Tesseract is a web client for Lemmy that was found to be secretly and arbitrarily blocking users, communities and even entire instances. You can see if you’re one of the kool kidz by running
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonand grepping your name / instance. Further details can be found in this post.
The poem above is adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s The Burning of the Books, which can be read here. If you would rather read it in the original German, go here.
I’m sorry, I don’t think we’re going to end up agreeing on this. I don’t see that it’s been forced on anyone. Maybe users of that instance, or people who use the software. But the list is there.
The blocklist wasn’t in the publicly viewable repo, but on a server owned by the dev. This also means users can’t change it or switch it off. Luckily someone forked the repo and disabled the blocklist.
Then the Fediverse and FOSS have succeeded.