I’m surprised no one has raised this point yet, or maybe they have and I just haven’t figured out where they posted it. Possibly this is the wrong place to ask. If so, please do let me know.

I assume most non-casual users are now familiar with the kerfuffle involving the Tesseract UI and its developer, vis-a-vis secretly adding an obfuscated and absurdly draconian inbuilt block list that silently filters out entire communities, instances, content containing keywords that are not aligned with the developer’s political bent, and also singles out hundreds of individual users by name for the same treatment. (Including myself, but I find that part more amusing than worrisome, really.)

I see that the lemmy.world sidebar and the pinned post in this very community no longer mention the Tesseract UI, which I presume dates from the time last year when its developer… How do we phrase this diplomatically? Threw a wobbler during which he closed his instance to the public. Or maybe it never mentioned it to begin with, and I’m having a Mandela effect experience.

Regardless, the Tesseract UI is still accessible at the subdomain t.lemmy.world, which I assume means the code is still being hosted on lemmy.world’s servers. This is listed as version 1.4.41 but since the developer has now apparently either deleted, moved, or closed the Github page for the project (the link in the Tesseract header is dead, for instance) I can’t readily verify if this is even a current version because up until now I haven’t been paying attention.

The developer’s response to the recent criticism over this, readable here, can be handily boiled down with statement near the very beginning that he considers Tesseract “no longer a general purpose ‘anything goes’ client.” Instead perhaps we should take it as read that it is a personal hobby-horse designed explicitly for his own preferences and no one else’s.

TL;DR: Should we take him at his word, and thus are we really sure this is something we want to be hosing on lemmy.world now?

I don’t want to be a power mod. I dun wanna, I dun wanna, I dun wanna. But !motorcycles@lemmy.world is apparently unmoderated completely now, at least if I’m reading the sidebar and its empty mod list correctly, presumably because the creator/original mod deleted their account. And its one of the communities I’m active in (though admittedly, possibly not as often as I should be).

In the apparent absence of any other volunteers, can I have it? It’s not quite dead, and I have an ulterior motive in the form of the header picture which was my photograph at one point but is now empty because I guess it got deleted along with the previous incumbent’s account.