Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
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He’s now calling you and all the other communities and instances unstable like matches…
smart people would just shut the fuck up and walk away.
I’m glad he’s dumb as a box of shit.
My guy is straight up delusional. He really ought to touch grass and come back next year when most people will have forgotten him
Somebody fill me in on the drama here? db0 has pissed me off when he decided certain political opinions where more important than free speech.
From another user:
Big frontend called Tessarect did a sneaky.
They made a hidden shadow-ban list of instances, users, and phrases, keeping it secret from users and admins by not including it in the open source code and instead loading it at runtime, and added in there all non-centrist (instances, users, and phrases) they could think of. They also lied about it, by claiming it to be a technical issue, when any user looked for the banned instances from the front-end, instead of calling it what it is, a targeted exclusion.
Essentially, hidden censorship, and sliminess.
the snuck the ban list in in such a way you couldn’t review it or even know of its existence.
*In such a way that it made it slightly harder to review it or know of its existence.
Any thorough look at the source code would notice it loading that list at runtime. And also notice it getting called and referred to in other parts of the code when it checks whether or not to block something. And that’s not hypothetical, of course – we’re only talking about it because somebody did check, and it was found.
we’re only talking about it because somebody did check, and it was found.
If it was closed source no one would’ve know, common open source W
You can still decompile things in closed source, which is what basically had to be done to identify this was happening.
Its about as scummy and antithetical to fediverse culture as could possibly be.
It’s harder to look in to it though, especially with obfuscation techniques and you need asm knowledge
I really appreciate the statement. I don’t agree with the action and think they are stupid and dangerous for the Threadiverse, as a frontend shouldn’t decide what the user sees, the instance administration is the one to decide. If an instance want to go beehaw, to build a peaceful place and attract Normie’s, that is great. But it’s not for a frontend developer to decide. If the block list and block policy would have been communicated very prominent for everybody to check out, fine. But this is just stupid.
And by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of OPs opinions. The Threadiverse is toxic on many occasions. Instances like Lemmy.ml and dbzero are problematic and probably partly responsible for the Threadiverse not to grow. But again, it’s the instance administration who should decide what the user to see. It is just not understandable for the user to have multiple levels of administrators.
You’ve got it backwards. Its the heavy handed administrative approach which stalled out growth in the fediverse. Not users you find personally annoying.
when I get banned, even temp banned, for bogus shit nobody else gets banned for I just block the community.
I’ve lost count of how many communities I was active in that that happened in.
heavy mods silence the most active users in a community and it stagnates.
Its an option. I do consider it to be the easy option.
So what’s your solution? Because we can’t just have less moderation and administration without something to replace it. If you want to move it to the frontend, then at least make it opt in and tell people (except spam)
Like in the bluesky model (atproto) you can pick and choose between appview, clients, moderation lists, etc. You can even bypass your current appview (frontend server) to fetch directly from a user’s host or from another index (appview or relay)
You’re also ignoring that there are many different types of users, and that lurkers drastically outnumber active posters. You lose a few active users from strict moderation, and you lose masses of lurkers from obnoxious users flooding every thread. And you get new active users from lurkers.
So what’s your solution?
Block the users, communities, and instances that cause problems for you. Continue on with your life and enjoy things. Maybe even touch some grass from time to time.
If nobody offers a default filtered experience then most people will refuse to join.
Maybe you should try your own advice.
If people wanted the “experience for adults” they’d be on 4chan already! There’s already places to go for that! And they aren’t going there because they don’t want it!
So when others create moderated spaces, don’t get mad that others want something nicer.
So when others create moderated spaces, don’t get mad that others want something nicer.
uh oh, someone’s got a stinky diaper! oh wait I’m on blahaj.zone so I’M toxic! quick, shadow-block me on your frontend instead of using the built-in moderation tools or picking an instance that would block me!
picking an instance that would block me!
He WAS doing that, he had his own instance and instance blocklist. Which was fine, if he wanted to block half the Threadiverse from his instance that was his prerogative. But then he decided to take it one step further and try to push his blocklist on as many people as possible.
If nobody offers a default filtered experience then most people will refuse to join.
If you want to offer a default filtered experience, you do that at the instance level, not as a frontend dev.
And you absolutely do not do that in secret, deliberately not informing users of the ‘filtered experience’ they’re signing up for and disguising the filtering as technical failures.
If you want to start a Lemmy instance for centrist normies that blocks its users from all the ‘extreme’ stuff (and you are transparent to those users about what you’re blocking and why), that’s perfectly fine. Go ahead. I don’t think your “I’ll decide what should be censored for you” approach will be as popular as you think, but there’s no reason not to try it.
Maybe you should try your own advice.
