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.

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      I’m glad you’re not getting downvoted for this. When I pointed this out, people yelled, “BUT YOU CAN DISABLE ALL THIS!”

      What’s the point of defaults even being there if you can disable them?

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Honestly it can be a coin flip, but I’m also banned from many of the instances that agree with Rimu thanks to the fiasco. That’s also why I tend to not be downvoted so much anymore, they literally cannot see my comments from Piefed.social.

    • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        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.

            • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              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.

              • Count042@lemmy.ml
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                1 day ago

                Which wars have the NYT’s been against, again? Which policy of W’s were they against again?

                I agree with Cowbees definition, but the NYT’s isn’t left wing BY YOUR OWN DEFINITION of left wing.

                • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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                  23 hours ago

                  Wars? W’s? wtf are you talking about lol

                  What is my definition and how isn’t NYT left going by it?

                  • Count042@lemmy.ml
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                    22 hours ago

                    Given your lack of reading comprehension, I’m going to stop here.

                    The NYT is a tool used to sell the American (supposed) left on literally every war in the last 70 years. Including fun ones like Vietnam, and Iraq.

                    There is nothing left wing about that. It’s not a hard concept. Try a little.

              • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                2 days ago

                New York Times is precisely as left wing as liberalism. You’ve been raised to implicitly think of liberalism as the “normal amount of left”, and that is not accurate. That’s my assumption at any rate, because I was raised that way and carried around a similar misconception.

                • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  It’s not a misconception. It’s the way left and right wing works.

                  If everyone but you agrees on a definition, your definition is wrong. The democrat party is not right wing. Anti-right wing media are not right wing.

                  • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    2 days ago

                    If everyone but you agrees…

                    …in this case, you simply need to expand your definition of “everyone”.

                    Roughly everyone in the US is conditioned to see our tiny slice of the political spectrum this way, as you’re describing. Democrats left, Republicans right, the precise middle between them being…what? “Moderate”?

                    US politics sits within several broader contexts - it is not some magical thing with the power to redefine global and historical political thought. We simply grew up thinking it’s mostly all there was and probably the ~best out of other worse sets of ideas.

                    And all of us suffer for that, you help us all suffer for that, by simply accepting (defending!) the self-defeating idea that Democrats are as far left as one should go. While Republicans just sprint further right, without penalty. And complicit orgs like the New York Times “report” like everything is mostly normal, instead of a goddamn historic, violent assertion of all the worst fucking things that basically NO ONE agrees with, going on today.

                    Okay. Democrats are left-wing. How?

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                2 days ago

                Both are right-wing. Both uphold capitalism, imperialism, and Zionist genocide. Leftism begins at socialism.

                  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                    2 days ago

                    I’m not redefining it. Historically, leftism has been used to describe those who wish to advance to the next mode of production historically, ie those who are progressive, while rightism is to conserve or turn the clock backwards. BBC and NYT are both on the side of dying capitalism, wishing to drag the moribund body of capitalism, while leftists would be the socialists and communists. In the French revolution, capitalism was left, because it represented a movement beyond the monarchy and into capitalism.