Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.
None of this is in the source code. It’s downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.
If you’re just tuning in
Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you’ve used a Lemmy site that didn’t look like stock Lemmy, there’s a fair chance it was this.
Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can’t see it, can’t configure it, and aren’t told it’s there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it’s “incompatible,” which is not true.
I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.
There’s a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn’t in the git repository. It’s unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.
Verify all of it in ten seconds
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
| base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json
That’s the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There’s a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well.
It filters criticism of moderators
lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk— listed- community regex
power ?tripping? - keyword
censoring me
Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.
It filters words
The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire.
Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to.
Filtered communities on instances that aren’t blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.
The 552 users aren’t bots
67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.
355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.
Seven of them aren’t even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.
I have the list and I’m not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.
And it lies about it
When the instance block fires you get: “Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract.”
Nothing is incompatible. It’s a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it’s what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.
For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.
Admins can’t switch it off
Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.
Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.
Before someone says it
A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. “It targets the left” doesn’t survive the data and I’m not going to pretend it does.
The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who’ve never read it and users who don’t know it’s there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: “it’s a spam list” answers every individual question and none of the whole.
And /c/modabuse is not spam.
Asks
- Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
- Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
- Tell users when something’s been hidden. One line.
- Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.
It’s AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That’s the licence working as designed. But forking isn’t disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.
If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance’s name, to users who don’t know it exists.
Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.
As an instance admin crew we want to voice our protest over our entire instance not being on the list. We feel we had failed our users.
One of them managed to get on the individuals list tho, for posting one single thing; “To predict the future we must look at the past. How Rome slave economy could be a 1:1 parallel to artificial worker economy.”.
As of around 7 hours ago, there’s a closed issue on the repo’s tracker from someone upset they were on the secret list, and the maintainer closed the issue stating that they’d make an official statement once everyone cooled off. Also that the issue tracker wasn’t the right place for that discussion.
This indicates that they are aware of the threads about this stuff here on Lemmy.
Please don’t dogpile the issue tracker, and give an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail. Trust that if they’re a piece of shit it won’t take long for them to confirm it (again) loud and clear. Not saying this isn’t a whole big bunch of bullshit, just that they should at least get a small opportunity to respond with their side.
If you hand someone a shovel and they use it to dig their hole deeper instead of filling it in, it’s even more fun to watch them fall in.
Sad to see I’m not on the list
Same.
Based on the skew of what’s on the blacklist, it’d have been more efficient for Tesseract to run off a whitelist only for FHF corporate approved.
“These rapscallions are hindering my ability to express myself.”
Lol the keywords list is hilarious, imagine publishing a list of things that rustle your jimmies.
That’s an epic level of gaslighting. Hell yeah.
Bonerfried dude’s rock situation.
Mum, I’m on the list!
Where’s the list I need to know if I’m a cool kid 😔
You’re not in the list. Your bot salary will be reduced this month, work harder next time.
😭😭
Run the command db0 provided. I can’t find you unfortunately.
I’m just curious when or why I was added 🤔
Check your modlog related to dubvee. Developer is that admin.
Absolutely nothing so they just go off what they saw in a random comment
Thanks for your work uncovering this. Imposing this broad and undisclosed censorship upon the user is unacceptable, so we have stopped hosting Tesseract on our instance.
imagine how many other things like this exist in the fediverse and haven’t yet been discovered; i bet most never will be.
Correction. This is actually good news.
imagine how many other things like this exist on the
fediversecorporate web andhaven’t yetcan never be discovered.At least here in open source town we get to detect and tackle this shit
I doubt there are very many, because most people don’t do these kinds of things, not even le evil tankies.
Congrats! Db0 forked it in case you want to go back to a similar interface, but I think it’s still getting the censorship parts removed.
We would consider it if it has the blocklist function removed. Whether the fork gets ongoing maintenance is a concern though.
Am I on the list
I saw a funny weirdo saying that this person is just blocking “extremists”. How in the fuck doing this shit is not extreme extremist radical liberalism??? They like the status quo so much that they don’t want to see people complain about it LMAO
Blanket suppression of political topics tends to benefit the right.
I’ve read the list. It almost exclusively targets left-leaning topics.
Benefit the status quo, so yeah benefits the right.
