Oh I did not know that. Tbh the interface is a little confusing to me - but I suppose I could get used to it, and actually most of that affects the mobile rather than desktop. Anyway, every single thing I continue to hear about it continues to impress me still further - e.g. they now have “post flairs”, which act like the Reddit ones i.e. they are basically “tags”, which Mbin and PieFed also have but Lemmy lacks - and yet even while still running on “Lemmy”, Admiral Patrick made it happen. Plus it runs YouTube videos natively inside of it. It’s basically an open-source app that doesn’t need you to download it but instead runs inside of the web browser - not an easy accomplishment by any means. And then there’s this little gem:

I built Tesseract in my spare time as a hobby, learning excercise for Svelte, and to address my own personal annoyances with Lemmy and other Lemmy UIs. That said, I do not feel the need to accept donations for its development.

Also, he will switch the back-end from Lemmy to Sublinks when that becomes available. Or maybe Sublinks will use something more like Tesseract natively, I have no idea (I never hear about Sublinks anymore these days - I seem to be the only one that continues to mention it, that I see at least).

But anyway, it’s impressive AF. And yet it might disappear at a moment’s notice - well, dubvee.org might, whereas Tesseract is open-source code so anyone could take it up and continue that if they wanted. In terms of blocking a custom instance such as Lemmy.ml, I would naively guess that what it took to implement that would be a combination of both Tesseract (the software making it possible) and dubvee.org (as the instance admin) - i.e. if someone else were to run Tesseract then they could decide differently, as admin of their own instance.

I have never not enjoyed any conversation I have ever had with Admiral Patrick. Others hint that they have seen differently but nobody will respond with any details or links to anything so… I can only go by what I see, which is impressive.

Yes and as I wrote up the first draft for this I definitely included that disclaimer but it got too long and so I took it out (along with a bunch of other stuff). Whether someone wants to block any particular instance at all - whether hexbear.net or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever - is up to them, and I covered that already in the previous post in this community.

Talking more about it now though: I agree that it is more than a little unfortunate then that such users would get lumped in together with the kind of “spam” that comes out to us across the Fediverse from inside that instance. It isn’t their fault, either directly, nor do they have anything to do with either the other users on their instance or the policies of their admins. I can well imagine having discussions entirely locally inside of lemmy.ml on communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml or !linux@lemmy.ml or !privacy@lemmy.ml etc., but never once encountering such users as I have mentioned elsewhere here - and perhaps they have likewise blocked them even.

But for myself, and many others, the trade-off is worth it. It narrows our experiences of the Fediverse sure, but I no longer wish to participate in a community where their content and userbase are held hostage by the tankie philosophy. This approach increases the false negative / type 2 “misses” of federated content, while substantially decreasing the false positive / type 1 “spam” that can get blocked.

You for instance do not participate in political communities. What we want to do or not do is up to each of us, and may even change over time. Therefore what I am a HUGE fan of is the democratization of that choice: how can someone take matters into their own hands, even without support of an admin, and improve their experiences on the Fediverse?

And although I deleted from the OP, I would have loved to have included an entire section on why blocking is inferior to merely “labelling”. What if instead of the binary yes/no there was a third choice? PieFed already provides such btw, in the form of “reputation” labels that are put onto user accounts. e.g. if you have received more downvotes than upvotes you will get a label that, while not restricting your activities in any way, will alert users (of instances running PieFed) to that fact. Similarly there is a new account label, etc. The advantages are numerous - e.g. rather than taking equal time to parse every single comment that you see, only realizing at the end that someone is spewing propaganda (or gish gallop, reverse gish gallop, controlling the conversation, strawman, the card says moops - the list goes on and on and on and on), you can see the label and deprioritize it.

This is a fully game-changing advantage that restricts the users of an instance in no way, yet still allows for something in-between full defederation vs. full allowance, as if they were speaking in good faith when in fact they may not be. However, this sounds to people like it is “karma” - notably it isn’t, not really, b/c e.g. there need be no difference between +1000 vs. +10000 - so I don’t expect people to be a big fan of this. But still, it’s there if someone wants to use this rather than blocking.

And Mbin does similarly, by while still allowing upvotes, also adding “favorites” from people on instances running Mbin, which tend to be more pro-Western oriented, therefore the large number of upvotes for a post in something such as hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse will not necessarily make that content appear high up in a list sorted by Hot or Top, and instead content gets sorted by the favorites / alternative votes.

Anyway, it’s a super complicated subject. Lemmy is in beta, and the entire concept of Federation is being tested right now, on the fly. And some people cannot wait for perfect solutions to come out and be vetted - so for those of us who simply want the spam to be GONE, I am glad that I finally found a way that doesn’t mean that, like all of my irl friends, I have to leave the Fediverse entirely to make it happen.

I see it: Settings -> Appearance -> Display Votes, set to Hide.

The votes will still be there, affecting e.g. how your content (posts and replies) will be sorted, you just would not see them anymore.

Although that might (I don’t truly know) be how instances that disable downvoting work anyway? Or at least when interacting with other instances even if not internally.

What happens if you hide them in your Lemmy settings? But maybe a question to ask on the Voyager community