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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.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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I don't think I've ever witnessed someone going so hard off the rails. It's been an entertaining few days really.
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:
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.
Text book narcissistic collapse
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.
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.
Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.
Idk, "🥺👉👈" was pretty wild
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
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.
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.
Full agreement. Part of the problem is that the blocklist was kinda bonkers in who was included
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.
I am sorry, but I disagree with the "centralised blocklists" in a:
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.
Can you elaborate on that? Asking for curiosity, not to challenge you.
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.
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-qanonbut it's definitely not just QAnon links.Thanks for the info!
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:
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...
Honestly, I can see a "curated" list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.
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.
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.
100%. I'm willing to bet he didn't even receive any threats. The guy was a short-lived lolcow.
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.
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.
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.
LOL. Sounds like an idiot. Even if the guy was really needed, you can't have someone like that on your team.
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.
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.)
Hell yeah! Happy for you
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.
Neverending crashout.
Hes probably writing a manifesto right now.
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
or with a JavaScript blocker
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™︎!
Not for those of us on the dbzer0 instance 😭