What's going on with Tesseract and why are people upset?

Comments

• PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Does this have something to do with the OCR software?

  No, thank goodness.

  What is Tesseract?

  Tesseract was a free and open source frontend to Lemmy. Basically, the logic of your instance is handled by Lemmy, but you can replace the look of it, or even give your users multiple options, by adding a frontend.

  Key here is that it is reasonable to expect a frontend to present the information from the backend correctly and completely. If you want to filter out communities or people, you would do this by joining the right instance, changing the settings in your client, blocking people you don’t like, and subscribing to communities you do like.

  And if he really wanted to have a filter in his frontend, it should have been opt-in, not opt-out.

  So once db0 (admin of Lemmy.dbzer0.com, who the dev previously clashed with (the dev hates anarchists but somehow doesn’t have that kinda hate for Zionazis 🤔)) found and exposed the existence of this filter, which is practically a secret blacklist of every user the dev found annoying.

  We’ve been clowning on the dev ever since.

  As an addendum, the dev crashed out and seemingly closed his instance (dubvee DOT org), leaving a goodbye rant. All well and good, but he embedded a bit of JavaScript that basically queries lemmy.dbzer0.com 1500 times whenever you open dubvee! Hence why I’m not putting the dubvee URL, and please don’t go there at least for your own safety.

  What is the list?

  The list is an obfuscated blacklist. Now if he just blocked lots of people from dubvee, we wouldn’t bat an eye. However, he added a practically secret blacklist of users and instances (full transparency: both my instance and my username were both blocked, I’m pretty sure my instance is the “instance-that-will-not-be-named” in his rant). Like it’s open source so you literally can find it, but you had to query his server to get it I think.

  The developer claimed that this was to “save” the Fediverse from “toxicity”. And yeah, obviously, there were some pretty toxic users on that list. But honestly…it was really just people who were active and ever posted anything to the left or right of Reagan, although it was dominated by leftists. In particular, a few trans instances were banned.

  Why do people want to be on it?

  Because it’s really really funny 😆

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  • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Not just that, but he also blacklisted a lot of instances that were not batshit insane enough. Lots of users were even included. He went so far to put up individual regex blocks against thousands of useds 😂

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    • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Also targeted the LGBT+ community for having the audacity to be willing to talk shit right back to the people who want to kill us.

      Literally targeted the admin of Blahaj.

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    • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah me too, my instance got put on there and I personally earned a regex 😆

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  • reader@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m so confused, I never posted anything controversial, popular, or interesting. Why did they add me?

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    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      they think you are gay.

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    • deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Maybe you offended him by using an emoji or talking about the police. (Both real blocklist items)

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  • AlfalFaFail@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Well damn. That guy sucks.

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• AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Long story short:

  A snowflake created a frontend for lemmy in which they added a hidden blacklist of communities, people and even words that were shadowbanned for everyone using it without informing first, so if you used it, you’d be seeing a censored version of the fediverse based solely on one person’s opinion about what you should be seeing there.

  Some smart people discovered this and the community didn’t take it too well for how it was made (in particular, how it was not optional but forced on the user).

  The dev of the frontend wasn’t happy about it and ragequitted with a letter in which they basically say that we are all mad here (except them) and that the fediverse can’t be saved because we are all pissed about this (as if they were our one and only saviour or some crap).

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  • SupraMario@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Don’t forget they also have some code that tried to ddos db0 instance as well for anyone visiting it the rant page.

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yes

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  • BillyClark@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    For anybody who doesn’t know what a front end is, the job of the front end is generally to take data from the back end and present it to the user. So for the fediverse, a front end might be the web page or app. The back end is the actual instance where you made your user.

    Lots of front ends do filtering, but at the explicit instruction of the user. It’s better to do it on the back end if you can because it’s wasteful to send data to the front end only to throw it away. But there is a place for front end filtering, just not in secret.

    So in this case, a person who used tesseract as well as, say, a lemmy web page interface, would probably expect to see the same data in both places, but the tesseract front end would actually be hiding a lot of stuff.

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  • FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I wonder if I was on the list

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  • AlfalFaFail@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Okay. It sounded like he sucked but I’m glad I now know how much.

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• TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  it’s a ban/censor list and folks are mad they aren’t on it because it means they aren’t important enough in the fediverse to be banned.

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• TheStaffmaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  the funny thing is that the list was populated through an AI dragnet, so many people who were on that list (like myself) not only had never heard of this guy, but never even used that instance of the fediverse. It was based purely on post history and keywords, not personal interactions. That’s why everyone on it was wearing inclusion as kind of “Badge of Honor” because it meant we were the types of people that would tick off a fascist.

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