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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[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The same error was not done regarding tesseract. It absolutely hardcoded instance blocks.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

apparently there is some env var PUBLIC_ALLOW_TOXIC_MODE that disables the entire list. From https://github.com/db0/tesseract/blob/c6767607da9f08033bbc38c2c3e38975be0eef2e/src/lib/policies/system.ts#L89

export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {
    SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)
    return
    if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {
        SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)
        return
    }

dunno if it actually works as intended tho. Also the main repo got deleted apparently lmao

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Yes for the second blacklist, if you knew that you were getting things filtered out in the first place and if you knew to look for the setting and find it.

But the first blacklist, the one I discovered, which prevents you from even using an instance whatsoever, is completely hardcoded with no way to bypass.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Thank you for the clarification and for making the fork, that seems like it will be very useful if you want to continue with that front-end UI.

Edit: I edited my statement above and will try to do similarly for others where I have been wrong.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 8 hours ago

ah thanks for the clarification

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Also the main repo got deleted apparently lmao

Forgot: They didn't delete it. They renamed it then reversed its history to 2023 so that I can't sync any more changes to my fork and my commits telling him to eat shit are not visible in the repo diff. lol

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 8 hours ago

data-laughing