this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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As this is a post on Beehaw, I'm going to abide by the rule and omit any unsavory words I was originally going to include 🙂
Whether intentional or not, the slur filter was one of the most genius things the Lemmy developers have ever done. No one was under any false pretenses that it was the absolute best way of moderating a space. In fact, everyone knew from the get-go that it had its fair share of problems! But it did one thing splendidly: it acted as a barrier against people obsessed with free speech who claim a slur filter is a tool used by some nebulous participants in the current culture war. I'll refer to this comment made by user
uabstractionon Hacker News 2 years ago.Even to this day you see those people using the slur filter as a talking point against the devs, the software, the wider community, etc. even though it hasn't been hard-coded or required for over a year at this point!
Meanwhile, as they continue to avoid Lemmy and prophesize its downfall, the people actually participating on Lemmy are growing a community and just generally vibing! No one is fainting at the thought that they can't say a slur.
Not just the slur filter, the whole strong leftist flavor, hard moderation, and no stupid ideals of free speech lemmy had basically sent all the right wing extremists running.
I'm conflicted about the slur filter episode. Sure, a clever way to moderate a brand of toxic community participants. If I'm not mistaken, moderation tools were far from mature at that stage and lemmy.ml was an active community dealing with community issues. I wasn't involved in the community outside of keeping an eye on the project development and perhaps the community needed a heavy handed solution - not for me to say. But the implementation left some questions and from my memory, dev response to pushback was not positive. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to remove.
That was the first exposure many, many people had to the Lemmy project - it probably resulted in a lasting erosion of trust in the software among people who had/have no interest in using the blocked slurs, and formed an impression that will continue to echo for many years despite the filter being removed. The impact goes far beyond people who would use or defend the use of the excluded language.
I don't see an issue with slur filter either but from what I've read it was hardcoded and couldn't be customized by other instances. Can you explain the reasoning behind that, why not let instances decide how far they want to go with their censoring policies? In my experience the only good moderation is manual context-aware moderation done by a person, text filters accomplish nothing except making people come up with slang terms or other workarounds. Seems weird to have this policy enforced in this way.
It's open source software. You could even then remove the slur filter manually trivially, and with a small amount of technical skill, make that persist across updates.
It took them quite some time to move it to a user friendly place. It can be set in the server settings in the UI presented to administrators. Previously it was hard coded requiring a fork or maintaining code every update.
However, I'd like to highlight that many people interested in federated software are not as technically proficient as you are. Your thoughts on what is challenging probably doesn't match what less technically proficient users think of as challenging. If federated software is to succeed, it needs to be approachable to many different kinds of people, not just the most tech literate of us.