I already do. Regularly. Which is why I recommend it. What, are you suggesting I should block you or something? Honey, you’re not nearly annoying enough to block. Not yet, anyway.
Just to be VERY clear, I do not defend hiding the moderation choices, especially not in places where they aren’t expected!
But the statement I responded to was about wanting less moderation than the current default. That’s the only thing I talked about there. Users should have a CHOICE and that includes an informed choice in degree of filtering
This should also have been obvious from my prior reply just one step up!
There is nothing to be solved? Or rather nothing to be solved in regard to silencing voices.
Don’t like someone’s opinion? Get into arguments with strangers online about it. Change their minds. Or don’t. That’s up to you. But structural silencing and obscuring of voices and communities isnt the way.
The real issue here is accountability and that we do need a solution for. And the answer is already in the fediverse, I. That we need to have a democratic approach to moderation and to some extent administration.
Take for example what happened recently with @PugJesus@piefed.social. Real permanent damage was done to our community and there will be no accountability on the parts of the admins who made those decisions.
Don’t like someone’s opinion? Get into arguments with strangers online about it. Change their minds. Or don’t. That’s up to you. But structural silencing and obscuring of voices and communities isnt the way.
Except for the fact that your time and attention are the most precious resources of your life, and you don’t owe them to anybody, least of all the worst assholes of this place.
Can’t believe we lost PugJesus over some stupid vote rationing bullshit.
Their is a self righteousness and petty authoritarianism that comes with a perceived sense of ownership over a community, platform, or project. In many ways we’re reenacting the same motions which ended up destroying reddit as a community platform, one which was built through the organic involvement and voluntary contributions of millions.
I’ve always seen Lemmy as the “2.0” experiment to identify and improvement upon the issues associated with the Reddit type long form threaded discussion platform so many of us prefer. And it’s been extremely useful in that we continue to understand where the real friction points are in growing these kinds of communities. Examples like @Jordon@kbin.social editorially banning @return2ozma@lemmy.world for explicitly political reasons at critical moments during a highly visible political campaign, this shadow ban list, pretty much every moderator action that squid ever took, these secretive matrix chats behind closed doors. The “3.0” version of whatever this has needs far better tools to support moderators, but also to hold moderation and moderators accountable and to give the ability for community to replace them as needed. Also, the ability to merge or fork communities and to migrate communities or accounts from instance to instance. Its simply unacceptable to do some of these activities and many of them while questionable at the time, have in retrospect turned out to be quite nefarious and destructive to the overall project.
Migration is definitely one thing holding us back, I think. While migrating your user to another instance would be nice, community migration is absolutely critical. We absolutely need to be able to move a community to another instance and have all the followers/subscribers automatically carry over. So many small communities have suffered and languished after moves, and it also ultimately drove off PugJesus in a way.
I think a merge/fork/subscribe system would also be critical and could revolutionize somethings.
Say you have a community for dirt biking, but it’s not big and doesn’t have traction, you can merge it into maybe ‘motorcycles’ till a critical mass for ‘dirtbiking’ is met. Its really one of the issues we faced early, and part of it is that the current design is for each instance to be a self contained replacement to reddit.
You are not entitled to an audience, people who want to see less of some things are allowed to see less of it.
Yes accountability, etc, is needed. The variant I’m in favor of is stuff like a content addressed protocol where you can “fork” a forum to substitute misbehaving mods (or server admins). But removing layers of moderation can not be a solution. Bluesky’s atproto has similar mechanisms but there’s not a lot of activity in making forum-shaped sites with it.
Fediverse growth is stalled for the same reason every alternative stalls: there’s no one here, so there’s no reason to join. Add on that there’s no way for content factories to recoup the costs of content creation, no way to ensure their work reaches maximum eyeballs, and you pretty much guarantee a niche platform.
It’'s the whole reason I’m here. I’m not interested in bullshit engagement-bait or people competing for imaginary internet points. Administration is going to do whatever administration wants, but if they’re open and explicit about it, I can shop around for an instance that fits me. If they obfuscate their heavy handed administration, then I might as well go back to the algorithm.
I’ve watched the consequences and damage which admin and mods have caused. They view the fediverse or their subs as theirs to control, case in point.
Who knows, right now the small size may actually be a straight up benefit. Yes, there is almost no content compared to Reddit. But we’re also so small still that it’s not particularly worthwhile to have bots going here compared to Reddit. So there is a much higher percentage of actual human interaction here. The other place is almost all bots now, it’s actually unbelievable.
Read the context and if anything, it made me want to use the app. Can’t find it though, links are all dead.
It’s not an app, it’s an alternative front-end e.g. you would access your existing account and instance via https://t.feddit.org/.
Your instance’s sidebar text also mentions others too: Photon, Alexandrite, Next - I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this one - and mlmym (old), apparently not aware that there is now a fork that took up maintenance.
