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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And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is evryone always pretending discrimination is “so big”! And “worse than it has ever been.”! It’s not, it’s a small minority and the left and right are both just as guilty. And I tipicaly only see this behavior online. However I kinda touch grass on a daily basis and have noticed the real world is far from what the internet portaits it to be.
At the very least, any software that produces error messages that lie is extremely annoying.
@Quokka Wait a moment. Is it the same tesseract that develops the OCR? Because I sometimes use that OCR for NVDA screen reader (non visual desktop access). If so, I’ll take it off immediately! This kind of hardcoded deny list, is an abuse. Worse than the one I noticed 25 years ago on MSN messenger where you couldn’t label yourself as “John Doe - webmaster of [project]” but then if you named yourself “I’m the drill for young asses” (said it less rude than it was), Msn messenger let you place that display name upfront.
Let me say that if you develop a software where you deliberately block pro-trans, pro-sustainability or topic you dev potentially dislike, your software shouldn’t be distributed to the public.No, different Tesseract!
@Quokka Sorry, and thanks for explanation. It’s a serious situation anyways. This kind of devs shouldn’t be accepted into open source community; maybe I’m too extremist
No you’re absolutely not. Allowing this in a community is tacit agreement with discriminatory attitudes against queer people.
@zqps I’m afraid discrimination has become mainstream. Against queer, against black, against people with disability…
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.
She’s not even a catgirl. Anubis is a friggin’ jackal or, if you must, at minimum has a dog for a head. She’s a puppergirl.
and removes the stupid catgirl.
Blasphemy! Someone fork the fork, call it AnUwUbis, and readd the catgirl.
Catboy? Thoughts anyone? Thoughts? Cat boy?
Or dog boy to fit the anubis theme.
Sooooooo just renamed Anubis? Daring today, aren’t we?
Some people have no whimsy
There’s a commercial license you can use to replace the image
I mean. If you want to use it in a serious project, that anime-looking girl is completely out of place.
People say that but it wasn’t a deal breaker for the United Nations.
The United Nations can say what they want, but I wouldn’t want it on a serious company website
Are you Swiss German by any chance?
That’s why the author offers a commercial license with custom image and serious name.
deleted by creator
Maybe ask the author for what to do? I’m sure they are receptive to arguments.
OR apply that guy’s patch to get the same shit for free
(nobody tell corporate)
Ah yeah let’s just fuck over the open source dev cool.
Even if taken literally, the second part would still then be my “sincere view” and therefore “the correct opinion”, no?
nice
if you block all the commies, gays, software pirates, plis you individually block people one by one…sooner or later there wont be anything left. maybe just a few nerds fighting over linux ricing.
Oh this would be a bliss…
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.
Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content.
Because you mention OCR; people seeing this: it’s not the OCR tool.
I keep hearing so much shit that piefed does but also see a ton of people either ignoring it or praising it. Does piefed have some sorta propaganda team or something?
It has a few evangelists, but I’m not sure I’d call them a “propaganda team” as I don’t think they get paid to do so.
And here I am, going WTF is a piefed?
It’s similar to Lemmy, but with more features and has better integration with Mastodon.
A platform similar to Lemmy, but with an explicit ideological stance against communists, who are the main Lemmy devs (and the Lemmy devs, because of their belief in communism, adhere more closely to FOSS and federation, with less hard-coded bias as PieFed).
For those to lazy to make block lists?
More ideologically driven, the Dev of PieFed wants to reduce exposure to leftists.
Tankies specifically. Not all leftists are tankies, stop pretending otherwise
If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.
In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.
It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.
With the users being unaware or is it marketed that way?
There have been a few fiascos about it. It isn’t exactly unknown, but it isn’t exactly advertised either.
They also block every source that doesn’t agree with the main devs ideology and politics.
Oh if they do that’s great, the main dev of piefed went on a hissy fit because other instances used AI tooling, for them to be doing the same is just perfect. Gotta love hypocrites
From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcode such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.
GUESS WHAT https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Please un-.ml your links.
The markup for that:
[here](id)EDIT: nvm doesn’t w*rk reliably (thanks, nutomic), here use the .world original (copy link and paste into search box)
ah good catch I meant to link hte original
read edit mb
I mean it works by just clicking the fedi icon
? I’m not sure what you mean with the markup.
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.
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.
Which is how this post came to be, by db0 discovering it.
Tada!
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.
“I know better than you”
(This person does, in fact, not know better than you)
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.
Surprise, secretly fascist the whole time! 🌎 🧑🚀🔫
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?
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.
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.
OP is on that list.
Can confirm. I believe I’m explicitly on their blocklist.
They also call you a harraser for pointing out actions the dev did?
I’ve been called every name and accused of every crime under the sun.
Same! Congrats on being a fellow hall-of-famer!
Thanks for the info!
No problem!
