The Chapo.Chat moderators have already stated that they’re planning on removing the hard-coded slur filter from their instance of Lemmy; it’s the reason you’re not able to say the full text of ACAB. It’s just a bad idea to have something like this hard-coded in, leftist instances are created by fostering a good culture and not by babying the people who run these servers and if we want Lemmy to grow as an actual federated alternative to Reddit then it’s worth bringing up how bad this policy is by the original developers.
I kind of like the sound of “all cops are removed” though.
The intent behind hard-coding the filter is making it so reactionaries have a much harder time creating their own communities on Lemmy, trying to make it so our tools aren’t being used by reactionaries to organize. But it’s relatively simple to remove and they’ll just make their own fork with the changes, so ultimately it’s gonna be fruitless.
Last I looked at the lemmy source code, that slur filter was a single line of code. That was a couple of month ago though.
Not to beat a dead horse, but It’s not a good idea to have it hard-coded like that. Any conceivable list of slurs will come with its own cultural biases, so regardless of good intent it falls short. Maybe I shouldn’t try to read people’s minds, but perhaps they’re anxious about the very real possibility of horrible people using lemmy to communicate and organize. I get that, but it’s something you need to get over when you’re making your software available like this. You are not responsible for what people using your software do and to think otherwise is somewhat indicative of some kind of god complex. (This is not to throw any kind of shade on the devs, of course, they seem great and have done a great job.)
The slur filter is so dumb. Diego removedundez plays for the New England Revolution. A smartwatch is worn on one’s wrist. It is important for school buildings to be built using flame reremovedant materials.
Who thought it was a good idea to have this hard coded?
The original developers are very talented and have incredibly good instincts so far, but yeah it’s just a growing pain thing that needs to change.