cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Also
/c/modabuse. Also/c/yepowertrippinbastards. Alsolemmy.ml/c/worldnews,comrade,ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.None of this is in the source code. It’s downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.
If you’re just tuning in
Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you’ve used a Lemmy site that didn’t look like stock Lemmy, there’s a fair chance it was this.
Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can’t see it, can’t configure it, and aren’t told it’s there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it’s “incompatible,” which is not true.
I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.
There’s a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn’t in the git repository. It’s unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.
Verify all of it in ten seconds
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonThat’s the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There’s a stale fallback copy at
/data/policy.datas well.It filters criticism of moderators
lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk— listed- community regex
power ?tripping?- keyword
censoring meCall the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.
It filters words
The 32 community name patterns include
Communis(t|m),Conservativ(e|es|ism),Leftis(t|m),Libertarian(ism)?,^Green Part(y|ies),Zionis(t|m),(Police|Cops),guillotineandbillionaire.Keywords include
comrade,ACAB,neoliberal,proletaria(n|t)anddeath to.Filtered communities on instances that aren’t blocked:
lemmy.ml/c/worldnews,lemmy.today/c/news,lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada,lemmy.ca/c/usa,infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.The 552 users aren’t bots
67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.
355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.
Seven of them aren’t even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.
I have the list and I’m not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.
And it lies about it
When the instance block fires you get: “Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract.”
Nothing is incompatible. It’s a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it’s what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.
For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.
Admins can’t switch it off
Tesseract has env vars for
PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST,PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLISTand the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist.enableToxicModebypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.
Before someone says it
A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. “It targets the left” doesn’t survive the data and I’m not going to pretend it does.
The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who’ve never read it and users who don’t know it’s there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: “it’s a spam list” answers every individual question and none of the whole.
And
/c/modabuseis not spam.Asks
- Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
- Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
- Tell users when something’s been hidden. One line.
- Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.
It’s AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That’s the licence working as designed. But forking isn’t disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.
If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance’s name, to users who don’t know it exists.
Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.
It seems none of the communities I mod have made the list this time
genuinely surprised i did not make the list lmao
tfw not in the cool kids club either
i mean, i expected as much, but still disappointing
They just blocked all of blahaj instead of dealing with us individually
Not entirely true 😎
I wish I was cool enough to make the blocklist 😔
I kind of want to k ow if any of my accounts (5 accounts over 4 instances) are on it, but I don’t care enough to find out for myself, and I understand not wanting to post username lists like the OP says.
It gives you something to aim for next time!
Should’ve tried harder, like one of the two people from my instance who were blocked that…idk…drew some Sonic characters a couple of times and posted them in relevant communities? Should’ve been a real rebel like them!
Same. Apparently I don’t say enough woke things that make the snowflake pissed off?
fwiw I’d recommend photon, it’s fantastic and the dev seems to work really hard on it. Hope they aren’t doing something shady either!
There are a few solid ones there. Photon and Blorp are my personal favourites on desktop
Do you know if either of them support user tagging? Currently on the default lemmy UI but I’d jump in a heartbeat for user tagging.
Blorp seems to support it: select the three dots next to a username -> Author -> Tag Author
There is discussion about adding this to Lemmy proper: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1456
Thank you! Will check that out. Much appreciated.
it’s not my job to moderate the fediverse, you won’t need to worry about seeing any of this in photon
appreciate it :)
I took a look at it earlier today and the addition of instances to be blocked was super shady and sloppy on part of the maintainer. Some high profile instances were added to the blocklist alongside unrelated changes and not mentioned in the git commit message, for example this commit: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/commit/fcd71e01e9f64d5ff40dbee9b815971bc00e9a2a
Also apparently the error you’d get when going to the blocked instance was a generic error which makes the user think there’s a network issue or incompatibility with the API or something and the idea of a hard coded blocklist is never presented to the user as the source of the issue.
That Github is a fun read in general. Some of these variables and function names are sending me. They even seem to be blocking proton email addresses.
