I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it's been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.
Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There's a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we've been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.
This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.
When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is "incompatible with that instance" which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.
Isn't it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don't just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn't it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think...
Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I'll doubt I'll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we'll bring up mlmym again now that someone's maintaining it again.
Also seems to include queer instances like blahaj.zone, which is... Interesting. Blahaj is pretty tame I think as far as leftist politics goes, but is explicitly a trans instance, so I can't help but think that's the reason they are being blocked.
Also, I have never seen this app, but is it useful at all? If there is any value, would it be worth it to fork it and make a better version with the hidden blocklist removed?
EDIT: Derp. I somehow missed that it was already forked with the blacklist removed.
Itself is a fork of the photon frontend, so ultimately it's not as important to fork it imho. I liked using it because it integrated the fediseer and had some tweaks I liked, but the dev's actions and opinionated design eclipsed those benefits.
I tried Photon and it doesn't have as many functions as Tesseract does. Viewing a user's modlog is more tedious, and banning user from communities is much more tedious. If Photon were updated to make its actions as smooth and easy as Tesseract then I would agree, but I wouldn't want to be left without Tesseract as a mod unless there was an effort to bring some of its feaures and functionality to Photon and I don't even care about the extra stuff like Fediseer integration of MBFC.
Just being able to view user modlogs easily or take action against them clicking on their profile would be all I would need:
A similar context menu for communities would be nice as well:
Having easy access to all these options makes moderation easier, which is why I use tesseract for moderation. Photon doesn't provide this for me though, at least not in its current state.
Theoretically those additional features could be ported back to photon, assuming photon is still actively maintained/developed.