Censoring leftists? No, he censors anything to the right of left more than anything. Maybe he censors the faaaar left as well, but anything “conservative”, right wing, or centrist is censored.
Liberalism is right wing, and is allowed. Anything to the left of liberalism, from anarchism to socialism to communism, is censored. It’s clear as day that Piefed is right-wing at the developer level. The fact that the far right is also censored does not make it left wing.
It’s right wing yet it censors every remotely right wing/conservative source?
It doesn’t, though, outlets like BBC, the New York Times, etc. are allowed.
The New York Times is a left wing publication through and through, what are you talking about?
The BBC is centrist but left leaning. Definitely not right wing.
Both are right-wing. Both uphold capitalism, imperialism, and Zionist genocide. Leftism begins at socialism.
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.
What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.
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.
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.
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.
That’s honestly probably a good point, yeah. Still amuses me.
Yep, one of those moments that feels pretty validating for my worldview, and proves the Lemmy approach to be correct.
I’m a communist myself
Well fuck you. May all the people who died in the concentration camps, in famines, cultural purges, or just simply shot dead at the border crossings, haunt you tonight.
While excesses have been committed in socialist countries, they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism. I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes, and I will celebrate the immense gains made by the working classes after successfully gaining political power.
Everywhere the working classes have taken power, life expectancies, literacy rates, housing rates, and more have all dramatically climbed, while food insecurity and poverty dramatically declined. Every single time. The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people is undeniable, and while it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means, this violence is a response to the daily brutalization of the working classes
they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism
Colonialism is colonialism. No matter the color.
I won’t weep for landlords, capitalists
Then weep for the workers who were denied education because they refused Leninism. Weep for those who has been sent to work in the uranium mines. Weep for those persecuted for their faith. Weep for those who has been put to a fucking jail for watching a Knight Rider on TV.
working classes after successfully gaining political power
What you call a working class has never achieved political power. Only the chosen faithful families could ever get anywhere near the office desk, not even mentioning a political function. Without pledging you allegiance to a one of the worst dictators who ever lived, you were not even considered.
The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people
Yes. The toilet paper outages and bribes for the butcher so you can skip the line were certainly very uplifting.
it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means
And here we are. You’re openly advocating for death and destruction to follow some kind of a fairy-tale. You’re no better than an american soldiers leveling a primary school to the ground, or a russian soldier executing civilians in Butcha.
daily brutalization of the working classes
Open your fucking eyes. You can no longer see the real wold for the veil of victimization you have put upon yourself. There is no class.
And most importantly, stop scheming about some great revolution and CREATE the means of production!
I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes
Well, yeah. Those are among the groups you said you explicitly want to
massmurder. Why would you weep for them?Edit: he never said mass murder, my bad. I should have fact checked before saying anything. Come one, come all, see how fucking stupid I am. It’s alarmingly stupid, and I probably should just fuck off forever instead of being a fucking moron in public. I’m so sorry for inflicting myself on you all.
I’m no expert, but it sounds like they were killed by authoritarianism, not communism. I don’t think communism requires concentration camps, famines, or cultural purges.
Deafboy dramatically and intentionally misrepresented the point, but all states are monopolies on violence, all are “authoritarian.” The excesses committed in socialist States are genuine excesses of socialism.
That being said, “concentration camps” is a bit disingenuous. No socialist state has had industrialized mass murder like the Nazis, UK, US, etc. Most deaths in prisons in the Soviet Union, for example, happened due to starvation during World War II, after the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket.
Contributing famine to socialism is even more disingenuous. In all instances of famine in socialist countries, these have been in countries historically food insecure with common famine, and the socialists were the ones to end the cycle of famine. Socialism did not cause the famines, weather disaster and underdeveloped agricultural forces did. Mismanagement often played a part, but not in a way intrinsic to socialism nor in a manner that would have made capitalism preferable.
As for cultural purges, this is more vague. The cultural revolution in China, for example, is recognized as a mistake by the CPC. This is all I can really think of, though, when it comes to “cultural purges.”
As established in the other thread here, state-wide communism can only be achieved by the violent means.
What needs to follow is for the people to willingly forget some of what they know, uninvent the market, money, and give up every possesion that’s of any significant value. That is not going to happen without violence either.
And to keep the society in this state, you need an aparatus that will constantly keep them in fear, or ar least apply some kind of double-think. A dictatorship is the only way to do that.
This is how the soviet style communism has been brought to my city:
Communism is inherently authoritarian.
And to that I say: Authoritarians of the world, gurgle my balls!
You say, the guy is fed up by the extremists? What an asshole!
Extremism is a matter of perspective and has no quality other than „far away from this arbitrary fix point“.
Why don’t you call all capitalists and their liberal enablers extremists for enslaving and annihilating the world and its inhabitants?
Yes, unironically. The communists are correct, even if we are far from the liberal establishment politically.