Like the Lemmy back-end software, it is up to your instance admins to deploy and configure these alternative front-end UIs.
It’s there but the instance I’m on already announced it’ll shut it off due to the whole drama. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Have you tried this one?
Do you know a good place to upload files? I’ll upload it for you
lmfao, that post. Read four words and almost fell backwards off my chair due to the sheer concentrated dipshittery, it’s like taking a firehose to the face.
Of course they locked the post so you can’t reply
No one complained about all the kids I raped until they knew about it! - Trump
This has been hands-down some of the best drama I’ve seen on the Fediverse. I assume there’s some sick part of my brain that just loves it when someone doubles down on a bad decision.
He would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling Karens
Weird experience to get labeled as too radioactive for any other social media by someone I haven’t thought about at all before today
"I’ve got four years good contact I have - "
“No, that was four years Not Found Out”, said Vimes. “Clear off.”
Don’t know the situation, but I’m a little confused after reading the linked post. In the link post, the dev says that it was always mentioned in the app’s settings with a “toxic mode” that turned off the filtering, yet everyone here talks about it as if he kept it a secret. What’s going on? Was that text actually in the settings or is the dev lying here? If it was in the settings, why is everyone claiming the dev hid it?
There is a second obfuscated blacklist that is always enabled even in “toxic mode”.
Looks like it was added a couple months ago, see e.g. https://dubvee.org/post/5865082.
The hidden file though was not included in the code repository as would be more standard for a FOSS project like this. This alternative web UI is thus making use of the author’s personal blacklist, rather than one shipped with the code and that could be modified by instance admins during installation of it.
Read more about that part here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942.
Ah OK, that’s weird… Yeah, it’s only mentioned very vaguely in the changelog.
What I don’t understand is: where does it pull the blacklist from?
From his server, where only he has control.
There is also some rumblings about the fact that this list, which is pulled in from his own server and compressed/encrypted so that using file search tools on it wouldn’t turn up any results, isn’t actually disabled by enabling “toxic mode”; but I can’t prove that.
Doesn’t matter, secret block lists that allow you to basically remotely moderate instances where your frontend is installed is some Temu CIA shit. That guy can take his hubris and fuck right back off to Reddit
From his server, where only he has control.
OK, that’s fucked up. Man, I wanted to believe the dev because I legitimately understand the problem he’s trying to face, but being so opaque about how it’s handled is not OK.
Honestly, it doesn’t reflect well on these kinds of projects that this is not the first such case. I remember the controversy when it was found Lemmy had a hardcoded blocklist and the dev refused to remove it for the longest time.
Do you mean Lemmy’s hard-coded slur word filter? Yes fortunately that was removed. I find it the height of irony how the Alternative Facts crowd keeps blaming PieFed for having hard-coded instance filters, which it does NOT do, while also shilling for Lemmy doing the same thing. But hey, Russia invaded Ukraine, you know? Whereas if you listen to certain people’s ah… uh… “alternative perspective on the matter”… then it was actually the other way around!! (Except again, it was NOT!!) So there’s nothing you can do about that except not feed the trolls the attention that they so desperately crave.
Or you might mean instead Lemmy’s choice to hard-code Lemmy.ml as the source of truth as to what communities are allowed to be recommended to a new instance just starting up. Not a neutral 3rd party webpage or service, but basically if that specific instance has banned it, then it does not exist in the form of acknowledgement to new instances. This also is something that they blame PieFed for doing, which here too it does NOT, whereas Lemmy truly did. Or rather, tbf came very close to almost doing - I think that decision was rolled back soon enough that it did not even make it into the official released codebase, the outcry & pushback was already too high maybe? It still exists iirc as something that now can be opted out of by modifying a configuration setting to use some alternate source of truth, though with Lemmy.ml still the default setting rather than a neutral 3rd party service.
I would think if Lemmy had actual hard-coded (instance) blocklists, that must have been like… at least four years ago?
Truly, Lemmy has gotten better and less opinionated over time - still not perfect (see attempt described in 2nd paragraph above), but better.
While PieFed unfortunately is getting more opinionated over time. Enough even to sabotage all hopes that it will be useful for both serious discussions a la Mastodon plus also funny meme scrolling a la Reddit & Lemmy. See the PugJesus incident. Perhaps this was inevitable? It began as a general-purpose software, but increasingly Rimu (while seemingly being burnt out from fighting against the tankies of Lemmy) looks to want to take on the next steps of remodeling the very underlying nature of social media itself. But… nobody is ready for that just yet, the subscriber numbers simply are not there, and damnit some of us actually DO want to look at funny cat photos and videos!!! (As well as a great discussion too.) More to the point, the roll-out was spectacularly poorly handled, as even admin teams of multiple instances cited having no knowledge of what was going on, even on their own machines after updating the software but then being surprised at the differences in how it handled things (to their credit, the ones that I heard of each handled the situation very quickly and quite professionally).