Tap for blacklists.ts
https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/main/src/lib/blacklists.ts
My personal highlights:
// Domains that have been identified as frequent spam export const SPAM_SITES = [ 'gofund.me', 'gofundme.com', // ... const SHIT_KNOWN_BAD_LEMMY_ACTORS_SPAM // ... // Very non-comprehensive list of domains that host disposable/temporary/throwaway email aliases. Basically just the low-hanging fruit to aid in decision making. export const THROWAWAY_EMAIL_DOMAINS = [ 'proton.me', // ... export const BLACKLISTED_INSTANCES: string[] = [ "abolish.capital", "altmedia.house", "anarchist.nexus", "chapo.chat", "chatgptjailbreak.tech", "diggita.com", "hexbear.com", "hexbear.net", "ibbit.at", "test.hexbear.net", "www.hexbear.net", "hilariouschaos.com", "lemmy.bestiver.se", "lemmy.blahaj.zone", "lemmy.dbzer0.com", "lemmy.doesnotexist.club", "lemmy.durstig.online", "lemmy.ml", "lemmy.razbot.xyz", "lemmybefree.net", "lemmygrad.ml", "lemmyusa.com", "lemy.lol", "maga.place", "multiverse.soulism.net", "news.abolish.capital", "nnia.space", "noauthority.social", "r.nf", "realbitcoin.cash", "redlemmy.com", "welppp.com" ] // ... // Fake news sites that MBFC doesn't have on file or are known disinformation campaignss export const FAKE_NEWS = [ ...RUSSIAN_GRU_INFOROS, ...RUSSIAN_NEWS_DOPPLEGANGER, ...RUSSIAN_OPERATION_UNDERCUT, ...RUSSIAN_PORTAL_KOMBAT_PRAVDA_NETWORK, ...RT_ALIASES, ...STOP_NEWS, ...OTHER_RUSSIAN_CAMPAIGNS, ...JOHN_MARK_DOUGAN, ...SHIT_KNOWN_BAD_LEMMY_ACTORS_SPAM, ...MAGA_PROPAGANDA, // Admin-extended list from env vars ...BLACKLIST_CONFIG.FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST ] // ... export const isFakeNewsSite() // ... if ( get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) return falseTap for filtering.ts
https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/main/src/lib/filtering.ts
They seem to be filtering out a lot of political keywords!
// Initialize a default blank policy export const defaultFilterPolicy: FilterPolicy = { name: 'Default Policy', communityRegexes: [ "^Ban ", "^Boycott", "(Elon|(Elon )?Musk)", "^Fuck", "Palestine", "Iran", "Israel", "Musk", "^News|News$", "^Politic(a|s|al)|^Politik", "Trump", ], communityInstances: [ "ani.social", "pawb.social" ],Tap for data.json
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asimons04/tesseract/refs/heads/main/src/lib/MBFC/data/data.json
Some juicy comments in this one. It’s a list of news sources with their “bias” (left/right/centre/etc). They didn’t write this, they copied it from https://github.com/drmikecrowe/mbfcext/blob/main/docs/v5/data/combined.json
“Official Media Bias/Fact Check Extension”
Be informed as you read your Facebook feed. We are the most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. There are currently 1100+ media sources listed in our database and growing every day. Don’t be fooled by Fake News sources. This extension is completely open source, and the source code is hosted here.
politico.com bbc.com cbsnews.com front.moveon.org These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward liberal causesSome high profile instances were added to the blocklist alongside unrelated changes and not mentioned in the git commit message… Also apparently the error you’d get when going to the blocked instance was a generic error…
Yeah, those two issues are exactly why the hidden blocklist was noticed. The site admin for db0 noticed that they were running into a version incompatibility after they updated their stack. But the “incompatible” version of Lemmy was supported. So what was causing the incompatibility? Maybe an API issue? Nope, API is fine.
