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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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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.
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
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.
Honestly, I can see a "curated" list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.
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.
TIL that I'm benign... Ouch.
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.
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.
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.