[unraveller]

The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed. Lemmy is practically unusable without a personal feed filter, it seems that of the new reddit alternatives only retalk_[1] want to get this right.

If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter - the code is designed to make it as difficult as possible to change out. Thankfully some nice souls [2] are maintaining that anti-feature removal.

[1] https://retalk.com [2] https://github.com/innereq/lenny

[strenholme]

The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced.

If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7].

[1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

[3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

[4] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

[5] https://github.com/innereq/lenny

[6] https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb

[7] https://github.com/mybb/mybb

[account42]

> use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter

I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.

[lewiscollard]

If it was possible to write an effective slur filter, I would not find it completely objectionable. Not because that would be useful to stop people saying completely shit-headed things if they really wanted to (I strongly suspect you could get the entirety of Mein Kampf past that filter), but as a "people who use these words are not welcome" signal, which definitely has some value.

As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)

[reginold]

Writing an effective slur filter is undesirable. No one can stop people saying completely shit headed things. For one, people just work around it. And more importantly for every shit headed thing you restrict you also cut out someone else, even if it's just because of their perception of constraints. The mind has a funny way of editing thought before it even arrives. We can't afford this anymore in our online spaces.

[Shywim]

There's also a language problem: "retard" is a common word in french which bears no insult in it and simply mean "late" like in "being late to work".

[mariusor]

Allow me to add one more, built by me, which is closer to lemmy in functionality being also built on top of ActivityPub: https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr

A test instance is at https://littr.me

[epilys]

Also see https://sic.pm and https://github.com/epilys/tade for a web no-js link aggregator/mailing list/nntp solution

[benhurmarcel]

There’s also https://tildes.net/

[reginold]

How strange they would include word filters that are hard to edit. Seems counter to their whole mission...what?

Edit: actually it would make sense if word filters themselves were hard to add. But having their own filter and making that hard to edit is bonkers.

[b112]

Reading the whole bug, it's literally a political stance with no teeth or real purpose. It's bizarrely all for show, serves no real purpose, is functionally deficient, and the DEVs know this.

Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file.

Done.

Updates would take zero time to deploy.

It's all about taking a position.

Taking a position is fine. But, imagine a self driving car which wouldn't let you drive home to Cuntsington, MA (an example)?

The DEVs think this logic is fine?

Strange people.

[reginold]

Super strange. One of those artifacts that makes you question the whole project. One of the powers of diving in super deep is you can start to notice internal consistency or dissonance quicker. With this as an example.

[uabstraction]

It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place.

While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.

A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."

The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).

Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.

[kixiQu]

In this case it's really about the burden of community moderation. It's a fairly impotent restriction, and yet it serves the social function of discouraging a certain sort from making Lemmy their home. Most Reddit alternatives become really scummy because they attract the people (not "the kind of people", the literal individuals) who get banned from Reddit for pushing anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny past what Reddit allows. There are a lot of people who thus think "the whole point" of a Reddit-like that isn't Reddit is to be able to post the really awful stuff. The filter obviously doesn't work well to reliably block it -- but it does seem to work to drive off the folks who are looking for a cesspool.

[Open-Sourcery]

But we aren't talking about a single centralised community. This is a part of the fediverse (decentralised) and where anyone can create a server to host their own community.

If the lemmy team wants to have their slur filter for their "official" instance, they are free to. However, part of being decentralised is to give people the power to run their communities as they see fit and so they shouldn't be beholden to the infallible lemmy devs to maintain a slur list that the community can't manage themselves. Maybe they want to add or remove slurs or remove this filtering entirely, it isn't the place of the lemmy devs to decide that for them.

[reginold]

Yeah exactly. I would expect a tool like Lemmy to acknowledge that slur lists are a thing, make them easy to modify by admins, and make them exposed and easy to reference by users. Join Server / Policies / Word block list. Put it up front and center.

[candreasen]

seems to be the direction they're heading https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

[reginold]

The problem is it cuts the other way too and spooks those who believe in open speech. I'm now uninterested in Lemmy because of this "feature". Anyone who would try to limit the speech of others cannot have my best interests in mind.

[HexbearShill]

The very existence of moderation is a limitation on certain speech. To acknowledge the necessity of any moderation is acknowledge the validity of free speech limitations in certain contexts. Anything beyond that is arguing specifics and thresholds, not categorical morality.