After some digging, they eventually realized that it was happening due to an instance block. But they didn’t have their own instance blocked, so why was it being blocked? It was suddenly being marked as “incompatible” because they updated to the version of Tesseract that included the hidden blocklist. So when they tried to start their stack after updating, Tesseract downloaded the hidden blocklist (which can’t be disabled) and blocked the instance it was currently running on.
Lol. “Hide NSFW communities by default” and in the same commit totally blocks blahaj.
Eh. Hopefully the dev/s get set on fire.
Never trust anything defiled by shitlib hands.
Hilarious. Well, I never used Tesseract, but now I’ll make sure never to recommend it
Damn, that’s pretty wild
This dude just looks like he’s building a fediverse he wants to see?
Then run an instance, Beehaw style.
Dishonestly.
This looks almost like a personal block list that got added to the full production codebase. To be clear: I do not think this was an accident. But I had plenty of interaction with this dev on the 30 Rock community, and they were clear about personally wanting to use Lemmy as a means of escapism and to ignore politics of all sort. They clearly want to ignore all remotely political discussions, but that shouldn’t extend to a hard-coded block list in a frontend they create for other people to use. Creating the tools to allow each user to set up custom block lists for themselves is great. It just shouldn’t be a preestablished list that affects literally every user of that frontend.
Can you clarify which Lemmy account you are referring to by “this Dev”? I’m a little confused about who maps to what specifically here.
Also I 100% agree with you here.
He is the admin of that instance, which he had set up as a Beehaw-like safe space (the rules/FAQ even called out Beehaw as inspiration). He then developed Tesseract to act as a bandaid to fix issues with Lemmy that could be fixed by creating a custom frontend. And if Tesseract was JUST used for his safe space, this block list stuff would be fine. But in reality, it is designed/intended to be used by ANY Lemmy instance.
And ptz also uses AdmiralPatrick as an alt?
That is the “display name” for that account
EDIT: Oh, I see they used to have an alt at @admiralpatrick@lemmy.world as well. So yes, you are correct.
They were talking about Admiral Patrick, the tesseract dev. The main admin of dubvee
This looks almost like a personal block list that got added to the full production codebase. To be clear: I do not think this was an accident.
I’m leaning towards accident or sabotage. It’s way too obvious and way too far-reaching to believe nobody would notice.
They’ve confirmed it was intentional: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942
I don’t know how you could accidentally write a regex list, encode it, secretly reference it, and commit and push it to your repo. That’d be very hard to do.
Thanks for providing the link to the rationale, notably posted after my comment went live. As for how it can happen “accidentally,” that’s easy. Have a file that’s referenced that way, and sub in another due to human error. Classic case of pushing test to prod etc. Doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination.
Pretending this is normal behavior?
Now that takes imagination.
that does make sense! tbh it looks very much like something I would make… for myself… or if I did release it for others it would def be advertised as “lemmy no politics edition” not as just a general front end
How does a forum with such few users have so much drama?
I think we just notice it more because we have less content, so you’re more likely to hear about each bit of drama that comes up and you’re more likely to know one of the parties involved. There was lots of drama on reddit too, but I didn’t subscribe to the communities that talked about it and I often didn’t know enough about each incident to judge anyone
It’s still annoying though 🫤
Because we’re contentious and get to recognizing each other
In this case, I think it’s part of a general effort by left-liberal refugees from Reddit, who genuinely believe that the fediverse will be the new future of Redditesque forums one day.
Unfortunately, they have learned the wrong(imo) lesson from spez becoming a Nazi and pushing his political agenda onto every Redditor. They want the politics of this new medium to be no further left than AOC, and no further right than Chuck Schumer, while seeming to be completely free and open and information must be free, etc.
You can see that in their choice of bans.
I am glad this particular effort was so incompletent. It will not be the only one.
Edit: Oh man, spelling “incompetent” incorrectly there and getting everything else right deserves to be preserved.
Edit: Oh man, spelling “incompetent” incorrectly there and getting everything else right deserves to be preserved.
I noticed that too and it’s a thing of beauty! There should be a special prize for that.
