I have no clue what Tesseract is, but we’re several days in and now I’m seeing memes of people not being on some list. What is Tesseract? What is the list? Why do people want to be on it?
Does this have something to do with the OCR software?
Long story short:
A snowflake created a frontend for lemmy in which they added a hidden blacklist of communities, people and even words that were shadowbanned for everyone using it without informing first, so if you used it, you’d be seeing a censored version of the fediverse based solely on one person’s opinion about what you should be seeing there.
Some smart people discovered this and the community didn’t take it too well for how it was made (in particular, how it was not optional but forced on the user).
The dev of the frontend wasn’t happy about it and ragequitted with a letter in which they basically say that we are all mad here (except them) and that the fediverse can’t be saved because we are all pissed about this (as if they were our one and only saviour or some crap).
Edit: forgot to add: of course, the people and communities targeted on the ban were, coincidentally, lgbtq or allies and you know, anything that would piss a fascist.
Don’t forget they also have some code that tried to ddos db0 instance as well for anyone visiting it the rant page.
Yes
For anybody who doesn’t know what a front end is, the job of the front end is generally to take data from the back end and present it to the user. So for the fediverse, a front end might be the web page or app. The back end is the actual instance where you made your user.
Lots of front ends do filtering, but at the explicit instruction of the user. It’s better to do it on the back end if you can because it’s wasteful to send data to the front end only to throw it away. But there is a place for front end filtering, just not in secret.
So in this case, a person who used tesseract as well as, say, a lemmy web page interface, would probably expect to see the same data in both places, but the tesseract front end would actually be hiding a lot of stuff.
Okay. It sounded like he sucked but I’m glad I now know how much.
I wonder if I was on the list
It’s an alternative skin/user interface that fediverse instances can offer users. It turns out to have an internal blocklist of instances, communities, users, and keywords that it will silently hide. Some (e.g. child abuse) are understandable. Others (e.g. specific usernames) are less so.
Some people are upset they are on the list; some that they are not on the list. But most are upset that a list exists in the first place.
We’re not upset that some guy has a block list, or even that he was sharing it.
We’re upset that he did everything possible to hide that he was pushing his block list on unsuspecting users.
That’s just straight malware, and when confronted, he resorted to vandalism.
I’m loving that people want to be on this guy’s list. He sounds like a bit of a chud.
it’s a ban/censor list and folks are mad they aren’t on it because it means they aren’t important enough in the fediverse to be banned.
the funny thing is that the list was populated through an AI dragnet, so many people who were on that list (like myself) not only had never heard of this guy, but never even used that instance of the fediverse. It was based purely on post history and keywords, not personal interactions. That’s why everyone on it was wearing inclusion as kind of “Badge of Honor” because it meant we were the types of people that would tick off a fascist.
