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.
Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need
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?
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.