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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[–] elettrona@poliversity.it 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

@Quokka Wait a moment. Is it the same tesseract that develops the OCR? Because I sometimes use that OCR for NVDA screen reader (non visual desktop access). If so, I'll take it off immediately! This kind of hardcoded deny list, is an abuse. Worse than the one I noticed 25 years ago on MSN messenger where you couldn't label yourself as "John Doe - webmaster of [project]" but then if you named yourself "I'm the drill for young asses" (said it less rude than it was), Msn messenger let you place that display name upfront.
Let me say that if you develop a software where you deliberately block pro-trans, pro-sustainability or topic you dev potentially dislike, your software shouldn't be distributed to the public.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 8 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

No, different Tesseract!

[–] elettrona@poliversity.it 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

@Quokka Sorry, and thanks for explanation. It's a serious situation anyways. This kind of devs shouldn't be accepted into open source community; maybe I'm too extremist

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

No you're absolutely not. Allowing this in a community is tacit agreement with discriminatory attitudes against queer people.

[–] elettrona@poliversity.it -1 points 5 hours ago

@zqps I'm afraid discrimination has become mainstream. Against queer, against black, against people with disability...

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 15 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

What a crazy coincidence. I was just checking out this GitHub today. It has a project called Anewbis which is

A fork of Anubis without the cringey anime catgirl. This fork provides no other changes. It just updates from the main project and removes the stupid catgirl.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 3 minutes ago

She's not even a catgirl. Anubis is a friggin' jackal or, if you must, at minimum has a dog for a head. She's a puppergirl.

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 7 hours ago

Some people have no whimsy

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[–] kepix@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

if you block all the commies, gays, software pirates, plis you individually block people one by one...sooner or later there wont be anything left. maybe just a few nerds fighting over linux ricing.

[–] als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

Doesn't piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it's a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content.

Because you mention OCR; people seeing this: it's not the OCR tool.

[–] Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I keep hearing so much shit that piefed does but also see a ton of people either ignoring it or praising it. Does piefed have some sorta propaganda team or something?

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

And here I am, going WTF is a piefed?

[–] GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago

They also block every source that doesn’t agree with the main devs ideology and politics.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 points 12 hours ago

Oh if they do that's great, the main dev of piefed went on a hissy fit because other instances used AI tooling, for them to be doing the same is just perfect. Gotta love hypocrites

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 40 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (4 children)

From a purely software engineering point of view, I don't understand why they feel the need to hardcode such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

GUESS WHAT https://lemmy.world/post/49778353

[–] diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Please un-.ml your links.

here

The markup for that: [here](id)

EDIT: nvm doesn't w*rk reliably (thanks, nutomic), here use the .world original (copy link and paste into search box)

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

ah good catch I meant to link hte original

[–] diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

read edit mb

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

I mean it works by just clicking the fedi icon ? I'm not sure what you mean with the markup.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 31 points 14 hours ago (1 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.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 12 points 12 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 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 hours ago

Tada!

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