Who, ME? Surviving a mass ban event? π₯³
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Omg I feel like I finally made it.
This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.
The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I've got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided "ew, you shouldn't be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it's now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses."
So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it's just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn't interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.
Do I have that right?
Yep, you've got it!
Wait, so is, for example, https://p.programming.dev/ a frontend? And https://old.lemmy.world/? Is merely www as a subdomain a frontend as well?
Yep. The first one is using the photon front end, and the second is using mlmym
Marked safe from Tesseract blocklist!
What's the deal with this Tesseract developer? Did they just block everyone that has ever looked at them funny? I looked at the blocklist and saw all kinds of people: trans-oriented, piracy-oriented, and lots of tankie-oriented instances. And a lot of users I'd never heard of.
Now they've taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won't have to answer any questions.
Now theyβve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they wonβt have to answer any questions.
Tea is just all over the damn floor at this point.
...but like... what did they think was gonna happen? Did they think they were so clever that no one could figure it out? Even when it effectively broke functionality on sites that used it but were blocked? Like they couldn't add in code to disable specific parts of it if it was deployed on one of those sites so they could keep the whole thing secret? Like just another little regex search string to ignore any users and sites that match the site domain as its rolling out, so they would keep using it and be none the wiser because it would work for them but continue to have its blocklist maintained and secret because it wouldn't cause any problems.
I hate that it takes me like zero effort to conceptualize a better way to have done this shady shit, but on the other hand I guess I'm just glad they weren't that clever.
EDIT: Upon reflection, I do wonder if this was at least partially vibe coded, because LLMs don't have forethought and can't plan ahead for contingencies like that. Because it also seems like a no-brainer that it would lead to configuration failures if deployed on one of the sites that is blocked.
EDIT: Upon reflection, I do wonder if this was at least partially vibe coded, because LLMs don't have forethought and can't plan ahead for contingencies like that. Because it also seems like a no-brainer that it would lead to configuration failures if deployed on one of the sites that is blocked.
The dev was quite vocal about being against LLM usage. Most notably, I remember their April Fool's Day post about an update that adds a bunch of AI features. The post was obviously just a big joke, full of disparaging comments about LLMs. With that said, that was April (maybe even 2025, I can't remember). It's possible that their opinion had changed in the time since. But I doubt it, personally.
EDIT: It was 2025.
Canonical link: https://dubvee.org/post/3069664
I won't lie, that mention of Nicole kinda got me nostalgic. What happened to you Nicole? Why did you forsake us?
I used to use that frontend, and I am in that block list. What irony!
Tell me about it. I liked that frontend so much I promoted it heavily. They blocked my whole instance...
Someone posted your fork in another thread. I self host alexandrite but I'll spin that up this weekend and give it a go. Thanks!
Wonder if I'm in there? If not I'll be saddened.
Edit: apparently I am WOOHOO, THANK YOU FOR THE BADGE OF HONOUR
How does one look?
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