As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.

  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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    3 days ago

    What’s crazy is they could have simply:

    • Apologised
    • Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
    • Agreed there was a lack of transparency
    • Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

    Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.

    But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.

    Second it must be opt-in.

    Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.

    And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.

    • Courtney (she/her/they) @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      Anyone who thinks “yeah lgbt stuff should be hidden because we want to attract people who don’t want to see LGBT stuff” is someone I don’t want anywhere near the fediverse.

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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        3 days ago

        Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.

        • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 days ago

          Tbh for me it was more outrageous how it interferes with moderation. There are admins from big instances who weren’t blocked themself and mods from big active communities on that list. If they write warning comments, users of this frontend will simply not see them

          And tho user and comment regex is a mess, partially containing very random things. Lot’s of possible wrong matches. This whole thing is from no viewpoint a good idea