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.
Really? I was thinking of switching to piefied (i was already skeptical because it’s made with python) but now? Hell nah, i’il stay on lemmy or use mbin
I am not saying that you should switch to use or even like PieFed, but afaik there is no feature that is “trying to trick users into thinking there’s a technical issue with servers”, or at least not one that Lemmy and Mbin do not identically share. I would be happy to read about one though if someone wants to point me to it?
e.g. just a few hours ago I recall reading a report where someone was confused why a post did not show up for them on PieFed but it did on Lemmy. The reason turned out to be that the user has been banned on PieFed.social. The key here is that the latter is an instance (a server machine) whereas PieFed is software.
Lemmy instances also ban people too btw. Some Lemmy instances are in fact quite (in)famous for this.
But that is not “trickery”, that is simply PieFed (or Lemmy, or Mbin, whatever) working as designed, someone’s lack of understanding notwithstanding, and likewise for people who want to cast aspersions onto their tribal “opponent”.
All that said, PieFed does have a weird way of blocking all users on an instance. If the devs of Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin could get together an agree on a protocol whereby a signal could be sent that all software platforms would understand and know how to handle… then such maneuvers would not be necessary. Instead, legacy software like Lemmy are not always going to be able to keep up with PieFed’s rapid pace of development - e.g. PieFed offers numerous things that Lemmy simply has to shadow-block (with no report of having done so), including polls, user and post flairs, various special features of communities (e.g. automatic deletion of submitted images after a certain time period, usually one year), etc. To be clear this is not “nefarious” activity on behalf of the Lemmy devs, it’s just that the software doesn’t know how to handle such content, nor do the devs make it a priority to make it do so (why should they?)
And likewise, the ability of Lemmy uses to reply to PieFed users that have instance “blocked” them is one such source of friction between the two software offerings.
If you are thinking of creating a community, it matters far more what instance admins you choose to interact with than what software that instance is running. Especially as some (like quokka, and reportedly soon-ish sh.itjust.works) switch around, while others (like .zip and .world) offer literally both options (Lemmy & PieFed).