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.

  • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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      1 month 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.