Cross-posted from "FYI: StarTrek.website is no longer federating with Lemmy.dbzer0.com" by @Admin@startrek.website in !quarks@startrek.website
Crossposting here since y'all won't be able to see it now that they've defederated us.
If you're not familiar with how Lemmy/the Fediverse works, basically everything you read at StarTrek.website is hosted by us, even if the content originated elsewhere. That means we are responsible for everything here and we have to decide if we are comfortable boosting content from other instances.
If you're curious, the final straw here was learning that db0 explicitly allows hosting discussions about hurting people, which needless to say goes against our instance values and we simply don't have the manpower to moderate that volume of content incoming from their server to a degree that we feel meets our quality standards, which left defederating as the only viable option.
In keeping in line with past trends we're announcing this because is is a larger instance and don't want to leave any of the crew confused as to why something may be missing.
I don't consider this a massive loss tbh. We already have !Risa@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !tenforward@lemmy.world was already more active than their whole instance. And I'm sure @Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com can provide the noxious lore of their instance if you're interested. The only loss would be not having members such as @Kirk@startrek.website running around running interference for DDoSers like @ptz@dubvee.org. Also Admiral Patrick was also an admin on their instance iirc so this is a clear retaliation as far as I'm concerned, even though we didn't actually do anything to AP.
But also
db0 explicitly allows hosting discussions about hurting people
What the fuck does this even mean? Can someone ask for an example? Is this about Luigi? IDFK...
Will this drama season never end? I want my free time back >_<
Nobody providing any context at all, going on long context-free rants with layers upon layers of "you had to be there" comments. The more I read of this, the angrier I become, not at the drama, but at the unwillingness to explain what happened or provide context. I'm supposed to just know. This is an awful experience.
Tesseract was a piece of trojan horse malware that purported to be an alternate Lemmy interface. It added a different UI and some features to the web interface of instances that were well liked. However, its true purpose was to secretly add a block list to instances that run it. It blocked instances, and URLs that the developer personally disliked, without telling anyone that it was doing it.
This drama started when the developer added dbz0 and blahaj to the blocklist, and the dbz0 admins noticed it and blew the whistle.
This caused Lemmy users to actually read the source code, and they found much more, like a second doubly secret blacklist that tesseract download from the developer's server at runtime. That list blocked many prominent Lemmy users individually, so naturally many of them took that as a badge of honor and posted about being on the list.
The developer has continued his public crash out. He's done many things, like defending his actions using alt accounts, deleting the github to stop nob-malware forks, and posting lengthy supervillian type monologues about why he did it. The most recent one, he claimed to be leaving the fediverse, and posted it to his own website with a script to make any readers DDOS the dbz0 instance as revenge for breaking the story.
He's now using his own instance to defederate dbz0 as a continuation of his crashout to get revenge or something. He said he's left but no probably not.
That's about where this whole situation stands. Hope this helps.
That's nuckin futs. Thanks for the breakdown.
It does help, actually. Thank you for sharing this context as well as disclosing which specific instances were blocked. This is very very odd behavior for a developer to engage in for no money.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/63880645
The dev in question is part of the admin team for the startrek.website instance, an instance that has historically made some very... questionable decisions.
Thank you. This is such strange behavior. So, he wanted to trick people into using a censored version of Lemmy? To what end?
Pushing his ideology onto others who hadn't agreed to it. Fahrenheit 451, lemmy style.
So... why not just tell people? Fascists love to have their own social media instances.
Because if they knew it'd become as popular as the instance they were running. So no one would be using it.
fascists always love to use deception, because hatred is well liked by most people.
That's the irony, a lot of people noted that if he had only been upfront about it, he'd probably have gotten some level of adoption. Instead he burned his bridges with the entire fediverse.
He did have his own instance with his own blocklist running. Nobody realised quite how extensive the list was at the time. Didn't have many users though, probably because the place was a barren wasteland after being filtered through all his blocks. That wasn't good enough for him.
If their parting message is to be believed it's because they are the last bastion of sanity.
Can't link to the original because they added a script that ddos'd an instance they don't like...you know...like a well adjusted saviour would do.
Yeah that post made him sound real sane and put-together.