I don’t really know where to post this but this community felt relevant, apologies if this is not welcome here, feel free to moderate, ping, and redirect me if I should share it elsewhere (especially because I’m not a good fact checker, but I felt like it would be interesting to have a level headed discussion about this drama).

I originally posted to [email protected], but a moderator there banned me and deleted the post, I’m guesing the Tesseract dev feels harassed by the whole situation, and do not want to hear about it any more. The community is now locked.

My original post read as follows:

"Was curious about The List™ and took a look at what it contained. There’s interesting stuff that tells us more about the intentions of whoever made it.

I’m not making this list to pile one the current drama, I don’t plan on being added to The List™. I just thought that, when something like this arises, one thing the Tesseract dev could have done is explain why some individual keywords are included, this would have been more transparent. Because when you look closer, there’s some absurd stuff in there, which can lead to confusion as to why some are filtered out.

I can’t be bothered to go through content posted by each individual user and community that are filtered out, so I skipped those.

Community names
  • ~25+ occurrences words referring almost exclusively to leftist political activism including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia…
  • 4 occurences of anime related content
  • 3 occurences of right wing related content (Libertarianism, Conservativism, and a conspiracy theory)
  • usgreenlandwar
  • “Collapse” (discusses the environmental (and more) collapse of our civilization)
  • any word referring to the green party of UK (their main platforms: anticapitalism, ecology, progressivism)
  • “death to” (understandable, but depends on context)
  • 4chan (and similar imageboard names) + greentext formats
  • “billionnaire”
  • “anonymous”
  • 1 specific username and variants of their spam accounts / communities
  • “Police” or “Cops”
Keywords
  • ~30+ occurences of usernames, website urls, company names, sentences, to filter out spam / scam
  • ~30+ occurrences of various sentences almost exclusively used by leftist circles, including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia…
  • 🥺?👉👈
  • “What would (france|the french) do” (probably to prevent referring to the guillotine or the french revolution, still funny)
  • “chatgip+ity+” used when someone criticises OpenAI’s LLM
  • “censoring me” (maybe because conspiracy theorists often claim to be censored)
  • 4 Occurrences of sentences mentioning when an article is paywalled
  • “pedophile” (can’t talk about it?)
  • “rap(e|ing)s? (kids?|child)” (can’t describe the actions of the above?)
  • “Perchance” (random LLM related website)
  • 1 dead instance link, which was used by a computer science student that hasn’t posted in 3 months
  • “neoliberal” (can’t even name a specific political and economic ideology?)
  • “death to” (that one is understandable)
  • “pray for nuke” (same as above)
  • “remove from reality” (same as above but euphemism)
  • “Kirk(e|'|’)d” (used to refer to the murder of Charlie Kirk)
  • whenever any post is crossposted from a list of already filtered out instances
  • whenever any user from a list of already filtered out instances posts or comments
Website URLs

I started this whole summary ~2,5 hours ago based on my search history. There about 300+ direct url entries and I can’t be bothered to check every single one of them (I’ve been looking up their domain name on google, then directly entered their url in a separate browser, and searched the domain on lemmy). I went through about half of them before thinking I had better things to do, here’s the pattern(s) I noticed so far:

  • 4chan
  • Any Blogspot blogs
  • Any website hosted on Infinityfree
  • Lemmy instances the Tesseract dev considers to be extremist (some are part of the free anarchist flotilla (btw quick fun fact, FAF is short for fascist in french, it’s ironic for us french lemmy users))
  • Any gumroad page
  • Any itchio page
  • Bunch of url shorteners
  • Bunch of piracy related sites
  • Bunch of cryptocurrency related sites
  • Some are obvious scam / spam / typo squatting sites NOT shared on lemmy
  • Left-wing related websites outweight Right-wing related websites 4 to 1
  • A lot of links are just random companies over the world without them ever being shared on lemmy, or being scams, or spamming the web about their services
    • there’s a heavy bias against indian companies
    • very few of them were probably filtered out because of their company name, for example a printing company from chicago has “freaks” in their name
    • There’s a french rodent control company that was filtered out, this one is interesting because its domain name is also the initials of the main left-wing french politician, but it could also have been filtered out because it obviously uses negative keywords related to their field. I feel like this perfectly highlights the flaws of this lists logic.
      • edit: that one was actually shared twice on lemmy by a user asking relevant questions, my guess is the dev added them preemptively to prevent spam
  • Some are links to website shared on lemmy, of those:
    • a lot were obvious scams / spams
    • some were ai related websites
    • few were just devs asking ONCE for feedback on their project

Anyway if anyone is motivated enough to take a deeper look and share their findings, or correct me if I missed/mislabeled something, feel free to tag me!"

  • cannedtunaEnglish
    517·
    2 days ago

    He didn’t ban anyone. It’s a filter. Is it right that he shipped this to people without telling them or asking for their consent to it? No of course not.

    You act like it’s targeted specifically at left wing. Lemmy just happens to be more left wing, therefore there was more to filter. There’s right wing shit on there as well. If right wing bs was more common on Lemmy you’d probably see more keywords matching that.

    You could be right tho. I know absolutely nothing about this dev, and wouldn’t if it weren’t for all the drama. I’m just making assumptions about their intent and thought behind it. All I can do is guess at it with what’s in front of me.

    • atrielienzEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      It sounds to me like he didn’t ban anyone on purpose and implemented this list in lieu of blocking or banning people so that there would be no mod log paper trail. Because he is a mod and therefore could have just banned the accounts from his instance.

    • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteBanned from communityEnglish
      236·
      1 day ago

      He did tell them, this was never a secret, admins cannot ban people from instances they do not own even if they wanted to, this is not a default Lemmy UI and the feature is easily disabled in the GUI for those that opt in.

      Everyone making up facts to justify their victimhood is demonstrating exactly why someone might want to exclude them from an instance in the first place.

      • Unruffled [they/them]@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
        20·
        1 day ago

        You:

        He did tell them, this was never a secret, […]

        Him:

        Because I’ve been pretty blunt about all of this, I’ll keep it going. There’s no good way to do what I wanted without either sounding like a dick, calling people out, or otherwise causing mass ire. There’s just not. Basically I was just banking on people not noticing until they’ve already had some kind of feeling that “Lemmy just feels more friendly lately” and putting two and two together when realizing why.

        So why you are spreading literal disinformation?

        • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteBanned from communityEnglish
          120·
          19 hours ago

          I don’t consider things posted in a public repo with clear labels and instructions to be “secrets” but I also don’t live my life looking for tiny details in other people’s behavior that I interpret to pretend I’m a perpetual victim all the time.

          If you don’t like tesseract then don’t install it on your instance but please PLEASE stop ruining our feeds with your collective victim complex it’s probably why you ended up on a blocklist of annoying people