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.
Thank you, this is an extremely helpful description.
Btw neither fedinsfw.app (with 2.4x higher number of MAUs than PieFed.social, making it by far the #1 most-used PieFed instance), nor PieFed.zip (with self-reportedly 541 MAUs, making it the clear #3 PieFed instance) show up in that instance picker list.
I tried viewing the list from multiple instances including from PieFed.social itself. So I’m not sure how much people actually make use of that picker, and it seems buggy as hell (unless both of those instances have intentionally decided not to be listed?). Though even more confusing is how PieFed.zip also does not report onto https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list (though Lemmy.zip does appear at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list).
Anyway, it’s good to know that while PieFed does not have a hard-coded instance blacklist - nor are those 4chan filters hard-coded either iirc - it does have an extremely odd and unhelpful depiction of what constitutes a “good” level of defederation on that instance picker list.
And now with the highly controversial and extremely bad roll-out of the vote quota issue, while I would not go so far as to recommend that people steer clear of PieFed itself (instances like PieFed.zip and quokka and blahaj seem to be doing just fine with it, e.g. maintaining a watchful eye on the opinionated additions to the sourcecode), I would unequivocally recommend avoiding trusting the instance picker at this point. As you showed and I piled onto here, it is just an absolute mess (and Rimu is showing strong signs of burnout so unlikely to be fixed anytime soon).