If anyone’s interested, seeing this post on HN is what inspired me to create my account today. I enjoy the Reddit model but I feel like Reddit.com was significantly flawed. I’ve been interested in a solid alternative passively.
Glad to have you!
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Don’t know much about the slur filters myself, but it does make me wonder about the type of characters that would fight so hard to allow the use of more slurs.
Some of the complaints are that the filter is too trigger-happy, and that it doesn’t (or didn’t until it was patched) respect languages other than English. Problems with this sort of filtering are known since at least 1996, when AOL banned the entire town of Scunthorpe. It’s one thing to consider this a reasonable price to pay for keeping nazis out, but it’s disingenuous to say that everyone who doesn’t agree must be a nazi themselves.
I have defended the word filter here on numerous occasions, but I think not having a word filter is an equally valid design choice, for the reasons you have cited - as long as the human moderators keep on top of it.
Yeah, I sure understand that moderators don’t want to waste time putting out fires, and the devs don’t want to risk their work would be associated with fascists. It’s just that it isn’t at all obvious for a random user who just wants to post.
Honestly, I’m tired of discussions of Lemmy from outside the Lemmy community. It’s always the same stuff: “blah blah slur filter so use Lenny, blah blah against free speech, blah blah full of leftists and not centrists like me, blah blah admins are anti-diversity.” For as much as HN complains about Reddit sometimes, these HN comments essentially mirror Reddit comments about Lemmy.
All these topics have been done to death at this point, but it’s even worse when it’s clear that some of these people aren’t even a part of the community and yet there they are criticizing it in the same way everyone else has already.
It would just be nice to see discussions and criticisms of Lemmy from other angles. Something like talking about its place in the current iteration of the Web, or about its UX, or even its community, but from an non-reactionary angle. To me, Lemmy is an experiment, a social one that’s currently seeing how communities form and change through federation, moderation, and community feedback. It’s not perfect, but dismissing it as a project and experiment just because of something as simple as a slur filter is reductive and ridiculous, to be quite honestly.
Ultimately, though, I’m not obligated to read what these people write, and they’re not obligated to write how I want, so my complaints are useless, unproductive, and mostly me being defensive because of criticism thrown toward a community that I’m a part of. Still, though, it would just be nice to have something more refreshing.
I’m not sure you’ll find productive discussions about Lemmy outside of the fediverse. Understanding the paradigm sort of requires one to use it to really see how it works. And the idea of federating in and of itself connotes a certain style of politics.
Successful fedi sites are heavy on personal responsibility to your community and active discussion with people you regularly interact with. On web 2.0 sites you are incentivised to interact with content creators and power users. The average reddit/youtube/etc user barely ever interacts with people that they know nor feel any responsibility toward them. Imo, this is why the fedi has been particularly attractive to anarchists.
Maybe the website needs to have some sort of FAQ, something like the wayland faq, Wayland was another “controversial” tech which had a lot of critics some of them having poorly based criticism but all the advocacy and seeing it mature probably made a difference and now i don’t really see it criticized .
account42 4 hours ago [–]
https://github.com/innereq/lenny#the-lemmy-problem
Having more users isn’t going to help if the core developers are anti-diversity.
Lol, imagine being that fucking stupid that thinking that adding a slur filter to make the job harder for alt right and proud boys to create instances is antidiversity. Fuck you account42.
so in a nutshell, they forked Lemmy to something called “Lenny” because they wanted to use the n word? I have no words…
If you bother to check the instance Lenny was created for, you would’ve known that it’s a Russian instance that largely post furry shit so no, they didn’t create a fork because they “wanted to use the n word”.
I went to the “flagship” lenny instance when this fork was created and (you are not gonna believe this) a large majority of the comments were flaunting not being censored by the now-removed slur filter.
so in a nutshell, they forked Lemmy to something called “Lenny” because they wanted to use the n word? I have no words…
this feels like a straw-man representation of what is being said. I am not saying I agree with everything or even disagree with everything that is being said on HN but I think it is healthy to have code & policies critiqued from both inside and outside Lemmy. We don’t have to agree with them and as the devs have pointed out it is trivial to fork and modify the lemmy code. Writing off the entirety of what is being said doesn’t seem healthy for lemmy in the long run. I think it is useful for us as a community to listen to outside voices in good faith ( again we don’t have to make changes or think they are correct ). For instance , some of the comments about making it easier to add specific slurs to the slur filter seem valid to me and to the devs ( given they they merged in a PR to do so ). I guess I am responding to more than just this comment. I hope Lemmy doesn’t turn into an us v. them community where we write off the them so easily.
