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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.