I’m curious if you feel the same way about other features such as the ability to ban users or remove comments, which is in effect is a much greater limit on people’s speech. I can say significantly less as a banned user than as a user who is discouraged from saying the n word (since you can still post those comments. they just end up with the word censored)

Do I think this is good feature? Absolutely not. It’s an anti-pattern. But my read is that it was a stop gap for a site which had a live instance running with minimal resources during early development. The maintainer has said they are removing it. Surely if the slur filter was a moral consideration rather than a practical one, they would have no interest in removing it.

[uabstraction]

Counterpoint: If you are a member of an oppressed group and the leaders of your community punish people for calling you slurs, it makes it pretty obvious that they do, in fact, have your interests on their mind.

The point of federation is autonomy. Communities can decide on their own how they would like to conduct themselves, instead of having Steve Huffman or Mark Zuckerburg write the rules for them. Several alternative social media websites, including instances of Lemmy, have actually sprung up explicitly because of censorship they experienced on the hegemonic corporate platforms.

Hexbear for instance was born from the ashes of r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the most active (per capita) communities on Reddit. The Reddit staff pulled the plug in the midst of a generational political crisis and mass civil unrest and didn't even have the nerve to cite a single, specific infraction. And now, the community is free to discuss subversive political topics without having to worry about advertiser boycotts applying pressure to have their community shut down.

This idea that free speech starts and ends with the ability to use slurs is among the most idiotic brainworms which persists among libertarians. Nobody in power gives a fuck if you spend your time spitting on people who have even less power than you do. They only care if you can articulate a political program which threatens their ability to rule.

[newswasboring]

> Reading the whole bug

Is there a link where I can also read this bug?

[ptman]

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

[Tmpod]

It seems like it is going away soon(tm): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

[chromatin]

That is a nice to see after reading several past issues and a closed unmerged PR where innumerable users and (presumably) instance hosts made good faith arguments as to why a hard coded Regex was not only untenable , but antithetical to the ideals of the fediverse — which fell on deaf ears of the developers.

[HexbearShill]

The maintainers can be pretty ruthless about closing issues. I think it’s either about their workflow or about maintaining focus for the main branch’s feature set. Last I knew the core team was two people and maintaining a repo with an increasingly large number of contributors can be super time consuming.

[seszett]

Weird, so you can't talk about Main Coons on Lemmy? Or even say that your train was delayed in French.

That list seems very Americanocentric.

[hjek]

It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again. It's like Youtube flagging that chess channel for hate speech[0] (perhaps because words like "black", "white" and "attack" were used a lot). It will annoy people who're accidentally caught by the filter, and people who want to get past it will figure out a way anyway (by look-alike character substitution or whatever). I think it's the wrong approach to that problem.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914261

[Igelau]

> That list seems very Americanocentric.

Indeed it is. There are comments here and there in the GitHub issues where the devs defend the filter as being targeted at making it harder for "the [American] right wing" to use the platform.

It's naïve, and they don't want to talk about it.

[hu3]

For reference, some context about word filtering: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

And here's the related code: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df...

edit: I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.

[seszett]

> I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.

Well I don't remember the exact phrasing but I think your original comment did have a part asking people not to discuss this further. I can see how this would not be well received.

[hu3]

Makes sense. Thank you for pointing it out!

[Tmpod]

Just as an update to this, it seems like the devs have given in: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

[hanselot]

>https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

Wow, this was a fantastic thread. It very clearly and logically lays out how to kill software by injecting your ideology into it.

RIP dessalines

[HexbearShill]

All software is political. The act of releasing your work for free into the public domain is political. Disagree with his ideology, but anyone who thinks they are above ideology is just unaware of the assumptions they’re operating under.

[uabstraction]

Ideology is when you disagree with the status quo, and the more you disagree with the status quo, the more ideological you are. And when you disagree with the status quo a whole lot, that's dogma.

[esjeon]

> all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed

I'm not quite expert here, but, IIRC, this language problem is partially inherent to ActivityPub. The sender can attach translations, and the receiver can pick one from the set, but no one knows what's gonna happen if the expectations from both sides don't match.

One might, instead, re-fetch the messages from the sender using HTTP + content negotiation, which will definitely cause different types of headache.

[nyanpasu64]

Odd how Lenny (the fork without a word filter) hasn't received commits in 5 months, yet has 3386 commits compared to upstream's 3330.

[StellarTabi]

> retalk

> Civil discussion for the center and center right

> Karl Marx: Atheist or Satanist?

> Candace Owens

> transphobic comic

> no links to github/gitlab

is this what passes for "civil discussion" and "center/center right" these days?

[HexbearShill]

Weird that a Reddit clone wouldn’t be open source. So much for the free speech crowd. thedonald and the .win-iverse did the same thing, but I think it was originally based on postmill.