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.

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[–] Quokka@quokk.au 38 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It also displayed bogus error messages, as if to appear to be a technical issue with the community instance, while hiding the black list deep in code. So the point here was to deceive and manipulate.

If it was a toggleable and customisable list that would be a good feature for instances.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Actually... it is toggleable, though not customizable, and for @theacharnian@lemmy.ca I will also add that it is separated into a different file, not hard-coded.

from src/lib/policies/system.ts:

export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {  
    if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {  
        SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)  
        return  
    }  
   // auto-update of blocklist continues below

- source

This feature definitely needs greater transparency, and people can debate whether and how offering a "toxicity filter" at all offends them (especially if they are caught up in it), or the way it was implemented, but the reporting on this issue could also definitely stand to be more rooted in facts as opposed to tribal politicking. The fact that the OOP gives extremely strong indications that it was written by an LLM also does not help matters any.

I am not saying that this is a nothing-burger, but I am saying that I see an awful lot of posturing and opinions shared vehemently but exceedingly few people (including those cross-posting widely across the entire Threadiverse) actually opening up and reading the code to look at the facts.

I would think that people would be in a better position to judge, after first-hand reading an actual source of knowledge rather than merely the title and enormously biased summary? (Which has turned out to be incorrect in several places, notably in CRUCIAL details that it has left out - which wouldn't you know it, sounds just like an LLM to me... - not everyone that I see on the internet is a bot, but then again some text undoubtedly is directly written by a bot.)

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 16 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Therefore the "deception" would be discovered the moment anyone tried to debug exactly those error messages in this ...open source application.

Bike fall meme material.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 19 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Which is how this post came to be, by db0 discovering it.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 10 points 21 hours ago

Tada!