Tesseract is a web client for Lemmy that was found to be secretly and arbitrarily blocking users, communities and even entire instances. You can see if you’re one of the kool kidz by running
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json
and grepping your name / instance. Further details can be found in this post.
The poem above is adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s The Burning of the Books, which can be read here. If you would rather read it in the original German, go here.
I do not understand why everyone is using the name of the codebase “tesseract” - which is in conflict with the absolutely wonderful concept of a tesseract - that is a four dimensional hyper cube. Why shame this beautiful word instead of shaming the name of the developer behind the fuckup? Save the word tesseract and shame the dev behind the frontend instead. Anybody care to explain their frivolity?
This drama started off as a PSA to users and instances using Tesseract as their default Lemmy frontend. The dev has at least two lemmy accounts and a different username on github; the software is better known than any of their names.