this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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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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[–] TragicNotCute@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

This is an important post and I appreciate the insight into the happenings on the Fediverse, but the comment chains are going off the rails and I’ve issued a number of bans from this post alone.

Locking.

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago

Genuinely think this post should be pinned for prosperity and a warning to others. Lemmy does not appreciate censorship.

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 34 points 2 days ago

anyone reported them to their ISP yet?

[–] Embargo@lemmy.zip 439 points 4 days ago (30 children)

I don't think I've ever witnessed someone going so hard off the rails. It's been an entertaining few days really.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 238 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (27 children)

It’s what happens when someone with underdeveloped empathy gets caught doing something they know is wrong, resulting in emotional overload.

It’s textbook toddler tantrum.

With stunted empathy, people seeking an explanation and apology are met with increasingly greater resistance.

And like textbook, they claim to be the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.

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

But no. They were caught while they were secretly trying to play internet dictator and refused to empathise with others that were hurt and shocked to find out a tool they were using was receiving undisclosed payloads to use to censor communities and individuals.

I strongly implore everyone to leave this developer alone. Jokingly asking to be added to the list etc empowers them to continue to play the victim. They do not deserve attention.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 76 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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 105 points 3 days ago (5 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.

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[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] T156@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Basically, every time you visit the page, it has code that sends 500 * 4 queries to one particular instance, making it load a page from the modlog, do a search, etc.

So everyone visiting the page would suddenly be sending 2000 queries each, and in theory, enough users would DoS the server by overloading it with those requests, rendering it unusable.

[–] ArkyonVeil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 69 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wow, this went from petty to downright malware by proxy. Real mature.

[–] fake@sh.itjust.works 19 points 3 days ago

Not even by proxy, literally just malware

[–] kreliac@lemmy.world 41 points 3 days ago

What a scumbag

[–] HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 130 points 3 days ago (8 children)

It'd be hilarious if this dude went to prison over this, because it seems like he finally crossed from "annoying and unethical but legal" to straight up illegal.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 49 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Enforcement is for inconvenienced rich tech companies.

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[–] BillCheddar@lemmy.world 59 points 3 days ago (27 children)

Fascists literally cannot help themselves.

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[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 133 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I think this is the first time the whole fediverse agrees to who the asshole is.

Thanks, dev of Tesseract, you actually left a positive impact on the fediverse. Please don’t come back.

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[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 176 points 3 days ago (22 children)

he is probably still reading these discussions lol

[–] bless@lemmy.ml 71 points 3 days ago (5 children)

"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob

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[–] DisasterTransport@startrek.website 64 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Dear Lord, please grant me this level of pettiness and the presence of mind to wield that pettiness only against those who deserve it. Amen.

[–] AzuranAurora@piefed.ca 108 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Tesseract is officially malware. What a petulant child Patrick is.

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jesus christ he just needs to take the l

[–] gnufuu@lemmy.ca 169 points 3 days ago (16 children)

In case somebody wanted confirmation. Maybe don't visit the page with Javascript enabled.

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 108 points 3 days ago (22 children)

And that full text, also to avoid extra visits:

You crazies won and proved me wrong. The fediverse isn't worth saving after all.

Over the course of the last several days, I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance's top admin. This is unacceptable for all of the reasons in the world, and while I won't give you the personal satisfaction of having won, you've definitely proven me wrong about the fediverse being something that even can be saved from itself.

Even people around here I'd interacted with positively for years and had grown to respect because they seemed level headed and above the immature and sociopathic bullshit that dominates this platform showed their true selves. That completely shattered any and all illusions I had that this place has a hidden core of users that I should try to make more visible amongst all the rage, rage baiting, propaganda, harassment, rumor mongering, trolls, conspiracies, purity testing, witch hunts, and violent rhetoric.

Like many of the rational people before me who called this place home, I'm done with this place.

I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.

Then you have entire instances whose admins call for the death of others, harass other users, and lead harassment, brigading, and DARVO campaigns against those who dare call out their bullshit or decide to disassociate themselves and their work from them.

Lemmy.World was so close to doing the right thing after instance-that-will-not-be named's admins were calling for the death of LW's admins while spreading rumours and labeling others in such a way that painted them as targets for murder. All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they 'caught' and should be killed.

.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.

"We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it." they probably said.

Bullshit.

I'm one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse. If I can stand up for what's right and deal with the blowback, so can you.

Fuck lemmy world's admin team for condoning that behavior and letting the human skidmark db0 DARVO his way out of the situation while brigading with his army of malcontents whom he wields like a cult leader. He knows exactly what he is doing, and you all continue to allow him to get away with it.

Nah, fuck this whole place. I've let too many things fall by the wayside IRL because of dealing with all this fediverse bullshit and trying to give it the slightest bit of polish both visually and atmospherically. Mythbusters may have proven that you can, in fact, polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it's still a shiny ball of shit.

For the few people left who didn't turn out to be psychotic, I'll think of you from time to time when recalling something you've posted or commented that genuinely made me laugh, made me think, or otherwise put a smile on my face or in my heart.

Everyone else, though, enjoy your toxic, xenophobic, knee-jerk-to-violence, purity-testing, and harassing-anyone-who-doesn't-fall-in-line cess pit. One day you, too, will do or say something that doesn't toe the line and you'll be right where I am.

P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you're welcome.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 96 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The disconnect from reality is insane. They completely ignore why people got mad and make up imaginary reasons for why they got the hate while painting themselves like some hero trying to stand for us but getting betrayed in return. It's both hilarious and sad. I hope that they will have time for self reflection once they get off the threadiverse and become a better person but I don't have much expectations given how deep they are into the delusion.

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[–] QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz 113 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

I could understand hardcoded blacklists if Tesseract was meant as a frontend for a Lemmy instance tailored for a specific purpose, and not intended for general use. But this, to DDOS a website because the developer is a whiny baby who can't take criticism? This is a new low. This is disgusting, and damaging for the Lemmyverse as whole.

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[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 79 points 3 days ago (9 children)

"Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate."

I think this is the best part of their message

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 60 points 3 days ago (5 children)

So they wanted to cultivate.. a ddos attack of peace and love?

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[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 56 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (10 children)

My favorite part of this was in the "elephant in the room" post.

One of his faq questions was something about if the list is a perma-ban. His answer was somewhat incoherent but basically if you stop being toxic you can get off it. But nothing about how. So either he's actively monitoring thousands of accounts that he's also secretly hiding from everyone else, or we were supposed to, I don't know petition him with our last 50 comments to prove we had changed and ask nicely to not be on a list we weren't supposed to know existed in the first place.

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[–] 1984@lemmy.today 91 points 3 days ago

I've never seen a dev do something like this. Pretty incredible that he put that in the code. It just shows the maturity level of these guys.

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What has the dbzer0 instance done to him?

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 41 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Exposed his hidden censorship he coded into the Tesseract front end.

Prior to that not condemning punching Nazis.

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[–] foggy@lemmy.world 42 points 3 days ago (1 children)

And that's how you go from loser troll to criminal. 👋

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[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 51 points 3 days ago (5 children)

This Admiral Patrick person needs mental counseling of some kind.

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[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 71 points 3 days ago (23 children)

Well, there's another one going down the deep end. Can anyone enlighten me why there are devs losing their minds on the regular and pulling everyone else into their shitshow? Most of the time those people are actually skilled, but something goes wrong and they become megalomaniac, believing they are the arbiter of truth and a gift from god we all should be thankful for while they pull more and more insane shit.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 75 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It’s dictator syndrome. There’s always going to be a subset of the population that, after acquiring the faintest whiff of power or authority, seizes it like a drowning man.

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