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submitted 5 hours ago by Quokka@quokk.au to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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[-] Embargo@lemmy.zip 216 points 5 hours ago

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

[-] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 4 points 1 hour ago

Honestly it was pretty common on classic Reddit. Usually a modder. Often times a script kiddie/chrome extension.

It feels nice to see it here and it really takes me back.

[-] Microtonal_Banana@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 hour ago

Hes probably writing a manifesto right now.

[-] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 7 minutes ago* (last edited 2 minutes ago)

They basically did, it shows to anyone that visits dubvee.

Which should only be viewed though an archive site as it could cause bad things to db0

And thankfully others already pulled the text so no one has too, but should still get it archived

https://lemmy.world/comment/24975427

[-] Dojan@pawb.social 8 points 2 hours ago

It’s okay, they are a measured and non-violent individual that just wants Lemmy to be friendly for the “normies.”

They’re a good guy™︎!

[-] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 113 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

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.

[-] mathemachristian 28 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

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.

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 24 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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 18 points 1 hour ago

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 10 points 1 hour ago

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

[-] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 28 minutes ago* (last edited 17 minutes ago)

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

[-] jaygray91@piefed.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

I don't really go on a blocking spree much. How would a front end's block list implementation be different than the instance's choice of software's block list implementation?

I hardly browse All and Local. I am on a piefed based instance, and leave "Enable Automatic Follow of Feed Communities." and "Enable Automatic Leave of Feed Communities." on. So kind of my subscribed feed is semi automatic as long as I follow a broad topic.

[-] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 22 points 4 hours ago

Honestly, I can see a "curated" list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.

[-] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, either that or at least if everyone on the blocklist was like nazis or something it seems like he would've had at least half a leg to stand on. But the fact that the most random and benign users showed up on it and he was still trying to justify it as "making the experience better for the fediverse" showed that he was just some asshole completely convinced of his own righteousness.

[-] Embargo@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 hour ago

TIL that I'm benign... Ouch.

[-] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 hours ago

If he had just implemented the list as a default that anyone could edit, he would have gotten pretty much what he wanted. I mean, some people would have edited the list, some would have deleted the list, but most people are lazy or uninformed and would have simply accepted the default.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 hours ago

I really hope the tesseract fork implements this feature.

Nothing would prove him more wrong than actually implement what he wanted in a sensible, non-dickish way.

[-] amio@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago

Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Not sure this would help in itself, even though more flexible blocking would ironically be nice. The value in such a list lies in how it's curated, and the guy is still certifiable and about 3yo mentally, tops.

[-] volore@scribe.disroot.org 34 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I agree, I'm almost sad it's (presumably) over now.

Then again, he already "left" once before (and came back), so who's to say? We might be clowning on him on and off the rest of the year if he keeps it up.

[-] fizzle@quokk.au 15 points 5 hours ago

I saw a vaguely similar situation a long time ago where someone was a positive, contributing member of the community and then they fell from grace somehow and basically no one was thankful enough so they were banned and they just kept evading the bans and posting smut in the forums for weeks.

The way this guy has really thrown his weight into this but still obviously feels like the victim is really reminiscent, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some more to come.

[-] Monument@piefed.world 14 points 3 hours ago

That’s weirdly sort of how I got my job.

Apparently my predecessor was a nice guy with low boundaries that (at the time) lacked managerial support. When he painted himself into a corner on his commitments, didn’t get the accolades or raises he thought he should get, he got bitter, started to act out, stopped doing work he should have done, and finally, when management started pressing him to clean up some messes he had created over a year+ of neglecting his responsibilities, he left an unsigned resignation letter on his desk and didn’t come to work for a few days.
He called to discuss the terms of his return, expecting a raise, and they just told him they accepted his resignation.

[-] fizzle@quokk.au 4 points 2 hours ago

LOL. Sounds like an idiot. Even if the guy was really needed, you can't have someone like that on your team.

[-] RogueBanana@piefed.zip 4 points 1 hour ago

Just another reminder, no one cares about you in the slave factory. Prioritize yourself over work and don't build up loyalty to a rich asshole.

[-] bl4ckp1xx13@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 hours ago

Not for those of us on the dbzer0 instance 😭

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
470 points (100.0% liked)

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