cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299
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.
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?
Same folks that complain endlessly about Far-Left censorship and militant authoritarianism, no less.
I wonder how many of the developers on these projects are spill-over from the reactionary shitholes of Reddit.
Surprise, secretly fascist the whole time! 🌎 🧑🚀🔫
Blacklisted: Tesseract.
Sounds like a great set of interesting places to explore; should thank them for compiling the list but the fix should just toggle them to be part of the defaults
Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need
Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration
I can forgive someone with a passing exposure to it not knowing, but MBFC is notorious for having biased rankings.
The regular example I use is the Guardian being placed on the same factuality ranking as breitbart (the nazi rag), but it’s not one case, there’s a general right-wing bias in the rankings.
The developer of this project is very clearly just trying to put their finger on the views of their users
Just looked and Breitbart is listed as extreme right and mixed factual reporting.
The Guardian is listed as highly factual and left-center.
What are you referring to?
Older versions were crazy, guessing they’ve finally got it roght. I think they should have launched with a “In beta, algorithm is learning” message. People implemented it right at launch and had expectations, and it was just not ready, total dumpster fire.
Holy shit have they finally updated it?
They had Guardian as mixed factuality for years
Unless they’ve completely overhauled all their rankings though, I expect a lot of the more subtle biases will still be present
Edit: from a year ago https://web.archive.org/web/20250816111509/https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
And it had been like that for a number of years (I don’t make a habit of checking it regularly given my distrust of it)
I think it could be from a different person doing the rating for the update.
Which really reinforces how terrible their rating system is
Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on its story selection, which moderately favors the left. We also now rate them High for factual reporting due to minimal failed fact checks in the last five years. (5/18/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 09/26/2025)
It still thinks “The Economist” is ‘Least Biased’.
MBFC equates political centrism as being unbiased, which is fundamentally flawed.
Don’t get me wrong, but this is a solid proof of the beauty of the Fediverse and FOSS in general you can do whatever you want and so can other people
Amazing how these projects keep killing themselves by alienating huge portions of their userbase. Hard to survive in a FOSS environment by being extremely reactionary.
Lemmy has managed to survive in spite of the tankies that develop it. I guess federation works in the end.
Lemmy also gets a boost for survival because ActivityPub also lets alternatives like Piefed interact nearly seamlessly. It’s the federation across competition that helps sustain even the bad development teams.
Lemmy is surviving because communists are ideologically coherent and committed to FOSS and federation. The communism is a huge plus, and communists make up a huge portion of the userbase.
Stop pretending that tankies and communists/leftists/whatever are interchangeable words.
They are not.
If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.
In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.
It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.
Try a relevant reply next time dude
I already did.
Me: don’t equate tankies and all leftists.
You: rants for paragraphs about your own (incorrect) definition of tankie.
Yeah, no, you didn’t. More tankie bullshit, shocker
I’m referring to the alienation of people who browse all, see a thread, and make an innocent comment only to be savaged by a mob of angry types who sort by new comments and continually hit F5.
I’d rather it be this way over Reddit, where you get the same but for far worse political views.
for far worse political views.
Opinion.
Not saying I don’t agree with you, just be aware that’s just your opinion.
Sure, in the same way that saying “fascism is bad” is technically an opinion. This, however, neglects the objective correctness of Marxism, which deliberately doesn’t rely on subjectivism or moralistic arguments, and the incoherence of liberalism and fascism at an objective level.
The objective correctness of Marxism is debatable, as has been done for decades now, by definition making it subjective.
Yeah, it sucks! I used to use Moshidon until they blacklisted the only Mastodon instance I use lol
I asked the dude who made it to fix the blocklist and he said no
Which instance got blocked?
I can’t remember if it was No Agenda Social or its successor No Authority Social, but I am quite sure that both are included in their blacklist.
Oooooh we’re blocklisted too! I guess we’re too radical for them!
Any idea why MULTIVERSE is blocked but quokk.au isn’t? Maybe they don’t think you guys are as radical as us :P
Genuinely WTF
Ah yes, the famously leftist and trans-friendly instance: maga.place
Deliberately missing Blahaj.zone?
Pretty sure it’s deliberate, that person is a well known troll and contrarian.
Cool slander.
Yeah, I learnt that after this interaction with them. Ended up de-federating their instance entirely, can’t see anything good coming from them in the future. And to think this is the sort of person moderating piefed.social’s Fediverse comm.
Good call, I don’t see anything good coming from them in the future either. It’s definitely concerning that this person is a mod on piefed.social, makes me feel like people need to stay away from that instance and its communities. Also I wonder if Ada should be made aware of this person, considering their prolific history of acting in bad faith.
It’s rather telling they didn’t end up on the tesseract filters
What moderation have I done on that comm. Can you tell me?
Do you have anything to back up your slander?