Guess that means that in a small way, I am now immortalalized in a git repository.
Welcome to the club 🤝
I don’t think you should defend him. Integrating spam defense is a cover to censor his ideological opponents. The best lie is the one wrapped in truth. You shouldn’t frame any of what he did as being for good reasons. He hid it from the rest of us, made it look like an error message, and took steps to stop people from patching it out.
That’s no what someone with good intentions does. That’s what someone who knows it’s wrong but tries to hide it does. Including spam domains in it can be seen as a way of hiding the rotten stuff and it gives trolls like him something to point at when it gets criticized “It’s a spam blocklist, you must be a freeze peach troll if you’re against that”.
This is giving him too much charitability:
A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. “It targets the left” doesn’t survive the data and I’m not going to pretend it does.
It’s honestly wild how many people on lemmy are giving this person the benefit of the doubt. As if they did it with good intentions.
Are people on this site really this naive?
Given their misogynist brigading of comments criticizing the guilty party’s politics and pointing out that this is just their perfect practice, I’m willing to say they are not. If you can consider .world users people, which is quite a stretch.
Yes.
You could assume naïveté if they gave that benefit of doubt to everybody, but they don’t.
They’re just authoritarians and ‘anti communists’.
Especially considering it’s this guy
Jesus Christ, this just makes me thankful that I never have to interact with that instance.
it’s on multiple instances and i suspect yours as well.
No it got taken off quickly when the shit hit the fan, there wasn’t a lot of spray afaict https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45728788
Godfuckingdamnit. I was wondering why the system kept blocking our instance even after I removed it from the blacklist. I suspected some sort of lookup but I was out of time and couldn’t find it with a quick search. This is so much worse than I expected.
Where does it dowload it exactly? I found the line loading policy.dat, but I can’t find any calls to tesseract.dubvee.org.
I would just take that frontend down entirely if you’re still hosting it. It’s basically malware at this point.
I’ve already forked and hosting my own version
Any reason the blacklist.ts is in your fork?
I’ve disabled it in code. One doesn’t delete files willy nilly
then rename it
exhibitA_blocklist.ts
Some other people said it’s in the github but obfuscated as base64
Ye there’s a local version but not a remote which is what I was concerned about
This was an attack.
"^Article is paywalled.?$", "ACAB", ... "anarchistic", "biz@agoda.com", "billionaire [cock|dick]", "boot ?lick(ing|ers?)", ... "censoring me", "chatgip+ity+", "child-?rap(ing|ist)", "comrade", "conformist turd", "corpo ?(turd|slut|tech)", "death to", "dvdfab.cn", "enlightened centrist", "(epstein|epstien|pedo|pedophile)Sooo, they are pro-pedos, pro-billionares, pro-paywalled articles, anti-communism and anti-conservatism and get offended by “enlightened centrist”
Yup, they pretend to be centrist or smth
DisgustingAnd quoting this blacklist might’ve just seen you blacklisted from Lemmy.world, because irony is dead.
Lmao
Edit: got banned fr 💔
Edit: got unbanned after i sent 'em an email
This is wild, wtf are they doin’ over there.
Dunno, i wonder too, they also don’t even use the “site-wide ban” feature and instead decided to flood my entire modlog 💔
I had that happen “by accident” once. Shadow fixed me up afterwards. Must be easier to do than one would expect.
That’s actually how a site ban federates iirc
Oh my bad, i thought it would be something like
“You are banned from the instance XYZ because: rule”
That’s def something that should be changed by lemmy devs, do you happen to know if it’s something planned?
It’s already done, for 1.0 I think. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5515
Yeah, I think there’s an issue somewhere
They definitely do the site side ban just don’t admit it
Yeah I’d try contacting the admins, or at least posting on YePowerTrippinBastards. Even LW needs to recognize that moderation by regex is fucking dumb.
I sent 'em an email, if i don’t get unbanned i am gonna make a post there for sure, it’s a very big problem, especially because 50% of the most used communities are on .world;
They are a big instance, they should moderate better IMOOn an unrelated note, think of your second-favorite username, and write it on a piece of paper.
on another unreleated note, i also have a 2nd home, just in case the first one goes on fire :P
