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.

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 74 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone 102 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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 45 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 day ago

Idk, "🥺👉👈" was pretty wild

[–] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Also from the other end, because of how the filter works, mods using couldn't see messages the user put, so they'd have been free to do whatever, until caught by either a bot, or moderators not using the frontend.

One of the reasons it was found to begin with was because the db-zer0 instance was on it, and the admin, who was using tesseract, suddenly couldn't load any posts from the instance at all. As Tesseract presents it as a compatibility issue, they were trying to track down the fault at the time.

[–] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 hour ago

Very good point, that’s horrible. And blocking "your own" instance is pretty dumb. I wonder if db0 would also not been able to read own posts if the instance wasn’t blocked.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

Full agreement. Part of the problem is that the blocklist was kinda bonkers in who was included