this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they're on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they're banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.
A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It's up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don't trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.
Not every admin has the time or skill to curate. As long as the dev is open about it and there are configurable features to disable it, I don’t see what the issue is. Ultimately it creates no difference for a user if the admin creates it or the Dev does as long as it’s communicated.
The advantage of the fediverse is “don’t like it, go to another instance or build your own”, not to tell devs what they can and can’t do. Hell I never even interacted with Tesseract since I use a different client and an open instance.
The issue is that it's one person shadowbanning people without their knowledge for any arbitrary reason across instances. Like even if it's opt-out, that's still problematic since it makes the default experience whatever that one person thinks it should be. Why should one guy get to decide across the entire fediverse whether your posts are opt-in? That is antithetical to the very concept of the fediverse.
Except one guy isn’t. You have to choose to install the software. It’s not included by default. I’m running a local client (Voyager) and never dealt with any of that because the admins of my instance don’t use it either.
And every user that uses that software for whatever reason, superior features, easier on the eyes, more popular it's what everyone recommended will get their curation from that one dev.
Which is why it’s ultimately the decision of the admin. Don’t like what the admin of your instance is doing. Go make your own. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. It’s choice all the way down. It’s not like Reddit where you’d be stuck.
Huh?? It's not up to the admin, that's my point, the list is implemented by the dev and every instance that ran tesseract ran the same blocklist. My point is that it should be up to the admins of an instance, not the dev of software that gets deployed on multiple instances...
Okay. I see where the disconnect is. We’re both saying the same thing. In my earlier comment I said “as long as the Dev is open about it and it’s configurable by the admin”. What the tesseract dev did was wrong, what I was saying though is that a dev creating and managing a list is fine as long as those other conditions are met.
But then the admin isn't managing the list the dev is! You have one guy managing a list across multiple instances, that circumvents the public modlog, where users do not know how they got on, or how they could get off, and the power to shadowban across multiple instances is concentrated in the hands of just one guy!
I dunno, I can understand a curated blocklist, topic-based. Obviously not what this is - if things were up front it wouldn't have been an issue - but maybe someone just does not like memes. A curated meme community list would be handy. If someone didn't want to be on a more curated instance like blahaj but still wanted to filter out specifically problematic anti-trans users, that would be useful.
Just like its up to the users to decide what instance you want to join, it also should be up to the user to decide if they want to take that further, and a front end would be the appropriate place for that (especially since its not baked into lemmy or piefed to have an imported list).
The problem has nothing to do with the option of centralized blocklists, but the hidden nature of the one in tesseract in its entirety.
I am sorry, but I disagree with the "centralised blocklists" in a:
You should be able to block and unblock freely whoever and whatever you want.
The "centralized" may be suggestions (i.e., toggleable), and only, where instances with opt-in keep them implicit/optional, and instances with opt-out explicitly warn about them during a registration.
Can you elaborate on that? Asking for curiosity, not to challenge you.
PieFed has a default list of domains/instances that are blocked when you do a fresh install for a brand new instance. A critical difference between PieFed and the Tesseract blocks is that any of the blocks in PieFed are completely visible to, and under the control of the admins of the instance. So, ultimately, it is just an out-of-the-box default, but the instance admins always have ultimate control over moderation/federation choices. This Tesseract stuff is taking those powers away from the admins.
The two main lists that are implemented by default are a defederation list and huge huge listof blocked domains which includes wikileaks for instance, there are other lists (I don't know if the "trusted instance" list comes prepopulated) and almost all can be emptied or added to. But that means that an admin that sets up the software has to go through a whole rigmarole to get the instance to neutral before being able to do what they think is best. And hope they didn't miss anything.
In the case of the blocked domains it's particularly grating since it has like 4000 entries that you either have to delete one-by-one or have to do a manual db transaction to empty the list and that is by design. Plus all you get as a warning that such a list exists is one line during the setup that says
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanonbut it's definitely not just QAnon links.Thanks for the info!
FYI, next version of PieFed has an "Unban All" button for clearing all domain bans to try to make this easier.
Screenshot from my instance:
Oh that's good to hear. It sucks that people have to constantly fight the dev to keep his opinions out of the code though, must be tiring for all involved surely...