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?
Also, apparently, Jeffery Epstein was a big Quora power user.
So was Jordan Peterson
Shitty Piefed dev -> lemmy.world mod -> ex-reddit power mod -> Ghislaine Maxwell
makes about as much sense as
“We shouldn’t have people starving in the streets or paying $35,000 to visit the emergency room” -> socialism -> USSR -> Stalin -> Holodomor
Sure, the links are there, but what a silly series of connections to reach to in order to paint your target as the worst possible thing to confuse the impressionable.
Sure, the links are there
I mean, we had Joe Biden force the sale of TikTok to a cartel of Silicon Valley fascists based on some spurious links to Chinese communism. If you can get from “Tankie TikTok Post” -> “President Xi Jinping undermined US electoral security” and enshrine that belief in federal communication policies, I don’t think “Shitty Piefed Dev” -> “Ghislaine Maxwell” is that big of a joke.
Double, extra, plus, too, you need to keep in mind how much influence Steve Bannon had back in 2016, largely by organizing and deploying white nationalists out of 4chan and the grosser corners of Reddit. And Bannon was bosom buddies with Epstein.
I honestly don’t see how those two are related but I do think it is interesting that the person I replied to insists they were joking while you insist they were not.
Schrodinger’s Douchebag at play.
I honestly don’t see how those two are related
They’re both (ostensibly) oligarchs and political insiders dictating the operation of mass media.
I think its pretty obvious that I’m just throwing out something that is almost certainly not related, at the end.
I did literally say its ‘unrelated’.
Because sometimes I’m a petty little bitch, just like you’d have to be to surreptitiously write an ideological ban list into some open source software.
I’m just illustrating a similar level of dirty play here… if that confuses idiots, I don’t care, in fact that’s part of the point.
You were obviously being sarcastic with stating it was “unrelated” and you’re obviously playing dumb, also in bad faith now.
You’re deliberately trying to confuse the “idiots” that agree with you, not the idiots that support this ridiculous move.
My username is a pun. You’re welcome to get bent out of shape over it if you want, but I hope people reading this realize you’re doing further bad faith tactics by tossing in this Red Herring as a cherry on top.
Shhhhhhh.
Quiet now, no one cares what you think.
Be respectful please.
I was curious to see if you were simply so passionate about the issue you were accidentally commenting in bad faith because you lost your cool or if that’s just something you double down on because you’re a troll.
Given it’s the latter, enjoy the block!
we got no clue man
I would recommend switching to piefed.ca
I can see it on the NZ PieFed instance. Interestingly on Lemmy/Voyager I can’t see that it’s a cross post, nor the original post text UNLESS I go to reply to the post.
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
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?
Older versions were crazy, guessing they’ve finally got it roght. I think they should have launched with a “In beta, algorithm is learning” message. People implemented it right at launch and had expectations, and it was just not ready, total dumpster fire.
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)
It still thinks “The Economist” is ‘Least Biased’.
MBFC equates political centrism as being unbiased, which is fundamentally flawed.
I think it could be from a different person doing the rating for the update.
Which really reinforces how terrible their rating system is
Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on its story selection, which moderately favors the left. We also now rate them High for factual reporting due to minimal failed fact checks in the last five years. (5/18/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 09/26/2025)
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.
Yeah, it sucks! I used to use Moshidon until they blacklisted the only Mastodon instance I use lol
I asked the dude who made it to fix the blocklist and he said no
Which instance got blocked?
I can’t remember if it was No Agenda Social or its successor No Authority Social, but I am quite sure that both are included in their blacklist.
Lemmy has managed to survive in spite of the tankies that develop it. I guess federation works in the end.
Lemmy is surviving because communists are ideologically coherent and committed to FOSS and federation. The communism is a huge plus, and communists make up a huge portion of the userbase.
Stop pretending that tankies and communists/leftists/whatever are interchangeable words.
They are not.
If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.
In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.
It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.
I’m referring to the alienation of people who browse all, see a thread, and make an innocent comment only to be savaged by a mob of angry types who sort by new comments and continually hit F5.
I’d rather it be this way over Reddit, where you get the same but for far worse political views.
for far worse political views.
Opinion.
Not saying I don’t agree with you, just be aware that’s just your opinion.
Sure, in the same way that saying “fascism is bad” is technically an opinion. This, however, neglects the objective correctness of Marxism, which deliberately doesn’t rely on subjectivism or moralistic arguments, and the incoherence of liberalism and fascism at an objective level.
The objective correctness of Marxism is debatable, as has been done for decades now, by definition making it subjective.
Lemmy also gets a boost for survival because ActivityPub also lets alternatives like Piefed interact nearly seamlessly. It’s the federation across competition that helps sustain even the bad development teams.
Blacklisted: Tesseract.
Genuinely WTF
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
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
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.
