I feel like I’m missing a key piece of information here. Wtf is “tesseract” in this context?
UPDATE: never mind. Other posts were more detailed. Apparently it’s a Lemmy instance/front end? And the owner(s) compiled a huge block list by usernames.
I still don’t know why it matters, what’s so special about tesseract.
It matters because tesseract was/is used by some large instances, so the tesseract dev was secretly censoring content from thousands of users without their knowledge and even without the knowledge of the instance admins. It’s a pretty big deal because this means that a lot of people on Lemmy have been getting a highly censored view of the community without realizing it. A lot of those people, probably even most of them, came to Lemmy specifically to get away from that kind of thing. So its really shady, a huge breach of trust, and this single dev has been covertly influencing thousands of people’s political exposure.
it was only discovered because lemmy.dbzer0.com (6th biggest instance iirc) hosts tesseract and it itself is one of the blocked instances so nothing worked (“this instance is not compatible”) and the admin, db0, did some digging
That’s a great summary, and now so many of the posts complaining about how Lemmy didn’t feel different than what they had come from suddenly could have been a red flag that no one understood. Maybe not, but sure seems a bit correlated.
Imagine your email program (seamonkey, thunderbird, outlook, etc) decided you shouldn’t get to see emails from black people any more. And never ever told you it made that decision.
They went to great lengths to obscure what they did, reporting it as an “error” rather than admitting to a shitlist - and only they got to decide who/what was shitlisted.
It was a covert attempt to control visible content on lemmy. THAT is why everyone is high hella pissed.
If they said they were doing a “normie safe” interface they woulda just rolled on. But they knew they wouldnt get as many users countenancing that shit so they shoved it in without consent.
I feel like I’m missing a key piece of information here. Wtf is “tesseract” in this context?
UPDATE: never mind. Other posts were more detailed. Apparently it’s a Lemmy instance/front end? And the owner(s) compiled a huge block list by usernames.
I still don’t know why it matters, what’s so special about tesseract.
It matters because tesseract was/is used by some large instances, so the tesseract dev was secretly censoring content from thousands of users without their knowledge and even without the knowledge of the instance admins. It’s a pretty big deal because this means that a lot of people on Lemmy have been getting a highly censored view of the community without realizing it. A lot of those people, probably even most of them, came to Lemmy specifically to get away from that kind of thing. So its really shady, a huge breach of trust, and this single dev has been covertly influencing thousands of people’s political exposure.
it was only discovered because lemmy.dbzer0.com (6th biggest instance iirc) hosts tesseract and it itself is one of the blocked instances so nothing worked (“this instance is not compatible”) and the admin, db0, did some digging
That’s a great summary, and now so many of the posts complaining about how Lemmy didn’t feel different than what they had come from suddenly could have been a red flag that no one understood. Maybe not, but sure seems a bit correlated.
I see. That’s good to know. Thank you.
A web frontend for lemmy that silently included a blacklist that blocked users for just about everything the dev didn’t like.
https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Imagine your email program (seamonkey, thunderbird, outlook, etc) decided you shouldn’t get to see emails from black people any more. And never ever told you it made that decision.
They went to great lengths to obscure what they did, reporting it as an “error” rather than admitting to a shitlist - and only they got to decide who/what was shitlisted.
It was a covert attempt to control visible content on lemmy. THAT is why everyone is high hella pissed.
If they said they were doing a “normie safe” interface they woulda just rolled on. But they knew they wouldnt get as many users countenancing that shit so they shoved it in without consent.