It matters because tesseract was/is used by some large instances, so the tesseract dev was secretly censoring content from thousands of users without their knowledge and even without the knowledge of the instance admins. It’s a pretty big deal because this means that a lot of people on Lemmy have been getting a highly censored view of the community without realizing it. A lot of those people, probably even most of them, came to Lemmy specifically to get away from that kind of thing. So its really shady, a huge breach of trust, and this single dev has been covertly influencing thousands of people’s political exposure.
That’s a great summary, and now so many of the posts complaining about how Lemmy didn’t feel different than what they had come from suddenly could have been a red flag that no one understood. Maybe not, but sure seems a bit correlated.
it was only discovered because lemmy.dbzer0.com (6th biggest instance iirc) hosts tesseract and it itself is one of the blocked instances so nothing worked (“this instance is not compatible”) and the admin, db0, did some digging
It matters because tesseract was/is used by some large instances, so the tesseract dev was secretly censoring content from thousands of users without their knowledge and even without the knowledge of the instance admins. It’s a pretty big deal because this means that a lot of people on Lemmy have been getting a highly censored view of the community without realizing it. A lot of those people, probably even most of them, came to Lemmy specifically to get away from that kind of thing. So its really shady, a huge breach of trust, and this single dev has been covertly influencing thousands of people’s political exposure.
That’s a great summary, and now so many of the posts complaining about how Lemmy didn’t feel different than what they had come from suddenly could have been a red flag that no one understood. Maybe not, but sure seems a bit correlated.
it was only discovered because lemmy.dbzer0.com (6th biggest instance iirc) hosts tesseract and it itself is one of the blocked instances so nothing worked (“this instance is not compatible”) and the admin, db0, did some digging
I see. That’s good to know. Thank you.