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.
Some of those tankie instances have been pretty aggressive with others, so I can understand that a developer wants to make its project more accessible to normal people by blocking them. Now, do all the instances on this list deserve it? I don’t know. Also, it would probably be a better compromise to have this as a visible “safe default” and let admins edit it easily.
What’s a tankie?
The Wikipedia introduction is quite accurate for the kind of people you may find on those instances, especially the bottom of the introduction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I’m not asking about the instances, I’m asking about the word. The wiki doesn’t really help:
Okay, so an insulting way to refer to an authoritarian communist. What makes them authoritarian? I see this word being used by people who support the police. Are the police (as an institution) not authoritarian? So what does authoritarian mean?
Okay, so only Marxist–Leninist or Stalinists?
Okay, so ML or Stalinists who are pro-soviet.
Uh…those are all very different.
Maybe it’s easier for me to ask what’s an acceptable communist?
If this wiki page doesn’t help you understand the term tankie I don’t think I can do better. It’s basically people who support authoritarian communism including denying or supporting their crimes like the Tiananmen Square massacre and similar. As the last part explains, sometimes the relationship to Marxism gets lost as they focus on anti-Western or anti-American positions, such as defending Islamist Iran and other Islamist movements that share very little with Marxism and the left.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but I would guess democracy based communism with no human rights abuse. Maybe that’s better called social democracy or democratic socialism. For example, in Europe many former Soviet communism supporters lost their faith when they progressively learned about Stalinism crimes and founded what’s called “Socialist” parties as opposed to “Communist” (ex: French or Spanish socialist parties). In English, they are usually called social democrats, close to people like Bernie Sanders, I think.
I don’t think you understood my response. The wiki doesn’t help because there is no common thread between the groups listed, and they aren’t all comunist. Like, iran? The article goes on to talk about modern russia. That’s not communist either. The only thing I can find in common is that they are not “western”.
Socialism is such a broad term it’s almost meaningless without qualifiers. Social democracy is also extremely different from democratic socialism. Social democracy wants to reform capitalism to reduce its harm whereas democratic socialists want a socialist society (i.e. no capitalism) but without the own party system and more democratic decision making.
Help me understand the term Tankie as anything other than an insult towards someone who thinks the capitalists and imperialists are bad, actually. Are their human rights abuses less horrific than any other?
I think it implies a sort of connection in this way: Marxism -> opposition to capitalism -> opposition to countries championing capitalism such as the USA -> defending organizations who oppose USA -> defending Islamist organizations or current Russia.
I have observed those thoughts combined within instances that claim to be Marxist on Lemmy. Have you not?
I believe all human rights abuse are bad whatever the ideology or absence of it. But maybe it’s even more depressing when it comes from an ideology base that claims to be in favor of the oppressed people. It’s also most visible from the leftist side here, because far right instances are more unanimously ostracized. I never saw them in my feed personally, probably due to admins early filtering.
I would say I have observed the following from individual users:
Marxism -> opposition to capitalism -> opposition to countries championing capitalism such as the USA ->
defending organizations who oppose USA -> defending Islamist organizations or current Russia.I think the Hexbear code of conduct explains why I feel the last price is missing. I’ll quote them instead of trying to paraphrase:
Being anti USA doesn’t mean you are on board with all the opinions of all the other opponents or that you are defending them. Personally, I sure am hoping we are watching the collapse of Team America World Police as a result of their involvement in the middle east but that’s where my opinion ends. I don’t know anything about the groups opposing them apart from what I read in western media which is as good as useless, so the idea that I would defend them is pretty absurd. Defend them about what? To whom? (I’m also not ML btw so maybe I shouldn’t be using myself as an example?). USA = bad does not mean another state is good. But I have found people assume that when I wish for the end of the US that I would support another authoritarian and/or imperialist regime in its place which is not accurate.
(Footnote: I’m assuming you don’t mean all Islamic groups/nations when you said “Islamic organizations” but only the ones who are in opposition to the USA. )
Anyways, this has gotten very off topic. Your connection list was helpful in answering my question. Whether or not I think there are instances that meet this isn’t really relevant.
