[cocoricamo]

Nah, they definitely overreacted to a reasonable request. Different languages, different cultures and different groups will have different words they consider as slurs or not acceptable.

Then there are edge cases like history forums where they have a valid use case for posting transcriptions with words that are currently deemed not appropriate.

Their response can drive possible adopters away because they could only think in US centric politics.

[nortonham]

What is US centric about not wanting to allow words that are commonly understood in English to be slurs, on a site that is predominately English speaking?

Also, why is it wrong to expect non native speakers to eventually work out what is and isn't acceptable in day to day conversations with native speakers?

[cocoricamo]

Isn't the idea of Lemmy to run your own instance that could be used to host communities that don't speak English? In their instances list they have servers that speak German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Euskera, French...

Why would some non English speaking person be forced to change their language because someone in the USA decided that an innocuous word in their language is now a slur?

Also USA is not the only country speaking English and some words considered slurs or offensive in the US are not in other countries that also speak English.

They did in the end made it configurable and that's good, but their initial response is a major turnoff for anyone thinking on seriously running the software without planning to maintain a fork in the future.

[nortonham]

Ah yes, I should have thought of all the words in Euskera that overlap with racial/homophobic/transphobic slurs in English