Fediverse

I'm somewhat ok with catering to a political filter in an instance/frontend, even if I prefer open inclusion.

That isn’t what this was.

He can claim it is all he wants, the list proves otherwise. As an example, the word “perchance” was in the list to hide content silently. Meaning this comment would be hidden in an unaltered tesseract front end, and the end user would have absolutely no idea, and no way to turn it off.

Most of the complaints against Tesseract weren't even that he had the filter. It's that he hid the filter, tried to obfuscate it's existence, and did not give people ways to disable it or alter it for themselves.

The concept was fine - if it was correctly advertised and (ideally) given multiple options of block list curators like how you can subscribe to blocklists on in Bluesky. That would actually be a great feature, because he was right about one thing - onboarding normies to the Fediverse is a struggle.

Hiding it, actually actively obfuscating it, making it unconfigurable and bundling it with the safety/anti-spam filter is not okay. That is him trying to silently make himself arbiter of acceptable conversation on the Fediverse.

Then on top of that, you add some of the bans he included being deranged at best and possibly actively homophobic and transphobic at worst.

I’m somewhat ok with catering to a political filter

Ok maybe... if they told people that's what they were doing.