- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.


It’s what happens when someone with underdeveloped empathy gets caught doing something they know is wrong, resulting in emotional overload.
It’s textbook toddler tantrum.
With stunted empathy, people seeking an explanation and apology are met with increasingly greater resistance.
And like textbook, they claim to be the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.
What’s crazy is they could have simply:
But no. They were caught while they were secretly trying to play internet dictator and refused to empathise with others that were hurt and shocked to find out a tool they were using was receiving undisclosed payloads to use to censor communities and individuals.
I strongly implore everyone to leave this developer alone. Jokingly asking to be added to the list etc empowers them to continue to play the victim. They do not deserve attention.
Text book narcissistic collapse
Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.
But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.
Second it must be opt-in.
Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.
And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.
Anyone who thinks “yeah lgbt stuff should be hidden because we want to attract people who don’t want to see LGBT stuff” is someone I don’t want anywhere near the fediverse.
Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.
Idk, “🥺👉👈” was pretty wild
Tbh for me it was more outrageous how it interferes with moderation. There are admins from big instances who weren’t blocked themself and mods from big active communities on that list. If they write warning comments, users of this frontend will simply not see them
And tho user and comment regex is a mess, partially containing very random things. Lot’s of possible wrong matches. This whole thing is from no viewpoint a good idea
Full agreement. Part of the problem is that the blocklist was kinda bonkers in who was included
100%. I’m willing to bet he didn’t even receive any threats. The guy was a short-lived lolcow.
No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they’re on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they’re banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.
A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.
Can you elaborate on that? Asking for curiosity, not to challenge you.
I dunno, I can understand a curated blocklist, topic-based. Obviously not what this is - if things were up front it wouldn’t have been an issue - but maybe someone just does not like memes. A curated meme community list would be handy. If someone didn’t want to be on a more curated instance like blahaj but still wanted to filter out specifically problematic anti-trans users, that would be useful.
Just like its up to the users to decide what instance you want to join, it also should be up to the user to decide if they want to take that further, and a front end would be the appropriate place for that (especially since its not baked into lemmy or piefed to have an imported list).
The problem has nothing to do with the option of centralized blocklists, but the hidden nature of the one in tesseract in its entirety.
Not every admin has the time or skill to curate. As long as the dev is open about it and there are configurable features to disable it, I don’t see what the issue is. Ultimately it creates no difference for a user if the admin creates it or the Dev does as long as it’s communicated.
The advantage of the fediverse is “don’t like it, go to another instance or build your own”, not to tell devs what they can and can’t do. Hell I never even interacted with Tesseract since I use a different client and an open instance.
The issue is that it’s one person shadowbanning people without their knowledge for any arbitrary reason across instances. Like even if it’s opt-out, that’s still problematic since it makes the default experience whatever that one person thinks it should be. Why should one guy get to decide across the entire fediverse whether your posts are opt-in? That is antithetical to the very concept of the fediverse.
Except one guy isn’t. You have to choose to install the software. It’s not included by default. I’m running a local client (Voyager) and never dealt with any of that because the admins of my instance don’t use it either.
And every user that uses that software for whatever reason, superior features, easier on the eyes, more popular it’s what everyone recommended will get their curation from that one dev.
Which is why it’s ultimately the decision of the admin. Don’t like what the admin of your instance is doing. Go make your own. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. It’s choice all the way down. It’s not like Reddit where you’d be stuck.
Huh?? It’s not up to the admin, that’s my point, the list is implemented by the dev and every instance that ran tesseract ran the same blocklist. My point is that it should be up to the admins of an instance, not the dev of software that gets deployed on multiple instances…
Okay. I see where the disconnect is. We’re both saying the same thing. In my earlier comment I said “as long as the Dev is open about it and it’s configurable by the admin”. What the tesseract dev did was wrong, what I was saying though is that a dev creating and managing a list is fine as long as those other conditions are met.
I am sorry, but I disagree with the “centralised blocklists” in a:
You should be able to block and unblock freely whoever and whatever you want.
The “centralized” may be suggestions (i.e., toggleable), and only, where instances with opt-in keep them implicit/optional, and instances with opt-out explicitly warn about them during a registration.
Honestly, I can see a “curated” list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.
Yeah, either that or at least if everyone on the blocklist was like nazis or something it seems like he would’ve had at least half a leg to stand on. But the fact that the most random and benign users showed up on it and he was still trying to justify it as “making the experience better for the fediverse” showed that he was just some asshole completely convinced of his own righteousness.
TIL that I’m benign… Ouch.
If he had just implemented the list as a default that anyone could edit, he would have gotten pretty much what he wanted. I mean, some people would have edited the list, some would have deleted the list, but most people are lazy or uninformed and would have simply accepted the default.
I really hope the tesseract fork implements this feature.
Nothing would prove him more wrong than actually implement what he wanted in a sensible, non-dickish way.
Not sure this would help in itself, even though more flexible blocking would ironically be nice. The value in such a list lies in how it’s curated, and the guy is still certifiable and about 3yo mentally, tops.
I don’t really go on a blocking spree much. How would a front end’s block list implementation be different than the instance’s choice of software’s block list implementation?
I hardly browse All and Local. I am on a piefed based instance, and leave “Enable Automatic Follow of Feed Communities.” and “Enable Automatic Leave of Feed Communities.” on. So kind of my subscribed feed is semi automatic as long as I follow a broad topic.