this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
125 points (97.0% liked)

Ghazi

1044 readers
82 users here now

A community for progressive issues, social justice and LGBT+ causes in media, gaming, entertainment and tech.

Official replacement for Reddit's r/GamerGhazi

Content should be articles, video essays, podcasts about topics relevant to the forum. No memes, single images or tweets/toots/... please!

Community rules:

Be respectful and civil with each other. Don't be a jerk. There is a real human being on the other side of your screen. See also the Blahaj.Zone Community Rules

No bigotry of any kind allowed. Making racist, sexist, trans-/homo-/queerphobic, otherwise demeaning and hateful comments is not ok. Disabilities and mental illnesses are not to be used as insults and should not be part of your comment unless speaking of your own or absolutely relevant.

No gatekeeping and being rude to people who don't agree with you. Leave “gamer” stereotypes out of your comment (e.g. sexless, neck bearded, teenaged, basement-dwelling, etc). Don't compare people to animals, or otherwise deny their humanity. Even if you think someone is the worst human on the planet, do not wish death or harm upon them.

No "justice porn". Posts regarding legal action and similar is allowed, but celebrating someone being harmed is not.

Contrarianism for its own sake is unnecessary and not welcome.

No planning operations, no brigading, no doxxing or similar activities allowed.

Absolutely no defense of GamerGate and other right-wing harassment campaigns, no TERFs and transphobia, racism, dismissing of war crimes and praise of fascists. This includes “JAQing off”, intentionally asking leading questions while pretending to be a neutral party. This also applies to other forms of authoritarianism and authoritarian or criminal actions by liberal or leftist governments.

NSFW threads, such as ones discussing erotic art, pornography and sex work, must be tagged as such.

Moderators can take action even if none of the rules above are broken.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cm0002@lemy.lol 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

export const BLACKLISTED_INSTANCES: string[] = [ "abolish.capital", "altmedia.house", "anarchist.nexus", "chapo.chat", "chatgptjailbreak.tech", "diggita.com", "hexbear.com", "hexbear.net", "ibbit.at", "test.hexbear.net", "www.hexbear.net", "hilariouschaos.com", "lemmy.bestiver.se", "lemmy.blahaj.zone", "lemmy.dbzer0.com", "lemmy.doesnotexist.club", "lemmy.durstig.online", "lemmy.ml", "lemmy.razbot.xyz", "lemmybefree.net", "lemmygrad.ml", "lemmyusa.com", "lemy.lol", "maga.place", "multiverse.soulism.net", "news.abolish.capital", "nnia.space", "noauthority.social", "r.nf", "realbitcoin.cash", "redlemmy.com", "welppp.com" ]

Not exactly crying a tear for the Tankie Triad or the right-wing MAGAts. Shouldn't be hard coded, should always be configurable.

But what the fuck did the flotilla do‽

lemy.lol

What the fuck did I do‽‽

Lemmy.blahaj.zone

What‽

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I said it before and I'll say it again, there is no reason a frontend developer should be making decisions about censorship on other people's instances, no matter how reasonable it seems. That's what they are trying to do. It's why they hardcoded it and also why they changed the message to say "not compatible". This is a major overstep from a developer to try to block or censor content on instances that are not their own, and is a breach of trust.
When you write code that runs on other people's machines you need to hold yourself, or otherwise be held to a higher standard than if you're just writing shit for yourself or for fun. Crap like this doesn't meet that standard.

[–] cm0002@lemy.lol 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yea, I mean there's room for "dev suggested lists" or some shit, but it needs to be documented, configurable and upfront about it at some point early on in the instance setup flow. Like in the setup guide docs or during first time setup menus.

This shit is totally unacceptable

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Lemmy though has its own instance moderation tools so it's also just unnecessary. The entire reason he did this is the hope that instance admins won't notice it and that even if they do they might not be able to control it without recompiling.

[–] cm0002@lemy.lol 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Oh there's room for a frontend to have mod tooling, Lemmy's built-in moderation tools SUCK. They're really basic and development is SLOW. We're supposed to have better in v1, that'll come...any day now LMAO

I often switch to Tess just for the mod tools when I need to do anything more than basic basic stuff lol

What I mean is, there is no reason for a frontend to do what Lemmy already does in the transparent way it does it. I used Tesseract for its community moderation tools and I think other's do as well.

It just doesn't make sense to do censorship in the UI tool exclusively when Lemmy has those options already, it would be like hiding someone from the UI while not blocking their account in the backend. Moderation tooling should be tied into the real features that we already have in the backend or it's not really doing anything.

can't moderate me on Tess I'm hidden blobhaj, sunglasses

[–] lambisio@feddit.cl 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)

But what the fuck did the flotilla do‽

Last I heard of them, they openly criticize EU support for Israel.

We also defederated feddit.org for apologizing for and promoting Zionist liberal apologia.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ayyy look who discovers that censorship against the "tankies" will soon turn into censorship against all wrongthink.

[–] i_ben_fine@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

no no they'll come for the communists and stop there

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

And that was that the end blobcat, googly, think

[–] cm0002@lemy.lol 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Lol, if you had read what I said carefully, I didn't say that at all.

I do not care for the fact that both right and left authoritarians (Tankies = left authoritarians) get "censored". Just as most agree that right-wingers and their toxic "ideology" should be shutdown, left authoritarianism should be as well because it is just as equally toxic. Known to call democracy "fake" and encourage people to not vote, spreading genocide denialism and even spreading literal Russian propaganda on Ukraine being "the aggressors" and not Russia

I also find it funny that Tankies cry about being "censored" just like right-wingers do. And then turns around and censors dissenting discussions on China.

In fact, there's a whole lot of censorship as documented here in the mega thread , but sure keep going on how the "only true communists" are being unjustly censored

And before you say "it's just anti-communism!" No, tankies love to conflate their authoritarianism with communism at large so they can make that exact argument

Don't you think it's weird that after all this campaigning against them, copying content across instances to minimize the interaction the wrong leftists have with the wider fediverse, it's not the "authoritarian tankies" that have you on weird blocklists, make you part of their software, and have not even banned you afaik? But you got on the wrong side of the people, who by all accounts should be with you, not once now but twice. You are in the piefed code and the tesseract code. Not the "tankie" code.

To be completely transparent I asked for you to be banned from hexbear in the hexbear mod chat since you are very open about being a wrecker (I must commend you on your openness and honesty, it's kinda refreshing actually and I mean this sincerely) but the sentiment was largely "nah why bother".