People are allowed to have political opinions and they’re allowed to express them through software. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

The list can also easily be a part of the repo that's pulled at runtime. Or viewable and modifiable from within the app itself.

It wasn’t encrypted.

It's a client side app, by definition there's no easy way to encrypt it. Dude certainly gave it a shot by base-64 encoding it. There was no technical reason to encode a text file.

Tesseract is open source, no?

It was an intentionally obfuscated line of code that pulled a file direct from his server. A file that was intentionally not in the repo so they nobody would know about it. In IT, we call that malware.

The list was not public, what are you going on about?

Tesseract is open source, no?

He was also not 'running' anything for most users, any more than Linus is 'running' my pc just because I'm using Linux.

He is running an opinionated client to the underlying ActivityPub network. He states that in user agreement and docs for admins that want to host it on their own.

Do I agree with a design philosophy intended to decrease polarisation? Heck yeah. The amount of downvotes I’ve got shows what kind of people this thing attracts. Reeks of reddit.

This is the list.

Just beware you’lrbe downrankd to hell, just cause.

Also, this platform would be a very boring place with that block list in place.

Basically doing anything to wind up the MLs seems to do it.

A B S O L U T E E M O J I

if you run a thing then you get to decide things about it.

That would be fine, IF he had been upfront about it. Instead of going the malware route