I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it's been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.
Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There's a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we've been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.
This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.
When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is "incompatible with that instance" which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.
Isn't it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don't just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn't it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think...
Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I'll doubt I'll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we'll bring up mlmym again now that someone's maintaining it again.
Yeah, actually, this is a huge problem I have with the larger Fediverse. Not just one instance.
The dev still approached it the wrong way though. It’s no excuse.
I want my Fediverse like Reddit, where you get banned for saying Hitler should have been killed but white supremacism is allowed.
On lemmy we get comments saying people with camera glasses (or whatever you call them) should be physically assaulted instead.
Like, the bar for calling for violence on lemmy is horrifically low.
It's not that low. Just don't be a disgusting billionaire fascist apologist, or wear state surveillance cameras on your face, and we'll get along just fine. Next you'll be complaining about flock cameras being vandalised? Allowing secret surveillance of citizens is a hallmark of authoritarianism that all of us as human beings have a duty to resist.
Hitler is dead. Of course Reddit sucks.
But I don't think we should explicitly advocate for the death of living people.
EDIT: My point; exactly.
I want criminals put on trial, I want them mobbed and disgraced and utterly humiliated.
I don’t want them killed.
And thats controversial on Lemmy? Literally everyone in this thread disagrees?
This is exactly what I’m talking about. If no one here sees that as extremist, I don’t know what to tell you.
When the state protects genociders, there is nothing wrong with using violence against them. I would love for every member of the state of Israel to stand trial and be punished legally and appropriately, but there is no state right now that has the power or inclination to do that, so in the meantime I will not condemn Palestinians for using violence to protect themselves and to make it so that Israelis cannot continue to perpetrate genocide.
I would love it if health insurance CEOs were made to stand trial for denying coverage to dying people, but there is no court in America that will hear that case, so in the meantime I will not condemn the Luigis of this world for taking justice into their own hands.
Give me a state that actually delivers justice for everyday people instead of the rich, and I will advocate for non-violence.
So brave very adult.