As expected from Hacker News the comments are absolute garbage
(ᅌᴗᅌ* ) I can agree with the chuds on one thing. We don’t need them here.
There’s a lot of comedy gold in that thread, from the person quoting Sun Tzu, to the person complaining that https://join-lemmy.org isn’t like reddit’s front page.
Found it:
nicbou 10 hours ago [–]
My options are “Run a server” and “Join a server”
This is not an alternative to reddit, where you would see a front page with content on it.
The reddit approach to content: Here comes the airpwane! Bwwwwwwrrrrrrr 🛬
The Hacker News’ comment section makes me sick…
I find it really sad that even on an relatively “enlightened” community like Hacker News (say what you want, but there are far worse, including most of Reddit), the comments are immediately shifted to some largely irrelevant aspect of the software and partisan politics.
If anything this shows how successful the alt-right campaign to shift the Overton Window has been in recent years and also how much the liberals and many leftists (and certainly most of the Fediverse) has fallen into their trap with hysterical counter-measures that ultimately proofed to be counter-productive for the most part :(
Every post about lemmy invariably descends into criticism of us 2 devs leftist politics. Its a spectre that won’t go away even tho we plan on externalizing the existing slurs ( an externalized slur filter has already been in lemmy for months ).
Yeah, it is odd how much weight is put into the slur filter and how quickly the discussion gets to the slur filter when the code is open source. I wish the discussion was focused past that and on more constructive issues but \ ’ ’ / . I imagine it is more of a vocal minority commenting in the thread on these topics. It will be interesting to see if there is an influx of users.
Do not remove the hard-coded slur filter! I am a serious person, I do not use slurs I do not use the F word, when I get angry at someone I give constructive criticism or just don’t reply. Trolls are not serious people, so each time you accommodate a troll, you alienate another serious individual. Do not capitulate to trolls! nobody who has anything serious to say will need slurs to do it.
externalized slur filter
What does this mean?
A few months ago we added a config that allows you to add additional slurs to be filtered, that aren’t in the existing hard-coded list: https://github.com/lemmynet/lemmy/blob/main/config/config.hjson#L93
Oh ok. I was worried for a second that the entirely of the filter was being moved to an external configuration.
Also I literally just now ran into this issue. If I try to go to https://lemmy.ml/inbox I get a 502 gateway error. But it works fine if I first go to https://lemmy.ml and click on the notification bell. Do you know anything about this? Let me know if you want me to create an issue for this.
Oh ok. I was worried for a second that the entirely of the filter was being moved to an external configuration.
I really don’t like it either, but I think this is the way we’re going, for the next major release. We’ll of course apply that existing list to this instance, and possibly have that list in the default config.
I really don’t want to remove it, because every time I’m tempted to, I realize that its one less bigoted group that’s going to use lemmy. But now that lemmy has grown a bit, it seems that they’re avoiding us anyway. Most importantly we have a core cluster of instances now that are all devoted to enforcing the no-bigotry policy. That’s enough momentum (i think), to be able to remove it without worrying too much.
I’ve honestly never been bothered by the filter and don’t see the point of removing it when the only people wringing their hands over it are toxic. There’s another site running lemmy that added mandatory pronouns (+neopronouns) and some people threw such a giant fit over it that you immediately knew who to avoid. It’s like a canary for user morality.
I think not removing it fine but that is just my opinion. One thing that can be done is remove words that cause issues in non-English languages.
My opinion about the filter is a bit idealistic because it does keep a certain kind of people of the platform but it would hinder adoption. You should just ponder over it every three or six months with the other dev.
Ahh the other issue I’m not sure about, ya make an issue on lemmy-ui, I’ll probably have to pull down the DB to test this locally, because I’m not getting it for my user.
