In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer.

  • raspirate@lemmy.world
    137·
    2 days ago

    This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.

    The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”

    So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.

    Do I have that right?

    • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 day ago

      You win the internet for today!

      This explanation should really be somewhere easier to find. Especially when you’re wondering if it will go down on your permanent record.

      • raspirate@lemmy.world
        4·
        24 hours ago

        I’m just glad I actually got it right. I was mostly typing up that comment just to make sure that my understanding was correct. I wasn’t even thinking at the time that it would be helpful to others as well. I guess I’ve been kind of assuming that everyone else on lemmy already understood how all of this stuff works. Happy to help!

        • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          5·
          1 day ago

          http and https are communication protocols, www is a way of enabling content sharing.

          You use a web browser, such as Firefox or Librewolf. When you put in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) such as https://en.wikipedia.org/ in the address bar (which shows the current URL), you tell the browser to retrieve that URL, through the HTTPS method.

          Almost all websites use HTTP or HTTPS (which is more secure, as it’s encrypted). The abbreviation stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol (Secure mode).

          The way of ‘retrieving’ that URL is often done through that HTTP(S). Web browsers for that reason can be called a ‘user agent’.

          Search engines, such as Mojeek, are essentially websites that link to other websites, using a search query.

          You can also sometimes use non-HTTPS methods, a few well-known examples are mailto and ftp (file transfer protocol) or database access like jdbc (Java database commectivity).

          The internet works by encapsulating the data into layers.

          After you send in the URL and method, the browser goes to look for the page. There are multiple layers to that. HTTP(S) belongs to the application layer, which tells “I make or have this data, I communicate with the same or another host”. The www uses the HTTP(S)’ rules to communicate.

          Then there’s the transport layer, that communicates “You’re on this host, I’m on that host”. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is one of those.

          After that there’s the internet layer, which says “This is the host address, that is the host address, both worded in the same ways” and “I send this data to that data”. IP addresses are part of this one. Domains work through the DNS (Domain Name System) and you can think of them as more human-readable, more specific IP addresses.

          Then there’s the link layer which says “This is how things locally communicate on the same host without intervening routers.” Wi-Fi and ethernet are examples.

          There is another, that’s not necessarily part of it, but nonetheless relevant here: the syntax (or presentation) layer. It “translates what this application layer reads to another application layer”. An API is part of that.

          So, then, what are front and back ends?

          Think of the user interface; that is how you communicate with your computer. It’s what the ‘menus’ look like, how logos look like, etc.

          If your computer is a bicycle, what it looks like (the front end) is the user interface; and how the parts are connected, is the API. The back end is managing the previous layers I’ve mentioned.

          I hope that that kind of explains it!