Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
From another user:
Its a kind of administrative abuse of power that has been slowly destroying the fediverse from the inside for a very long time. And it’s not unique to the fediverse. But it’s unique within the fediverse, in that the fediverse is a community built specifically to go against this kind of abuse of power.
We’ve been having a laugh about it but it’s actually such a senseless abuse of trust and power, it’s challenging to imagine them being anything less than a paraiah for all of time for doing this. Its implementation was quite clever and very insipid, because the snuck the ban list in in such a way you couldn’t review it or even know of its existence.
*In such a way that it made it slightly harder to review it or know of its existence.
Any thorough look at the source code would notice it loading that list at runtime. And also notice it getting called and referred to in other parts of the code when it checks whether or not to block something. And that’s not hypothetical, of course – we’re only talking about it because somebody did check, and it was found.
If it was closed source no one would’ve know, common open source W
You can still decompile things in closed source, which is what basically had to be done to identify this was happening.
Its about as scummy and antithetical to fediverse culture as could possibly be.
It’s harder to look in to it though, especially with obfuscation techniques and you need asm knowledge