I’m surprised no one has raised this point yet, or maybe they have and I just haven’t figured out where they posted it. Possibly this is the wrong place to ask. If so, please do let me know.
I assume most non-casual users are now familiar with the kerfuffle involving the Tesseract UI and its developer, vis-a-vis secretly adding an obfuscated and absurdly draconian inbuilt block list that silently filters out entire communities, instances, content containing keywords that are not aligned with the developer’s political bent, and also singles out hundreds of individual users by name for the same treatment. (Including myself, but I find that part more amusing than worrisome, really.)
I see that the lemmy.world sidebar and the pinned post in this very community no longer mention the Tesseract UI, which I presume dates from the time last year when its developer… How do we phrase this diplomatically? Threw a wobbler during which he closed his instance to the public. Or maybe it never mentioned it to begin with, and I’m having a Mandela effect experience.
Regardless, the Tesseract UI is still accessible at the subdomain t.lemmy.world, which I assume means the code is still being hosted on lemmy.world’s servers. This is listed as version 1.4.41 but since the developer has now apparently either deleted, moved, or closed the Github page for the project (the link in the Tesseract header is dead, for instance) I can’t readily verify if this is even a current version because up until now I haven’t been paying attention.
The developer’s response to the recent criticism over this, readable here, can be handily boiled down with statement near the very beginning that he considers Tesseract “no longer a general purpose ‘anything goes’ client.” Instead perhaps we should take it as read that it is a personal hobby-horse designed explicitly for his own preferences and no one else’s.
TL;DR: Should we take him at his word, and thus are we really sure this is something we want to be hosing on lemmy.world now?
This is some shady shit. Any software that does things you didn’t tell it and then tries to hide it cannot be trusted. Get rid of it if it exists at all.
I think the developer makes some excellent points, but I don’t know if I support them because, since they moved the github repo, I don’t know if I’m on the blocklist or not
‘Censorship is great as long as it isn’t me being censored’
lol. You found the joke
Also that said blocklist is implemented in a rather underhanded manner, to put it mildly. I can get behind the theory but not in this case the contents or especially the execution. If they wanted to maintain a curated filter list for the Fediverse it should be a project explicitly described as such which users/instance operators can implement at their own discretion and with full disclosure.
Of course now that he’s been called out, Mr. Patrick is getting even more secretive than he already was which is not the sort of thing that is going to engender much in the way of confidence from the community. The project may be “open source,” but that doesn’t mean much when there is now an established history of it pulling code and content from external sources at runtime apparently specifically in an attempt to evade inspection of its behavior, plus it also presents error messages as a result of this behavior that are deliberately crafted to be misleading. That presents a major trust issue.
The developer’s attitude towards the community has been consistently combative, condescending, hyperbolic, and yes, untrustworthy. Obviously my personal take on matters at the moment is that it’s a danger and a liability for lemmy.world to continue to host and run his code. New users especially should not be exposed to the Tesseract client without the very explicit understanding that it’s silently censoring a lot of content and potentially doing who-knows-what-else behind their backs — either now, or in the future if the developer gets some new bee in his bonnet.