Looks like deeply agenda driven anti-cognition with a side of insane respectability politics in an effort to appeal to other people who already think like them. It’s really too bad you can’t truly block people on fediverse, because that seems like the exact type of goal that, even if you don’t feed that troll, it still gets a quip in that appeals to their audience, energizing it and stroking the fire.
That is some wild projection.
🫂
They’re also prone to stalk and spams users dms. But yeah it’s a wonderful example of how great piefed.social is since they’re one of the mods there if their fediverse comm
Cool slander. Got reciepts?
Because I do, for you following me around and downvoting everything. The thing you’re accusing me of.
Tell me, what “moderation” have I done?
It’s rather telling they didn’t end up on the tesseract filters
Telling of what?
Huh?
You can see the list, you focused on one shitty instance and ignored countless leftist and trans friendly ones in attempt to discredit the issue.
The fact that it’s on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.
I wasn’t ignoring anything. But you have a history of maliciously labelling people as anti-left and anti-trans, so worth pointing out that you’re doing it here too.
Sorry they blocked the maga instance you agree with about everything at all times in addition to the left and trans instances you hate.
Huh?
I can’t make you smart enough to comprehend what I wrote.
The fact that it’s on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.
Explain how blocking a single instance means someone is incapable of making a different block for transphobic reasons.
Why? I didn’t make any such claim.
I literally quoted you claiming you had debunked the claim the block was transphobic. All you did was show a MAGA instance had also been blocked. Explain.
It’s a crosspost, I didn’t make the post nor the title.
Make up all the excuses and deflections you want. There is zero reason for Blahaj.zone to be on this list except blatant transphobia.
Having a look, your mod log is pages long of bad faith and trolling. Seeing as you’re a single user instance and defending transphobia right now it’s probably best to just go ahead and not with bother with your nonsense any further.
defending transphobia right now
It is amazing that you offered up a textbook example of what I accused you of right here.
Absolutely nowhere have I defended transphobia. It’s disgusting how often you try to discredit people using that tactic.
It is amazing that you offered up a textbook example of what I accused you of right here.
You’re accusing them of telling the truth about you.
Self awareness will help you understanding why you’re in the wrong here
@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.No, Tesseract is a Lemmy alternative front-end UI, it has nothing to do with the OCR, besides sharing the same name.
Also, Tesseract does not actually use a hard-coded list - that turned out to be misinformation by the LLM-written OOP. In actuality, there is a “toxicity filter” that admins can toggle on or off as they please - the polar opposite of a hard-coded feature.
Don’t believe everything that you read on the Internet - it is not all true.
That said, Tesseract is quite opinionated in its views, and instance admins who hold different ideologies than its author might want to actually read about which settings they want to have toggled or not, rather than merely accept the defaults.
Apparently it does use a hardcoded list. The list db0 discovered was hardcoded it was not possible to circumvent it. This second list, the one that gets pulled from dubvee’s server can be disabled by the end-user that is if they somehow realise this antifeature even existed and went through the code to find it.
The first list is not hard-coded, as it depends upon an instance-set environmental variable.(Edit: I retract this statement as I may have gotten confused between the differences between the two lists.)This other, hidden list though… that one is a lot more dicey. It can also be disabled wholesale, but is not easily discoverable nor editable, it is essentially his personal blocklist shared with everyone who uses Tesseract. (It could be nice to open that up as a more fully fleshed out feature where instance admins can more readily control whose personal blocklist gets pointed at, or even allow an individual end-user to input one?)
Though his latest manifesto says that it can be disabled, both by instance admins and by individual users.
Anyway since it can be disabled, it’s not a “hard-coded block list”, as in mandatory.
Though his latest manifesto says that it can be disabled, both by instance admins and by individual users.
No he even wrote it into tesseract himself apparently, taken from what you called his manifesto:
Tesseract does not, and will not, allow for disabling the filters by default; it will only allow users to opt in to the toxic crap and violent whack-a-doos rather than making people opt out. So don’t go complaining to the {instance} admins about this.
and readily admits
the fine print buried at the bottom of the advanced settings isn’t the most upfront place to put [the option to disable that filter]
Yes, I am glad for db0’s correction. I already edited my comment that you replied to here but our messages got crossed while you were typing, anyway thank you for this clarification as well.
It seems like instances on ptz’s personal shitlist need to use db0’s fork from now on, or like blahaj just abandon Tesseract altogether (as you pointed out, the author even asked for thus:-P).
I was objecting to your claim that admins can disable it. This is not possible by design, every user has to do it individually.
Fair, that is the part that I know the least about but at a glance… it does look like you are correct. I will edit my comment above to reflect.
No, different Tesseract!
@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
No you’re absolutely not. Allowing this in a community is tacit agreement with discriminatory attitudes against queer people.
@zqps I’m afraid discrimination has become mainstream. Against queer, against black, against people with disability…
Haha! Now y’all know how it feels lol.
