[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.