I’m just glad we could have a conversation about this without one calling the other fascist as it happens too often here.
It’s very safe to say the only reason one would ban Blahaj is because they’re transphobes.
How do you feel about quokk.au not getting the black mark? Kinda insulting ngl.
Truly horrible. I can’t believe a Nazi ignored us.
Performative nazism lmao
Not the criteria being used here, obviously.
Also, we have a statement of intent. There is a statement of intent here in a pr. You cannot assume good faith of shit libs. You cannot assume good faith of people who say they’re doing things for bad reasons.
I mean you can but its disingenuous and shitty and I’m blocking your instance because its so violently stupid.
Doubtful it’s tankies, this looks like it’s fascist work.
The dev of Tessaract is obviously a fascist, but oce isn’t calling them a tankie, they’re agreeing with the fascist that leftist instances should be censored, because “tankies”
Which is ironic given that people here are upset about that mod forcing their political biases onto others.
Basically
First they came for the communists —totally cool
Then they came for my outgroup — wtf!!
Don’t forget that MAGA instance on there
First they came for the MAGA, then they came for the commies /s
Doesn’t the software package for running a lemmy instance have a default defederation blacklist that includes some of these same instances? It sounds like they’re talking about exactly that - an editable blacklist instead of hiding it as some kind of software error when you go somewhere the admin doesn’t want you to. To which I say, Lemmy already has that, it’s called defederation or muting an instance yourself.
There’s a technical, often legal, aspect to blacklists. Unmanaged and unmoderated instances can be hijacked and be an actual threat with bots and so on.
But there’s another aspect, like someone’s favorite shitposter got banned for gatekeeping neopronouns, and now the entire Blahaj instance is blacklisted.
The categories are just entirely different orders of magnitude.
My point was that what they’re calling for here already exists natively within the federation framework and this hidden filter that the dev made doesn’t even need to exist as a front-end system that mods/admins can use as a result. And that some of the more egregious instances on this list are already on the defederation list by default and that admins are free to add or remove instances from that list as they please.
In short, that this hidden filter is not only unnecessary but that it also only exists to secretly censor what users on an instance can see on top of what instances are already defederated by the admins and would have no purpose as a publicly available system.
There’s a difference between not federating with fascists, spam, csam instances by default and not federating with leftist instances because you think it’s scary to “normal” users.
The other thing is that the developer of Tesseract doesn’t have the authority to block servers they don’t like on other people’s instances. It is a major overstep from him to do this, and a severe breach of trust. You really have to hold yourself or be held to a high standard when writing code that runs on other people’s computers.
Putting in a backdoor so you can get in is really bad. Putting in your own hardcoded ideological filters isn’t as bad, but it’s almost as bad.
I agree, I’m just saying that it sounds like what they’re talking about is something that’s already natively built into Lemmy and doesn’t need to be built into a front-end. Especially since I believe some of these are already defederated by default and you would need an account on an instance that has gone out of their way to federate with those in order to see/interact with them in the first place.
I don’t know if this dev is fascist I have not studied the question. Do you have some other information besides this list? Indeed, I’m not calling the dev a tankie, but rather some of the instances of the blacklist that I know of, as a possible explanation for being blacklisted. I don’t know all of them well enough to tell.
Can you say why you think this? Is it this code?
{ domain: "lemmy.dbzer0.com", reason: `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.` },Well, now I think this because you’re defending them.
No, they’re critiquing tankies specifically. Tankies do not represent all leftists
I confirm.
They should just add an option: OBEY=y/n
Apparently maga.place is super leftist /s
There are a few on there I would say have issues but weirdly the consensus here is that “no of course not these are all fine sites and now why isn’t some other site on the list because it’s leftist and belongs on the list as a badge of honor!” Kinda seems funny to me that no one noticed the maga site on the list. And you are the only person here to doubt that narrative. No one else considers that maybe this dev had a few bad experiences with some of these sites that maybe otherwise wouldn’t be on the list…? I have no knowledge of most of them, but hexbear is about as head-fucked as an instance comes.
They’re to your left.