Try not being an asshole and maybe people won’t want to block you so often
Did you reply to the right comment?
And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is evryone always pretending discrimination is “so big”! And “worse than it has ever been.”! It’s not, it’s a small minority and the left and right are both just as guilty. And I tipicaly only see this behavior online. However I kinda touch grass on a daily basis and have noticed the real world is far from what the internet portaits it to be.
I don’t have a clue but here I am spreading my whole ass for the world.
Since you’re so special and you touch grass, here’s an analogy: Imagine buying a mower whose packaging jerks itself off about how great of a mower it is. It improves on regular mowers in X, Y, Z way. It’s a mower for Lawn Chads with Chad lawns. You fire it up and then immediately it cuts off and tells you “Incompatible lawn detected.” But the reality is it’s lying to you. That fucker could mow your whole lot and ask for a second helping… if it weren’t for the fact the company just has something against Zoysia or Kentucky Blue or whatever.
Tesseract is a Lemmy front-end doing just as much. Advertised are it’s enhanced admin/moderation features and blah blah blah. Meanwhile it has hard coded filters and retrieves a blacklist not disclosed in the GitHub readme. Not “hidden” per se, because you can dig through the code base, but not made known in an upfront and honest way.
If they just bothered to disclose their position, it wouldn’t be an issue. I mean, some terminally online justice warrior can go on a tirade about how much of a Nazi they are, how their software isn’t inclusive, blah blah blah. End of the day, if someone wants to write software that explicitly aligns with their positions - so be it. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. However, in that case, at least others will know outright where the developer stands and whether or not they want to use it, manually delete the offending code in their own deployment, or even maintain their own fork.
When a creator omits the fact that they’ve done such a thing, leaving the end user to figure it out for themselves, it’s just fucking cowardly on their part.
Ok, that claryfies it abit… I guess… Still I’m rather baffled by the internet outrage that excists today… Instead of just moving on. Or better yet. Buy another lawnmower.
tesseract is Ubuntu’s optical character recognition tool in my mind
At the very least, any software that produces error messages that lie is extremely annoying.
Not sure what any of this has to do with discrimination?
I don’t even know what this Tesseract is
Oh I see
Honestly after looking at the list aside for blahaj (wtf I know) most of it is basically internet hygiene. Please look at the full list I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev got in a fight with someone from that instance and childishly just black listed the whole instance.
deleted by creator
dbzero has always been very pro ai maybe thats why, odd that they blocked it tho, main one for piracy
It’s not very pro AI, it’s just not rabidly anti AI. There have been too many pitfalls with AI causing major issues in the piracy world to be very pro AI as pirates.
Either way, nothing on this list seems to be for AI acceptance reasons.
They explicitly mention that dbzer0 is “extremist,” ie that it has too many leftists.
I’ve seen quite a few trolls coming from those instances. Yes dbzer is odd but I understand that the red line was crossed with the blahaj one I’m surprised I didn’t quokk on it (or maybe missed it?). A lot of odd things are happening on the threadiverse lately and it seems like some groups are trying to deive wedges between us.
I seem to be OOTL, what is the situation wrt blahaj?
Blahaj is on the blocked instances list
It’s a deliberate hate list for queer folk and leftists, pretty nakedly obvious. Calling that “internet hygiene” is a bit ridiculous.
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.
Oh this would be a bliss…
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.
Some people have no whimsy
nice
There’s a commercial license you can use to replace the image
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.
and removes the stupid catgirl.
Blasphemy! Someone fork the fork, call it AnUwUbis, and readd the catgirl.
Catboy? Thoughts anyone? Thoughts? Cat boy?
Or dog boy to fit the anubis theme.
Sooooooo just renamed Anubis? Daring today, aren’t we?
I mean. If you want to use it in a serious project, that anime-looking girl is completely out of place.
That’s why the author offers a commercial license with custom image and serious name.
OR apply that guy’s patch to get the same shit for free
(nobody tell corporate)
Ah yeah let’s just fuck over the open source dev cool.
Even if taken literally, the second part would still then be my “sincere view” and therefore “the correct opinion”, no?
Yea, it’s still a shame I can’t use it for nonprofit work.
Imagine a serious website you spent month on the content, just to be sabotaged by the catgirl bouncer.
Edit: undeleted. I just didn’t want to sound like I blame the creator(s) in a way.
Maybe ask the author for what to do? I’m sure they are receptive to arguments.
Fair point. Just something rubs me the wrong way thinking about it. Even if the creators agreed it wouldn’t be fair to get special treatment. To me that’s not what foss is about.
No idea if that makes sense.
People say that but it wasn’t a deal breaker for the United Nations.
Or kernel.org
The United Nations can say what they want, but I wouldn’t want it on a serious company website
Are you Swiss German by any chance?
Same.