As well as editing to point out one’s own stupidity instead of just correcting it. Good shit all around.
Right?? I expect this kind of crap on reddit, but Lemmy? Really?
Well look you wanna poke it with a stick or not
The thing is Lemmy is populated almost entirely by people who made a conscious choice to not be somewhere else. So the majority of them are those who hold strong beliefs and are generally anti-establishment or just contrarian by nature.
Basically people most likely to argue about arbitrary bullshit a lot. Which isnt to say that all of them will, just that there 2ill be a higher incidence of it happening.
you’re contrarian by nature.
deleted by creator
Nuh-uh!
If you want me to go on arguing, you’ll have to pay for another five minutes.
Your mom’s a contrarian
Touché.
This tells me the project cannot be trusted at all. The dev is clearly willing to ship undisclosed block lists… What’s next, a crypto miner? Credential harvesting? Who knows.
Libs love betrayal and being evil for no fucking reason.
I mean, looking at how often libs side with and work for fascists, yeah.
sybau
Shut up cunt
You make a convincing argument, as I would expect of a devoted liberal. But no.
shut up cunt
Just checking in, hey. Still salty?
Is your account just for this sort of trolling? I’d hate to think you were being honest, but trolls tend to be a tiny bit subtler.
No I just have a grudge against unselfaware cryptofascists. Personal stuff.
is that you @Deceptichum@quokk.au ?
Yes, I am another user on the same server. Thank you for noticing. My reasons for doing this shall remain inscrutable.
Because you desperately need attention?
Oh well, it’s easy enough to set a personal block on you and deprive you of attention.
But you haven’t blocked my other account! Hahaha!
Yes, I am another user on the same server
Totally normal behavior.
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s why I did it.
censoring me
Libs are cryptofascists?
You need an internet break, your brain is currently melting.
I think he just doesn’t know the difference between liberal and libertarian
i don’t think most people do, tbh. Pretty sure i see people who self-identify as either of them call themselves the other, not even realizing they said a different word.
I’m always confused when someone knee jerks “liberal”. Are they trying to talk about leftists? Or pro corporate free market people? Or…?
Most people on here, outside of the far-right of lemmy.world, use liberal to mean… liberals. and neoliberals. Aka most democrat and republican politicians, and the current status quo of the western world; aka the single most destructive force in world history.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. I wonder what his track record on open source is.
This is very upsetting. I could see an argument if it was made a user toggle for a “more friendly experience” or something like that (Like the enable toxic mode toggle), but hiding the blacklist and then an opaque error message is cowardly. Having it be pulled every time from another website instead of built into the software is also a very clear accountability dodge.
Also reading over the file, I think it’s biased, especially towards unfairly heavy moderation.
Edit: Just noticed I’m on the blocklist. What he said fuck me for?
It’s just liberalism. The whole thing is just doing liberalism.
I’m a ‘liberal’ by your standards, and I’m on the blocklist. Explain this, atheist.
No, it’s a particular type of liberalism. Freedom of speech is actually a core liberal value, and while some who think themselves liberal will use censorship, (usually political hacks doing it for political ratfuckery, like the dev of Tesseract) most do not.
No. They say that shit, they say they have values beyond the class system and terror and feeling good about themselves for doing it, but shitlibs are liars.
Every single one, when pressed, is an authoritarian first. They fucking fetishize that shit. Everything else is just painted on.
No. They say that shit, they say they have values beyond the class system and terror and feeling good about themselves for doing it, but shitcommies are liars. Every single one, when pressed, is an authoritarian first. They fucking fetishize that shit. Everything else is just painted on.
I know you are bit what am I? Seriously? You’ve got nothing else? Is your position really so hollow and hypocritical that you can’t even criticize anything I actually believe?
Are your beliefs not reflected in what you’re writing here? Oy vey.
Which beliefs might be reflected?
I’m curious what makes them liberal not conservative? Why do you immediately jump to liberal, when every thing I’ve seen that’s been blocked has been shit that triggers conservatives.
