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.
I would appear asimon04 changed their name to paulo-roger. It appears they are trying to remove some of their repo from public view. But git doesn’t remove data just because it’s orphaned.
Here are some updated links, these might be good for another week before git does GC.
link in title: https://github.com/paulo-roger/tesseract/blob/e70e3a3cef739c59288ec78f0bbb4f0e1b4fa194/src/lib/blacklists.ts#L2270
Commit Explaining Specious reasoning: https://github.com/paulo-roger/tesseract/commit/2b53f17a5506b7c4b3ad1d5c26af49662f03a478
Old Main before they rolled it back 3 years: https://github.com/paulo-roger/tesseract/blob/e70e3a3cef739c59288ec78f0bbb4f0e1b4fa194/
I recently found out Admiral Patrick made a response to this situation where he doesn’t address any of the concerns related to censoring leftists and just points to the spam he included in the list.
Here’s his post:
https://lemmy.world/post/49817942It is kind of amusing to me how often these people who run their own instances force other people to accept their own ideology.
Admiral Patrick has ruined all credibility and has proven that he doesn’t add value to the fediverse. He actively detracts from it by shaping instances other than his own into his own image. Without their consent.
I’m not saying this because I’m on that user list (fucking lol) but because it’s just pathetic. Rimu is doing the same thing on Piefed, Kaplan tried to do something similar by pressuring other instances to blacklist Dbzer0… Meanwhile the Flotilla seems to be the only ones willing to be completely transparent about what is going on and actually have their users decide.
And for Admiral Patrick, considering the dipshit seems to love Star Trek so much, let me remind you of what someone far better than you once said who you seem to admire.
With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
I’m adding on my own quote.
Fuck you.
I’m not saying this because I’m on that user list (fucking lol)
It’s good company, and I don’t just say that because I’m on that user list. But yeah, fuck asimons04.
Asimons04
Otherwise known as AdmiralPatrick here on lemmy.
Well at least open source coding makes it so this is easier to spot and the community can choose better going forward. The beauty of descentralized social media
Ye nobody would trust a proprietary one previcely for this reason
I really hope you don’t get rid of tesseract completely. It’s a very useful tool when moderating and I haven’t found anything with a similar feature set. This dev sucks as a person for doing something this stupid and reactive.
Edit: Apparenly he’s also blocking trans friendly instances too. What a transphobic piece of shit!
I think db0
blahajmade a fork with the list removed, thankfully.I thought it was db0 who made the fork, he said so in the post above.
Oop thank you.
If they could hid a blacklist I wonder if they also could hide a coin miner or a backdoor.
With this, the author has forever ruined their own credibility.
Of course they could. They would totally ruin their credibility but they’ve already done that it seems. They shut off their instance and redirect it to a cartoon picture telling people to go away.
Calling a “blacklists.rs” directly in the top level rust source tree hidden is an overstatement. The blacklist is not obfuscated or compressed. It is just a blacklist.
There’s a worse one here
aw man blobs in oss? why is there no scanner for that?
Looks like they’ve deleted their repo for tesseract.
Probably for the best given their credibility as a FOSS dev is shot now anyway. But at least nobody else will unwittingly walk into their
curatedenforced bubble.Nah, they just renamed their account https://github.com/paulo-roger/tesseract
I love the still have the commited developer part in Readme after their development halted message
Fair enough. I noticed that one from the fork you made. I just assumed that’s where Patrick forked it from originally.
More likely they privated their repo. Your fork is way ahead with this devs commits. I’d guess the dev made a fork of the paulo-roger repo when they stopped the development.
Mine is ahead because that repo was at my level when I forked
Well yeah. The guy made a bunch of commits, you forked, they privated the repo. The repo you forked “no longer exists” so parent fork is reported. Nobody renamed their account, nobody transferred the repo.
I’m pretty sure his wasn’t a fork. He hard forked from photon, so there’s nobody he forked from calling it tesseract. This doesn’t make sense
So the last commit on the apparent “original” paulo-roger/tesseract repo states abandonment of the project in 2023. However this commit, like every other in this repo, is authored by asimons04.
$ git log | grep asimons | wc -l 651 $ git log | grep roger | wc -l 0That seems pretty weird to me. I guess if they were added as a contributor at some point they could’ve force-pushed a rewritten history? Still doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Edit: Maybe it’s just paulo-roger who checked out asimons04’s repo after they abandoned it and uploaded it to his profile as a fresh repo instead of forking, and somehow GitHub mistook it for the parent repo after as04 made their repo private/whatever happened?
Ye that’s my suspicion as well. I think I got redirected to a random fork
My theory was something like:
- Repo
A(paulo-roger) abandoned at 2023 - Repo
B(asimons04) forked and worked from there - Repo
C(OP)
Now what happens if repo
Bis removed (privated)? We still have all the commit history form repoB, but no upstream to link to that history. We also have all the commit history form repoA, however the upstream is still public so it gets linked properly.The fork chain is still the same
A -> b -> Cwe just no longer see repoBon github. It doesn’t mean that anything got moved, deleted or overwritten, just hidden.- Repo
Isn’t it still there? (I mean, here: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/)
I’m not on it, unfortunately.
Yeah looks like its back up. I’m guessing they made it private and had a change of heart. When I checked earlier, it would 404, and db0’s fork now references the earlier fork in the chain rather than this one.
There wasn’t an earlier fork. Either ap isn’t telling the whole story of what they did with their repo (they also lost all their stars), or github is bugged somehow

lmao ironic.gif
I thought Admiral Patrick “”“left”“” lemmy more than a year ago?
I think a bit of a problem with the fediverse might be that the majority of instance admins are just barely competent enough with development that if they get upset with how other admins run their shit, they end up forking some piece of the project in order to put their thumb on the scale and bend the network to better fit their worldview.
This bullshit is starting to feel like a bit of a pattern.
Nope only did an announcement but nothing else changed
Haha, what a small pathetic man.
He absolutely is. I have no clue why anyone would defend him at this point.
Lmao they blocked thelemmy.club for a few weeks for seemingly no reason. Unhinged stuff.
What’s wrong with piefed dev? Genuine question. Edit: found it, https://lemmy.ml/post/47306551
What is the issue with PieFed?
I’m also curious and hoping @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com could expand or point to something for background.
I searched and found this. Not sure if it is what db0 referred to.
Ye basically. Piefed was also very opinionated on what to silently drop and avoid showing. It didn’t go as far as tesseract, but it did rub a lot of people the wrong way
Lol. I’m on lemmy.ml because I thought it meant .machine-learning. I just thought it sounded cool. So my content would get banned
It means marxist-lenninist I think.
I recommend you to check the profiles of the creators of Lemmy which are also administrators of lemmy.ml. At least one of them has plenty of writings that make their ideology pretty clear.
It’s Mali.
Well shit, it was my favourite interface.
That said, not too surprised the dev turned out to be leaning that way.
Heres a fork without the banlist
Yeah, I’m currently trying to get SJW to adopt it :)













