PSA: The Tesseract frontend includes a hardcoded hidden instance blacklist with all leftist and trans-friendly instances. : meta

PSA: The Tesseract frontend includes a hardcoded hidden instance blacklist with all leftist and trans-friendly instances. (github.com)

submitted 5 days ago by inlandempire@jlai.lu to c/meta@jlai.lu

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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.

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[-] loutre@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Je pense que je te suis sur ce que tu dis et désolé par avance j’essaie de pas faire une réponse inutilement longue.

Ce que je dis, c’est que d’un point de vue technique, Tesseract n’est pas dans son rôle. Il est chargé de rendre visibles et accessibles les outils mis à disposition par le logiciel en fond (lemmy ou piefed, par exemple) et rien d’autre.

Ce que je critique chez Tesseract, c’est la volonté de forcer silencieusement (normalement c’est la prérogative des logiciels malveillants…) une blacklist que les admins d’une instance ne peuvent pas modifier. Autrement dit, un acteur extérieur à l’instance se donne le droit de bloquer tel ou tel site.

Certes, c’est un client et il suffit d’en changer, mais encore faut-il le savoir. C’est pour ça que je trouve que c’est pas génial :/

(edit: j’ai enlevé une phrase où je me répétais)

[-] Snoopy@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

T'inquiète, j'adore les réponses longues :)

En tout cas, j'ai ramené le sujet pour Piefed et ça a donné une roadmap sur sa propre blocklist. :)

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026

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