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.



So the last commit on the apparent “original” paulo-roger/tesseract repo states abandonment of the project in 2023. However this commit, like every other in this repo, is authored by asimons04.
$ git log | grep asimons | wc -l 651 $ git log | grep roger | wc -l 0That seems pretty weird to me. I guess if they were added as a contributor at some point they could’ve force-pushed a rewritten history? Still doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Edit: Maybe it’s just paulo-roger who checked out asimons04’s repo after they abandoned it and uploaded it to his profile as a fresh repo instead of forking, and somehow GitHub mistook it for the parent repo after as04 made their repo private/whatever happened?
Ye that’s my suspicion as well. I think I got redirected to a random fork
My theory was something like:
A(paulo-roger) abandoned at 2023B(asimons04) forked and worked from thereC(OP)Now what happens if repo
Bis removed (privated)? We still have all the commit history form repoB, but no upstream to link to that history. We also have all the commit history form repoA, however the upstream is still public so it gets linked properly.The fork chain is still the same
A -> b -> Cwe just no longer see repoBon github. It doesn’t mean that anything got moved, deleted or overwritten, just hidden.The fork chain makes sense, but why is asimons04 the author of every commit in repo
A?The OG repo seems to be back. Now I’m stumped on my theory.
That I cannot answer, maybe he took over as the main dev and moved the work to his repo. Maybe there’s some other explanation.