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

2026-07-22 09:38 UTC

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.

Replies (7)

@klu9@lemmy.ca 2026-07-22 14:55

I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social. Copied link In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post "Post not found". Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already??? Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article. After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to !fediverse@lemmy.world , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It’s missing. Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even. So why can’t I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?

Open ##4239217
@theacharnian@lemmy.ca 2026-07-22 20:33

From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcode such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.

Open ##4248098
@als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-07-22 22:15

Doesn’t piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it’s a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.

Open ##4249304
@kepix@lemmy.world 2026-07-23 05:34

if you block all the commies, gays, software pirates, plis you individually block people one by one…sooner or later there wont be anything left. maybe just a few nerds fighting over linux ricing.

Open ##4249512
@9point6@lemmy.world 2026-07-22 11:00

Lmao just read the readme of the project and got all the red flags I need Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration I can forgive someone with a passing exposure to it not knowing, but MBFC is notorious for having biased rankings. The regular example I use is the Guardian being placed on the same factuality ranking as breitbart (the nazi rag), but it’s not one case, there’s a general right-wing bias in the rankings. The developer of this project is very clearly just trying to put their finger on the views of their users

Open ##4252995
@null@piefed.nullspace.lol 2026-07-22 12:29

Ah yes, the famously leftist and trans-friendly instance: maga.place

Open ##4258221
@Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2026-07-24 05:52

did he took down the repo? it gives 404 scared that somebody would fork it? what a loser

Open ##4284892