It was a frontend for Lemmy. The developer hard-coded blocks for instances, communities, and individual users that they didn’t like into their software without informing administrators running the software, and giving them no option to unblock any of those entities. lemmy.world/post/49778353
Comment on POV: You just said something the Tesseract Developer didn't like
icelimit@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Completely ootl of this tesseract thing. Could someone fill me in? It’s a Lemmy app?
gallopingsnail@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Copy-pasting a comment I already made:
Some guy makes a semi-popular front-end for lemmy. He then sneaks in a blocklist that goes unnoticed for almost a year. It gets discovered when he blocks entire instances from using the front-end by an admin trying to troubleshoot why the front-end won’t work on his instance. Drama unfolds but shit really hits the fan when it gets discovered that the major portion of the blocklist isn’t even hardcoded, it gets pulled from the devs own server. The dude made a centralized secret blocklist that he can update however he wants and people won’t even know they’re on it. He is blocking comments containing keywords, whole communities, users he doesn’t like, it’s wild. He can effectively shadowban across the entire platform (well everyone using his front-end) with no oversight, no accountability.
People didn’t even know they were shadowbanned by him, no reason is given, no path to get off the list is mentioned. So now people are pouring over the list hoping to be one of the cool ones that got blocked (I was in the OG blocklist back when it was part of the code 😎) and are really fucking pissed off. So he throws out some long letters telling people he isn’t mad at all and the last one apparently contains a piece of code to make anyone who views part of a DDOS attack on db0, the instance whos admin first made this list publicly known.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Thanks!
Is it drama because the front end is really good and the dev turned out so tilted or just the drama?
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I think the front-end had some features, particularly mod features, people liked but I haven’t used it so I don’t know. I think the outrage is mainly that someone wanted to alter the user experience across many instances without getting noticed. So people that were using it didn’t see posts or comments no matter what instance they were logging in from, without ever getting notified that there was a filter in play. As someone who has a couple accounts on different instances specifically in order to choose what I currently want to see, this would have been infuriating to me.
Plus users had to figure out for themselves that their experience was getting altered and then find a very hidden checkbox in the settings that was just labeled “toxic mode” in order to disable that list. And people didn’t even know they were on that list. I was on it since at least end of april without every knowing about it.