In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer.
In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer.
Poking through both /src/lib/blacklists.ts and the double-secret policy file that gets pulled on load (see snot flickerman’s comment on how to look at it), I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the end goal of blocking this specific set of keywords, fediverse peers, communities, users, etc.
You’ve got radical right stuff in here with radical left stuff, lots of lie-peddling news outlets and state-backed propaganda sources as well. Lots of focus on Russian-sourced content, and some attention paid to American MAGA crap. It’s quite strange to find blahaj hostnames and users among them.
My best guess is that this is a hammy attempt to make Tesseract a more bland beige version of fediverse content with the pointy jagged parts filed off. But porn is a-ok.
Really weird choices.
UPDATE: The Tesseract project author made a public post addressing the obscured ban list: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942
There’s some clarity provided, most interestingly recontextualizing the hidden ban list as a “toxic mode” setting that can be turned on and off by the instance admin. So sure, that’s nice and all, but it still groups our entire instance, and our admin, in with the literal worst of the internet, making us banned by default. That’s the moral assessment this person has made of us, with no justification or receipts to back it up.
Just…
That’s pretty warped, but I don’t want to call it unforgivable. I just want the author to introspect and say more about why they feel this way.
He still doesn’t get it.
That’s not for him to decide. Ever. That’s for end users and mods and admin of instances. Not some random fucking interface.
But random UI designers know best.
If he actually cared about making the fediverse less toxic, there are ways to do that. Working with instance admins to create up to date filter lists would be valuable, effective, and something no one would take issue with.
Or even being up front about it would have been fine. There is no mention of the blacklist on the main page of the github. If tesseract were a sanitized, curated fediverse client that described itself that way, it wouldn’t be an issue. Clear disclosure and consent count for a lot.
Instead he literally built a trojan horse for the fediverse. Unjustifiable.
EDIT: I was right. This is from their angry defensive screed.
There’s certainly a subset on the Fedi who seem to desperately want it to become a massively popular thing that persists through the ages instead of small but deep and worthwhile community growth among those who do choose to participate. Will it last forever? Probably not, most things don’t. Friendster died before MySpace and people forget it even existed (I mean, it was legitimately terrible)
It makes me wonder if this person thinks that they’re making the Fedi more palatable for “normies” or something.
Because popularity always brings a marginalization of already marginalized communities. This comic sums it up pretty well.
Honestly, I think as long as we stay small and have our own community existing under the radar so to speak we have less likelihood of being invaded by even more numerous asshats than we already do. Lemmy or Piefed becoming massively popular could actually be a detriment, especially in terms of hosting costs, since most instances are funded via donations or the admins own personal income.
I’ve been a part of online communities for a long time. The ones I value most in retrospect were relatively small, niche and disconnected from grand global everything-platforms.
The fediverse is a step towards an internet of a million weird micro communities, finding ways to talk to each other.
We don’t have to stay small, we just have to kick out the bad and not put up with it.
I know this site was not designed this way but MetaFilter has always had a small one-time fee to get an account, because it puts weight on having the account and weight on being banned. It always helped keep out a lot of the riff-raff.
I hope you understand how similar that is to irl laws for which the only punishment is a fine, meaning it’s a law that only restricts poor people. Charging a fee for an account just assures people with money have a disproportionate say in things.
I dunno, $5 for a lifetime didn’t seem too restrictive to me as a poor person, but I understand what you’re saying and that’s definitely been a problem on MetaFilter at times for sure.
However, that money does go to good things. They are officially a non-profit. They hold elections for admins and moderators and support staff. Admins, moderators, and support staff for MetaFilter are full time paid jobs, not volunteer gigs. So it’s got positives and negatives.
Desperate centrists who believe the axiom that all of their beliefs represent reasonable moderate positions no matter what are some of the weirdest, most ingrown people next to rightwing chuds.
I prefer the Nazis honestly. At least they don’t pretend not to be pieces of shit.
I don’t think this is even something centrist, centrism is all about blandness, a la “whatever doesn’t offend people that aren’t batshit insane”.
Maybe “centrist radicalism” is a better word, in that someone tries to gather everything crazy.
As an anarchist/council communist, it is my belief that whether you are communist, socialist, christian democrat, liberal or not, as long as you oppose fascism and whatever’s more right wing, you’re my ally.
Sure, with some I’ll agree much more, and coordinate more. But either way, either someone’s a fascist or is not. Those that aren’t, oppose fascism, and therefore must be called upon to grow labour’s democracy, as fascism is a danger to everyone, fascists themselves included.
Just call them bland. Milquetoast. Porridge-men
I see what you are saying and I am not arguing some opposite radicalism, but where your approach fails is that nobody is a monolith, we are many people in many different situations and it matters which version of people we feed energy and validation into… thus we must be concerned with how within each of us there are many potential fascist selves and thus what it means to be an antifascist/normal decent adult as a verb is to commit to continually re-examining the growth of our feelings and ideas and pruning away the things that begin to become ingrown.
Also, what is considered bland and what is considered radical are some of the most political battlefields in society.
Probably promoting his own biases while also blocking spam to justify its existence.