I get that you have to shoe horn your “everything bad is liberal” shit into everything, but this ain’t it chief.
Before you accuse me of the same bullshit, I’m on the block list.
Liberals are a kind of conservative. This ain’t the 17th century.
I would say they’re more centrist.
Sure, right between Ronald Reagan and the Thule society.
Lol
Where I live that’s still center left.
Liberals are a kind of conservative
It’s funny because a statement like this would simply break the brains of my Fox News drip-fed parents lol
Doubt. Modern understandings of physics say you can’t get fragments smaller than 2.6121×10−70 m²
Liberals are nothing more then centrists and can suck eggs for all I care but jeez, could you offer comments that were any more useless and rage-baity then this?
Ikept getting told to ‘shut up cunt’ in this thread and mods seemed fine with it. So I’m explaining myself in detail.
And libs aren’t centrists, except maybe between Ronald Reagan and the Thule society.
Why do you keep repeating this throughout these comments chief?
Being self important is not a political act and so far there is no indication of a political motivation, just that the dev somehow got the idea of appointing themselves secret online discourse admin. If it turns out there is some financial goal behind it i’m with you tho.
being self important is not a political act
Citation needed.
financial goal
I didn’t say capitalism I said liberalism.
Liberalism = Liberty
so you hate liberty?
DPRK = Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
so you hate democracy?
American style “liberalism” (aka Neoliberalism) is exactly the opposite of that:
- Everything must be behind a money-gate (everything must be private, nothing public) and only if you have enough money can you pass such a gate
- Unless you’re born on the right side of the gate or from parents with enough money, you can only get the money to pass most money-gates (even just the ones for food and for shelter) by working for the people with enough money to pass ownership-of-means-of-production & land-ownership money-gates.
It’s a structure to heavilly reduce freedom in the most important aspects of one’s life including things necessary for survival (like food and shelter), not to increase it, so it’s the very opposite of increasing Liberty or Freedom.
I reckon that’s the kind of “Liberalism” (which is the only one with political power anywhere in the World at the moment as far as I can tell, since there sure aren’t any politicians in power anywhere which both claim to be Liberal and are against core liberty-reducing legislation such as Private Land Ownership) that the previous poster is talking about.
Mainstream politicians out there who call themselves “Liberal” are 100% liars and frauds.
Edit: Just noticed I’m on the blocklist. What he said fuck me for?
Figuring this out has been interesting, but then again based on that user could have just said something they didn’t like in a random thread so they put you on the list
The developer behind Tesseract is the same user who has displayed the habit of preemptively banning users who have never participated in or even visited his communities, particularly those that were on dubvee.org. Apparently for ideological reasons, or simply for being associated with a particular Lemmy instance.
So at the risk of stirring up even more Fediverse drama by saying it, it seems like the findings above are squarely on brand.
Not to come over all Graham Chapman about it or anything, but I always found that type of behavior to be very silly.
dubvee has insane ban policies. Like they find people to ban based on posts in coms that have nothing to do with them. It’s almost like SRS on reddit.
Sounds almost like a compulsion
Ohhh that’s why I have some community bans!
Maybe he just really hates tomatoes?
is the same user
Which user specifically
Based on the comment chain above, https://mander.xyz/u/AdmiralPatrick@dubvee.org
Their DubVee account was @ptz@dubvee.org. “Admiral Patrick” was just the display name for that account.
I’m somewhat disappointed that i am not on the list. But i rarely post even if i do comment on the regular, and i tend to be not attracting drama (deserved or not) while doing so.
Still, i would have found it great if a leftist chump like me made the list lol. I am in awe of your popularity mate ;-)
Yes, I have no idea what the rationale is. My posts are largely about silly knives, birds, motorcycles, and occasionally cameras. Other than very occasionally engaging with idiots in the comments until I inevitably remember that it’s a waste of time, I don’t think I’ve incited or attracted too much if any drama around here.
My site itself does not have a hardcoded ban in the list, though!
