this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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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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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 116 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 45 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Just looked and Breitbart is listed as extreme right and mixed factual reporting.

The Guardian is listed as highly factual and left-center.

What are you referring to?

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 58 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Holy shit have they finally updated it?

They had Guardian as mixed factuality for years

Unless they've completely overhauled all their rankings though, I expect a lot of the more subtle biases will still be present

Edit: from a year ago https://web.archive.org/web/20250816111509/https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/

And it had been like that for a number of years (I don't make a habit of checking it regularly given my distrust of it)

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 day ago

It still thinks "The Economist" is 'Least Biased'.

MBFC equates political centrism as being unbiased, which is fundamentally flawed.

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 90 points 2 days ago (16 children)

Amazing how these projects keep killing themselves by alienating huge portions of their userbase. Hard to survive in a FOSS environment by being extremely reactionary.

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[–] klu9@lemmy.ca 51 points 1 day ago (7 children)

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?

Piefed.social - "Post not found"

Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Lemmy.ca/Alex frontend - post present, twice even

Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Piefed.social - post missing

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 81 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (30 children)

Piefed.social is run by an admin with similar views on censoring leftists as the Tesseract devs. There was a whole fiasco about it a few months back, where the lead Dev of Piefed kept lists of Leftists and other users they permabanned for pointing out issues with Piefed's code.

OP is on that list.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Can confirm. I believe I'm explicitly on their blocklist.

[–] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They also call you a harraser for pointing out actions the dev did?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

I've been called every name and accused of every crime under the sun.

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[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 day ago

Piefed has a shadowban/defederation tool. Like, I can post in piefed.social communities but they don't federate for anyone to see except for the individual user responded to. It's a way of moderating without it showing up in modlogs.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 30 points 1 day ago (15 children)

What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 58 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Lead Dev is a crusader for establishment liberalism, essentially. Hates conservatives but also hates leftists. This puts them at odds with much of the fediverse, who lean more left than liberal.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.

[–] alapakala@quokk.au -1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)
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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 day ago (22 children)

I'm definitely biased as I'm a communist myself, but I'd argue this is more reflective of the politics of both sets of devs. Lemmy devs truly believe in the communist principles underlying the FOSS, federated project they have, while Piefed is unapologetically biased against that and towards liberalism. In other words, the principles speak for themselves in both projects.

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[–] krigo666@lemmy.world 73 points 2 days ago

Blacklisted: Tesseract.

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