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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.

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.

what the fuck happened? I am hearing about this for the first time

a small crumb of context would be amazing

Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds. And my family has a history of bashing fascists. I'm just partaking in my family tradition.

seems like startek.website is a trap, to get people to the instance, and started censoring to isolate people, does it have anything to do with TREK at all.?

same reason I left ML. Post just vanished, no trace

he will likely make another one once the news blows over.

we have strict rules about linking to other instances with the *intent of shaming someone or nfluencing their policy

That sounds like this is retaliatory action for db0 calling out AP for being a shitlord and demanding the censorship gets rolled back in Tesseract.

After all, db0 shamed and tried to influence policy for a turd who wanted to control what their users could even see.

Almost like there isn't a reason just spite or pettiness.

Especially as the reasoning of extra moderation needed would only be on the db0 side unless those admins of startrek wanted to curate what federates

I'm sure that admin is Admiral Patrick's alt. There are signs that they share the same sentiment as him. I kind of knew he wasn't going to just leave the Fediverse entirely.