So yeah, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc), and then all the infighting pushes people away still further, especially those least willing to read about the details of each incident.
, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc)
Does this number include accounts from those who, like me, interact with the threadiverse from non-threadiverse platforms? I mean, Misskey, Friendica and even Mastodon are able to interact with Lemmy/mbin/kbin/piefed threads and comments, although they wouldn’t be considered as threadiverse I guess?
I meant the slur filter. Honestly, I hadn’t heard about the other issues - but having seen what I’ve seen of Dessalines, I’m not really surprised.
Goddammit, I just want to enjoy some social media without the enshittifacation bullshit. And I know many people in my life who would also be interested - but I can’t in good faith recommend this in the current state. Why does it have to be so hard…
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy
Full details in https://lemmy.world/post/49778353 including how to download and decompress (111KB of JSON).
Why is Admiral Patrick complaining? Just put all the complainers on the list. Problem solved /s
He probably will. He’s still updating the list. Not like it matters much since most instances are likely going to delete Tesseract or use db0’s fork once they get wind of this.
That’s the joke :)
But I get the feeling that he wants to be right more than anything
Oh that’s a top tier temper tantrum trying to justify themselves. They got caught and they’re real mad about it.
Genius thought nobody would ever read the source code…
They tried to hide it by putting it in a non-plaintext format downloaded at runtime, the actual list isn’t in the source code.
Yeah, but … they didn’t think anybody would read the source, see it calling to download that file, and wonder ‘what’s that file for?’
it’s worse than that.
they thought base64 encoding was encryption 🤣
Ha! What a white knighting tool bag
Making a blacklist for your frontend is one thing.
Not telling users about it is an entirely different, more fucked up thing.
Purposefully disguising block as technical difficulties instead of deliberate blocks is yet another level of different and more fucked up.
A blacklist that users are informed of and therefore (presumably) consent to when using the software, I could understand. I still don’t entirely agree with it, but I understand.
But each of the additional levels of fucked-up-ness turn it from understandable to despicable. Absolutely fuck that dev in every which way.
And the statement that it wasn’t encrypted, just compressed, is an entirely antagonistic reframing.
There were multiple block lists. Some right in the open, and one that was stored as a monolithic .dat (I assume the one he called “compressed”).
The end result is that the second list was obfuscated from not only end-users, but also “admins” hosting it, and developers attempting to work on the project.
The compression decision only holds if all of the filter lists were compressed and this decision was clearly documented.
Plus the circumstantial evidence that the “enable toxic mode” option did not in fact disable the filtering that relied on the .dat file.
I can’t even say that I’m in theory against his openly stated goals of making the fediverse more approachable to normies. But this is not the way to implement it, and it’s not the way to react when called out about it.
I can’t even say that I’m in theory against his openly stated goals of making the fediverse more approachable to normies.
If you want something approachable for normies, Facebook is right there.
IMO, the fediverse should be weird and stay weird. It doesn’t need to grow huge, it doesn’t need to become a normie website or a household name.
I’m more than OK with weird. I love weird. I’m even ok with strong political opinions that I don’t always agree with. I’m fine with Lemmy staying small in the hopes it never ends up becoming an eternal September situation.
Those aren’t the issue.The problem is the violent rhetoric combined with the intense and constant bad-jacketing. Constant jumping to bad conclusions about other users and arguing against those straw men instead of trying for good faith.
At least you only jumped to the conclusion that I wanted Lemmy to stop being weird and grow unsustainably popular. I was honestly expecting someone to call me a corporate stooge or that I’m just a butthurt MAGA chud upset that Lemmy leans left-wing, then tell me to kill myself.
Word bad step on lego immediately
I was honestly expecting someone to call me a corporate stooge or that I’m just a butthurt MAGA chud upset that Lemmy leans left-wing, then tell me to kill myself.
Well, I don’t want you to feel disappointed, so here goes: you’re a person who likes money and you’re just upset that my virtue signalling is of higher fidelity! You should go get a coin and put it on your shoulder, so you get alarmed by the sudden clattering when you forget it’s there and it hits the floor!
Is that enough vitriol for you?
I would love an anti fascist blocklist
Do you really run into that many fascists on Lemmy? (As long as you’re not counting tankies as fascist, I guess. Which they’re technically not quite.)
Yeah, but seeing myself on line 1208 of the super-secret banned list made me feel far more dangerous and badass than I deserve. I feel like I’m barely a decent person, but I’m still working on it; apparently, that makes me a radical.
