Recently there have been some discussions about the political stances of the Lemmy developers and site admins. To clear up some misconceptions: Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others. While @dessalines and I are communists, we take decisions collectively, and don’t demand that anyone adopt our views or convert to our ideologies. We wouldn’t devote so much time to building a federated site otherwise.
What’s important to us is that you follow the site rules and Code of Conduct. Meaning primarily, no-bigotry, and being respectful towards others. As long as that is the case, we can get along perfectly fine.
In general we are open for constructive feedback, so please contact any member of the admin team if you have an idea how to improve Lemmy.
Slur Filter
We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy. Not so much on lemmy.ml itself, but whenever Lemmy is recommended elsewhere, a few usual suspects keep bringing it up. To these people we say the following: we are using the slur filter as a tool to keep a friendly atmosphere, and prevent racists, sexists and other bigots from using Lemmy. Its existence alone has lead many of them to not make an account, or run an instance: a clear net positive.
You can see for yourself the words which are blocked (content warning, link here). Note that it doesn’t include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people. If you want to use any of these words, then please stay on one of the many platforms that permit them. Lemmy is not for you, and we don’t want you here.
We are fully aware that the slur filter is not perfect. It is made for American English, and can give false positives in other languages or dialects. We are totally willing to fix such problems on a case by case basis, simply open an issue in our repo with a description of the problem.
The slur filter is certainly not perfect, but so far it has been very effective at preventing bigots from using Lemmy. If anyone has a better idea how to achieve that goal, we will definitely consider it.
What if the filter sends a notification to the communities admins, so then they can read it and decide for themselves if it deserves a ban or not? It would require human moderation but it’s an idea.
I agree it would be more efficient in general, but it would allow the creation of spaces dedicated for people ok with using those words. And I do agree with the “clear net positive” of preventing creation of the accounts and communities here.
The idea is to ensure the maintenance in every instance built. Moderators here are not the same as other instances. The software could be used for really bad things.
Well, I don’t think that’s the problem, though, anyone could literally use Lenny which is Lemmy without the slur filter, so if people in other instances want to take that route they already can. The important thing that could cause issues with this idea is that A. You need active moderators in all communities who are willing to cooperate in this and B. The instance admins need to want this, too.
Lenny is the proof that it works. They were forced to fork it and remove it by hand and even to maintain backporting every time which could lead into incompatibilities and slow maintenance.
It is proof that it doesn’t work. They managed to remove it pretty trivially.
Open-source software is supposed to serve its user, not your political goals, no matter how holy said political goals are.