this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Since there has not yet been an official announcement regarding this matter, I wanted to provide some clarity to the community.

Last week, it was discovered that the Tesseract frontend included an undisclosed and unsanctioned blocklist that prevented users from seeing certain people and communities across the fedivese. This led to significant controversy across the Fediverse, after which the original developer withdrew the project and left the Fediverse.

Everyone is entitled to their own views and to make their own choices about the content they wish to see. However, when those choices are built into an open-source project, they must be disclosed publicly and presented transparently to users. Quietly imposing a blocklist without their knowledge is a serious breach of trust and, in my view, raises legitimate concerns about the security and integrity of the software.

As a result, we have disabled the Tesseract frontend on sh.itjust.works indefinitely.

We are open to offering other alternative frontends. If there is one you would like us to consider, please share your suggestion in !main@sh.itjust.works or !agora@sh.itjust.works.

Thank you

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[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Agree with the post, just curious if anyone knows or can estimate how many users were on tesseract? Just i never heard of it before the controversy and interested in why the news spread so quickly about it.

[–] marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The felony probably helped propel the story along. Everyone loves a good drama that ends in a credible risk of jail time for the least sufferable person involved.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] DarkSirrush@piefed.ca 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Right before the final ragequit dude added code to cause all users to DDoS the db0 instance.

If caught, dude could face felony charges as intentional DDoS attacks are, in fact, very illegal.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 2 points 2 days ago

Interesting. Db0 would have to file charges. And I doubt they would. But that’s a pretty interesting predicament they got themselves into.