Tesseract was a web frontend for Lemmy that was used as the default for a few big instances when you visited them in your browser.

It was discovered that the frontend had a built-in hidden blocklist of instances and users that the developer deemed to be “toxic” despite the instances on the list being some very normal mainstream ones and the list of users being so large, a significant proportion of active posters/commenters were on it.

Users of tesseract were not told the list existed, admins/moderators could not disable it. It would just silently hide everything matching the filter without the user being any the wiser that they were missing content.

People were obviously angry about this and the developer, instead of apologising for how they handled things, doubled down, got clowned on by practically everyone and ragequit the platform.

Who woulda thunk a community that prides itself on user choice would be mad when someone else forces their choices onto said users…