Tesseract is/was an alternative frontend for Lemmy sites. Its developer — asimons04 — hid malware in it. It would secretly download an obfuscated ban list with instances, communities, and people that asimons04 wanted to personally discriminate against and it would silently shadowban them from any site that used Tesseract.

The bans were heavily anti-fash leftists and queer folks, including yours truly.

This was discovered through some community sleuthing in the last several days. Asimons04 has since ~~deleted their repos and accounts and disappeared~~ moved repos to break forking and posted an unhinged rant to dubvee.

@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has forked Tesseract since it had some nice features and they seem to be working on thoughtfully removing the malware.

Those finding their name on the list are treating it as a badge of honor, since it shows that asimons04 was a conniving fascist bigot.

The rabbit hole begins here.
https://lemmy.world/post/49778353

An admin of an instance dubvee ptz/AdmiralPatrick published a frontend for Lemmy - a different interface to look through - called Tesseract. Many instances provided it as an option for their users.

Something around a year ago they suffered a burnout from fediverse (idk how) and seemingly cut their presence here.

Just recently, db0 instance admin got a funny result from updating their server software. They couldn't see their own instance's posts through that frontend, it was reporting an error. Going around it with a magnifying glass, they learnt, that an update to Tesseract silently shipped a new filtering engine with a list by dev. It downloads said list as the frontend starts, so you (1) won't see it on github and (2) they have all power over what you see or not. Content matched with that list by instance, author or regex keyword doesn't show up, like it isn't there at all.

It appears, not only spam or fash dens were there, but a lot of active instances incl. db0 and lemmy.ml (that you are on) were on the list, as well as many individuals. In a long post AP argued, that they wanted their frontend not only to spice up the interface, but also to provide a better normie-friendly look at a fediverse, to make more people stay (unlike them), without anything upsetting, or "toxic" as they say, meaning anything slightly political or verbally violent too. And as some users wondered what's left of fediverse with that opinionated filter applied and what it says about that person's leanings

others took being in the list as a medal of honor, and started memeing about that, and talking about dev's shadowy practices. The overwhelming majority was not having it, excluding maybe Rimu, a Piefed dev, who soberly corrected that there was actually a misleadingly named switch to turn filtering off - and iirc they had some sort of a drama themselves recently, so it may come off natural to them.

Either way, this piece of software was forked by multiple users to exclude shadowban list. Memes roll, people are jelly they aren't in the elite club, and we get another story about small power causing god-like delusions in a person. Unanswered though stays the question of why the fediverse, seemingly the size of town, has a capacity for drama.

I'm not sure I got everything right, but other people's writeups appear under almost any post concerning that matter, so you can see if they cover it better than I.

Here is a post explaining it: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63897215

It just happened. Tesserect is a front end to Lemmy (like old.red-dit) that was actually nicely built, but apparently taken over because it was abandoned. Since you're new, being on different instances is a little opaque to me as a non-techy, but here's my experiences

• I think the largest instance is doing the same thing.
• Your instance is known to be full of aggressive trolls and are the lead developers of Lemmy. Most of us take user by user, so you don't have to change instance. But if you get a lot of people hating on you for seemingly no reason, that's probably why (or they're trolls, we have them here). Lemmy was developed by the admins of your instance
• I've only heard good things about piefed, but haven't made the switch myself to try it, since I'm a mod on lemmy. It would be a pain to switch back and forth.