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 !tesseract@dubvee.org, 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
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- there's a heavy bias against indian companies
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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
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- Some are links to website shared on lemmy, of those:
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- a lot were obvious scams / spams
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- some were ai related websites
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- 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!"
Can anyone tell me what is it about? My whole feed is filled with I am in tesseract list but I just can't figure out what it is lol
Tesseract purported to be an interface for Lemmy. It appeared to be an alternate web frontend that instance operators could run that makes lemmy's UI a little different. Other examples of frontends are Photon, Alexandrite, mlmym. Your instance seems to be running the Lemmy default interface.
Tesseract instead was trojan horse malware, it disguised itself as an interface to hide content that the developer personally didn't like. Any instance running tesseract would secretly have a bunch of content hidden from all users.
A few days ago the developer added dbz0 and blahaj to the filters, which made people notice, and they dug deeper and found more. Tesseract had a built-in blacklist of instances, but it also downloaded a secret blacklist from the dev's personal server that would block individual users.
Many of those listed by name on the secret blacklist consider it a badge of honor, and are posting about it.
The blocklist that idiot made wasn’t just secret, it was hidden under several layers of obfuscations, so that no-one could see any sign of it but the dev.
Not only that, but it didn’t generate a ‘this person/instance has been blocked by the dev’ message for the list; it just made it so the ones on the blocklist didn’t exist at all when viewing the fediverse through tesseract.
That dev was trying to curate the feed of everyone using tesseract to his preferences, which appear to be ‘don’t show anything to the left of Regan, and also don’t show anyone who’s hurt my feelings in discussions’.
It’s a type of (otherwise good) software that some people use to access Lemmy / fediverse content - but it has a secret blocklist that its users weren’t told about.
Not secret, and fully optional! The claims this was closed source and/mandatory are just being used to justify harassment (probably why they ended up on a blacklist)
You're not fooling anyone.
you have the right to believe whatever victim narrative you want but you do not have the right to contribute to a harassment campaign
Believe me, if I were harassing you, you'd know about it.
I obviously already know about it?
No. (source)
Lying through obfuscation is still lying.
people who got banned from everywhere else creating an alternative universe in which they are the victim because it's easier than examining their own behavior
Tesseract is an optional frontend ui for Lemmy that has an optional feature that hides users known to behave, well, like they are behaving here lol
the victims were anyone who was not aware that their feed was being manipulated by an outside force in secrecy to further their own goals… so that means all of lemmy.
You know... I see a lot of people pointing and laughing at how pathetic it is... And not a lot of people playing victim.
Huh maybe I already blocked all the namecallers
Yeah, speaking of; weren't going to leave Lemmy because you "couldn't save it" or whatever?
If you're sitting around using an alt, what the fuck was the point of writing that whole ragequit manifesto?