble gesture, though.

-15