Other than very occasionally engaging with idiots in the comments until I inevitably remember that it’s a waste of time,
awwww you remember meeeeee :3333
WAIT silly knives? hold on
edit i think i might have just talked the wife into a gardening sword. she is pretty cool.
Thanks to the GOAT who found this!
Tbf @NounsTheVerb@lemmy.dbzer0.com was the one that found the original commit. I just discovered something was initially wrong, then did the fork and the PSA
<3 Btw I love that you already added the warning as a tagline lol
Well, and GemAlarm.
It looks like there is an ‘enable toxic mode’ setting that DOES switch off the auto-updating blocklist. The LLM that wrote this post claimed that there is no way to turn it off.
from src/lib/policies/system.ts:
export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() { if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) { SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY) return } // auto-update of blocklist continues belowThe original post was written using AI so it’s going to have a lot of inaccuracies like that.
Overall though, this does seem poorly documented, too opaque and overly prescriptive. And needlessly encrypting the payload looks shifty.
shame that piefed has similar block lists.
I wish developers would try not to play fedi-police
The question is how to prevent toxic material that brainwashes people like Facebook did. It irreparably damaged the social fabric in my country.
(Don’t know the answer)
Yeah it’s the trans people who simply want to exist who are toxic
Edit: no indication any of that post was LLM, but would love to hear why you think that.
Though I suspect that’s just a tactic to get people to shift their ire.
On the LLM thing, there are tools that can say the likelihood that any given text was written by an LLM. Apparently, they’re a necessity for English teachers these days. So, it’s possible that Rimu used a tool like that.
Those tools are themselves, LLMs. They’re not trustworthy at all.
Unfortunately (or hilariously depending on your perspective) those tools are notoriously inaccurate and often driven by LLMs themselves.
That’s typical for a transphobe like Rimu
He’s a transphobe and turbolib now too?
5 month old account on a free-registration instance that actively and only downvotes.
Or what we like to call, the cowards alt.
I didn’t know they were an established transphobe, so I wanted to give some benefit of the doubt.
But yeah, all signs pointed to that fact.
Hi, not the person you replied to, and (edit: not*) agreeing with any of this blocklist shit, AND my ire is firmly not shifted away from Tesseract, but just wanted to break down the characteristics of the OP that suggest (to me) it was composed mostly with an LLM and fine tuned after. (Though to be clear, that’s a pretty unimportant characteristic of the post considering the actual content)
-
The division of the text into small “sections” of five or fewer short paragraphs separated by headers is probably the most obvious hallmark.
-
Kind of difficult to put into words, but abrupt / awkward / overly poetic metaphor and… “overconfident”? “sensationalized”? phrasing both give me an LLM vibe. examples:
It’s a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it’s what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.
I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.
The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: “it’s a spam list” answers every individual question and none of the whole.
It’s downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.
spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden
That’s the licence working as designed. But forking isn’t disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.
- Overuse of the rule of three. This one is probably the most tenuous, because genuine human writing does make frequent use of the rule of three. But when LLMs do it, it’s usually at a high enough density where it starts sounding like it’s trying too hard, or it’s clickbaity.
Admins can’t see it, can’t configure it, and aren’t told it’s there.
That’s the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks.
There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.
355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight.
For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.
Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.
If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance’s name, to users who don’t know it exists.
- Tonally inconsistent with the intended audience. I realize Lemmy/Fediverse users are more technically savvy than usual, but even then… consider the claim “I went through the code to see how that was implemented.” early in the post. A lot of plausible technical jargon is used, and there are plenty examples of the actual filters and filter patterns themselves, but the post makes claims about what is happening without really being specific at all about how.
Could be explained by me just not being familiar enough with the technical side, but saying stuff like “There’s a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads” without breaking it down any further seems a bit suspicious to me? It doesn’t actually call out any function, file, or… i dunno, a logical starting point, for a competent reader to dig into the source themselves. Reads like it’s written for either an expert who doesn’t need any details, or for an audience with zero skepticism whatsoever.
