this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299

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.

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 73 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need

Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration

I can forgive someone with a passing exposure to it not knowing, but MBFC is notorious for having biased rankings.

The regular example I use is the Guardian being placed on the same factuality ranking as breitbart (the nazi rag), but it's not one case, there's a general right-wing bias in the rankings.

The developer of this project is very clearly just trying to put their finger on the views of their users

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Just looked and Breitbart is listed as extreme right and mixed factual reporting.

The Guardian is listed as highly factual and left-center.

What are you referring to?

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 41 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Holy shit have they finally updated it?

They had Guardian as mixed factuality for years

Unless they've completely overhauled all their rankings though, I expect a lot of the more subtle biases will still be present

Edit: from a year ago https://web.archive.org/web/20250816111509/https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/

And it had been like that for a number of years (I don't make a habit of checking it regularly given my distrust of it)

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 32 points 1 month ago

It still thinks "The Economist" is 'Least Biased'.

MBFC equates political centrism as being unbiased, which is fundamentally flawed.

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 62 points 1 month ago (32 children)

Amazing how these projects keep killing themselves by alienating huge portions of their userbase. Hard to survive in a FOSS environment by being extremely reactionary.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 47 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?

Same folks that complain endlessly about Far-Left censorship and militant authoritarianism, no less.

I wonder how many of the developers on these projects are spill-over from the reactionary shitholes of Reddit.

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 month ago

Surprise, secretly fascist the whole time! 🌎 🧑‍🚀🔫

[–] krigo666@lemmy.world 45 points 1 month ago

Blacklisted: Tesseract.

[–] klu9@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 month ago (7 children)

I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social.

  • Copied link
  • In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post
  • "Post not found". Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already???
  • Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article.
  • After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to !fediverse@lemmy.world , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It's missing.
  • Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even.

So why can't I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?

Piefed.social - "Post not found"

Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Lemmy.ca/Alex frontend - post present, twice even

Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Piefed.social - post missing

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 54 points 1 month ago (52 children)

Piefed.social is run by an admin with similar views on censoring leftists as the Tesseract devs. There was a whole fiasco about it a few months back, where the lead Dev of Piefed kept lists of Leftists and other users they permabanned for pointing out issues with Piefed's code.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Can confirm. I believe I'm explicitly on their blocklist.

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 19 points 1 month ago (3 children)

What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 43 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Lead Dev is a crusader for establishment liberalism, essentially. Hates conservatives but also hates leftists. This puts them at odds with much of the fediverse, who lean more left than liberal.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It's definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 month ago (22 children)

I'm definitely biased as I'm a communist myself, but I'd argue this is more reflective of the politics of both sets of devs. Lemmy devs truly believe in the communist principles underlying the FOSS, federated project they have, while Piefed is unapologetically biased against that and towards liberalism. In other words, the principles speak for themselves in both projects.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (11 children)

My strong guess would be that the turbolib Zionist mods/admins of lemmy.world are at it again.

lemmy.world of course being... you know, mostly ex reddit power mods, from the US.

On an unrelated note: We all know Ghislaine Maxwell was also a reddit power mod, right?

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[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 month ago

Piefed has a shadowban/defederation tool. Like, I can post in piefed.social communities but they don't federate for anyone to see except for the individual user responded to. It's a way of moderating without it showing up in modlogs.

[–] GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

Oh you didn’t know? Piefed is an extremely censored and politically biased platform lol. The main dev has made it his own little authoritarian platform. It blocks all sources that don’t align with his political beliefs and ideologies, and auto blocks/tags users that he doesn’t like because they disagree with his ideologies.

It’s disheartening to see more and more people using Piefed.

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[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

From a purely software engineering point of view, I don't understand why they feel the need to hardcore such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 34 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It also displayed bogus error messages, as if to appear to be a technical issue with the community instance, while hiding the black list deep in code. So the point here was to deceive and manipulate.

If it was a toggleable and customisable list that would be a good feature for instances.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Therefore the "deception" would be discovered the moment anyone tried to debug exactly those error messages in this ...open source application.

Bike fall meme material.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Which is how this post came to be, by db0 discovering it.

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[–] stoly@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is also a penchant amongst some tech types to force their worldviews. Look at all the AI people, Zuckerberg, and so many other tech leaders.

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[–] als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 29 points 1 month ago (52 children)

Doesn't piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it's a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.

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[–] gon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 month ago

Genuinely WTF

[–] rottenmummy@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 month ago

Don't get me wrong, but this is a solid proof of the beauty of the Fediverse and FOSS in general you can do whatever you want and so can other people

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 month ago (21 children)

What a crazy coincidence. I was just checking out this GitHub today. It has a project called Anewbis which is

A fork of Anubis without the cringey anime catgirl. This fork provides no other changes. It just updates from the main project and removes the stupid catgirl.

[–] archchan@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

and removes the stupid catgirl.

Blasphemy! Someone fork the fork, call it AnUwUbis, and readd the catgirl.

[–] Sv443@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Catboy? Thoughts anyone? Thoughts? Cat boy?

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[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 month ago

Some people have no whimsy

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[–] bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago

Sounds like a great set of interesting places to explore; should thank them for compiling the list but the fix should just toggle them to be part of the defaults

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 21 points 1 month ago

Oooooh we're blocklisted too! I guess we're too radical for them!

Any idea why MULTIVERSE is blocked but quokk.au isn't? Maybe they don't think you guys are as radical as us :P

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

One of their last changelogs they posted on Lemmy 11 mounths ago (halfa year before injecting said blocklists) considers content filtering: https://lemmy.world/post/35006054 They wrote it was a huge undertaking for them to rewrite the filtering engine specifically. Welp, it went out of hand.

Also:

Please do not take anything personally if you show up in the screenshots of my filtering preferences. These were either chosen at random because they were at the top of the feed at the time of testing or were chosen because they have both Lemmy and Piefed versions/alts and were used to test wildcard and regex based filtering.

It's funny to read it alongside their pretty opinionated commentary in blocklists.

☆ I want to log it: at the time of writing, no one brigaded the linked post or sub, upvotes on old 8mo old posts were in positives, lets not interfere with what's already dead.

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