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.
And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is everyone 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. EDIT: typo
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.
Not sure what any of this has to do with discrimination?
Oh I see
At the very least, any software that produces error messages that lie is extremely annoying.
tesseract is Ubuntu’s optical character recognition tool in my mind