Tesseract is a web client for Lemmy that was found to be secretly and arbitrarily blocking users, communities and even entire instances. You can see if you're one of the kool kidz by running

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

and grepping your name / instance. Further details can be found in this post.

The poem above is adapted from Bertolt Brecht's The Burning of the Books, which can be read here. If you would rather read it in the original German, go here.

When the Tesseract hardcoded
The unruly users to be blocked,
Teams of dull fingers entered
Huge blocklists to the json.

Then a banished poster,
One of the best,
Scanning the list of
Excommunicated names,
Became enraged:
They'd been excluded!

They rushed to their desk,
Full of contemptuous wrath,
To write fierce letters
To the morons in power —
Ban me! They typed
With shaking hands —
Haven't I always
Reported the truth?
Now here you are,
Treating me like a liar!
Block me!
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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

😭 I'm too lib to be banned. I just dont post enough prolly. I didn't even know what tesseract was until today. I think I've heard of it but I almost always use the Thunder app. And I know Hexbear isn't censored for me. However, I did wonder if my instance admin was because I saw him on the list but haven't heard from him in a while.. @seahorse@midwest.social u good? We dont have to worry about tesseract, right?

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