I think the front-end had some features, particularly mod features, people liked but I haven’t used it so I don’t know. I think the outrage is mainly that someone wanted to alter the user experience across many instances without getting noticed. So people that were using it didn’t see posts or comments no matter what instance they were logging in from, without ever getting notified that there was a filter in play. As someone who has a couple accounts on different instances specifically in order to choose what I currently want to see, this would have been infuriating to me.

Plus users had to figure out for themselves that their experience was getting altered and then find a very hidden checkbox in the settings that was just labeled “toxic mode” in order to disable that list. And people didn’t even know they were on that list. I was on it since at least end of april without ever knowing about it.