- And least importantly, because my focus is on the presentation of the post moreso than the accuracy, IF rimu’s read of the code is correctly calling out a factual error in the OP (and let me be clear that I’m not enough of a programmer to evaluate whether it is), that is pretty strong evidence of an LLM getting something wrong.
Again… this wall of text isn’t meant as a refutation of anything you’re saying, or a reason to dismiss the contents of the OP uncritically. Seems pretty clear after reading through db0’s posts about it that this is seriously fucked up. I hope I’ve been clear enough about that.
Could be explained by me just not being familiar enough with the technical side, but saying stuff like “There’s a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads” without breaking it down any further seems a bit suspicious to me? It doesn’t actually call out any function, file, or… i dunno, a logical starting point, for a competent reader to dig into the source themselves. Reads like it’s written for either an expert who doesn’t need any details, or for an audience with zero skepticism whatsoever.
It gives you the file directly
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy
| base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonYeah… but not where in the source code it’s actually loaded.
./Dockerfile:14:COPY --chown=node:node static/data/policy.dat /app/system/policy/policy.dat
./src/lib/policies/system.ts:105: res = await fetch(‘/data/policy.dat’)
./src/server/system.ts:27: let file = await open(${policyDir}/policy.dat)
./src/server/system.ts:71: await writeFile(${policyDir}/policy.dat, policy)Thanks, but I’m not sure what value you think you’re adding by actually going and finding that - if you had understood my post, you would know that my critique of the lack of specifics in the OP was a reason to doubt it was written by a human, not anything to do with whether or not the details of the post were credible or not.
I found that because OPs post lead me to it.
But none of those are the remotely fetched file.
There seems to ALSO be a statically included policy file with a bunch of stuff. That he updates periodically.
Give them a little credit, they were only five lines away from a bullseye in their second example. That’s much closer to accurate than their overall comprehension of my post was
-
You know you’ve lost when even Rimu thinks it’s too prescriptive
This is the beauty and downside to open source. Anybody can force their political views in their software. But once discovered, it can be forked and fixed.
It’s a shame that everything has become so politicized that people feel the need to shove their
religiouspolitical beliefs down everyone else’s throats. Yeah, we all know who the Bad Guys™ are; we don’t need to be constantly reminded.Give users their voices back (or at least choice in what they want to see and block). It’s the decent thing to do. Anything else makes you a certified asshole.
I said what I said.
Give users their voices back (or at least choice in what they want to see and block)
This is why I think that dev is 100% in the wrong. They made it obscure, and default, for a reason: because they can’t bear to read a political opinion online, or that they’re happy someone responsible for untold number of people (Luigi’s alleged victim) is dead (normal, empathetic human response to someone evil dying).
You’re right, individuals should be able to choose who to block (which Lemmy already lets you do!)
I’m glad this dev has been exposed.
It’s a shame that everything has become so politicized that people feel the need to shove their
religiouspolitical beliefs down everyone else’s throats. Yeah, we all know who the Bad Guys™ are; we don’t need to be constantly reminded.A huge problem is widespread political disengagement. It’s not a shame everything has gotten so politicised, it’s a shame how much worse inequality and consolidation of power has become. And things are getting worse and worse. Sorry, the only solution to this is to build a movement of people to push back, and reverse this. It can’t be achieved by a handful of people.
People do need to be reminded. People do need to get their message out there.
We don’t need to talk about bad things all day every day, but honestly, the amount of people who talk politics and are geting organised to do something is way, way, way too low.
Well this is also what the offending dev accuses some mods. I would love to join your stone throwing, but i also think there are some truths. Libs and Commies and Queers all can react overly hostile and not seldomly react disproportionate (all 3 of them, not every last queer person). Aaand i think the dev is butt hurt, but if he chooses an unreasonable way to react we can be glad to leverage FOSS.
All propaganda has some element of truth to it, thats how they trick you into thinking its wholly believable.
Surface level honesty does not presuppose that same honesty at depth.
