Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it needs to be said. It’s a fucking slur filter, the developers have so far only put actual slurs in it, ones whose primary purpose to insult a (usually already marginalized) group of people. Yes, the slur filter is far from perfect and can cause some problems outside stopping those slurs, but I think it’s worth the hassle. It’s also not a general (non-slur) profanity filter which I agree might be going to far, but the amount of profanities in this post prove that’s not being removed. They say it’s against “free speech” that they’re not allowed to be bigoted assholes who drop insults left and right, even though free speech doesn’t even apply to private websites (and hate speech isn’t covered under free speech anyway).
It’s insane how many people are vehemently against Lemmy because of this one feature, but then again, I wouldn’t want any of them on my instance anyway if I ever create my own.
It’s not a profanity filter, it’s words like the n-word that are auto-banned.
Is this just a site policy of lemmy.ml or does the Lemmy software itself not allow this to be modified or disabled? I can understand people wanting it to be configurable, but people who won’t use this site because the filter is in place shouldn’t feel welcome here anyway.
It is hard-coded, but can of course still be changed by the person running the server, even though it has to be done in the source code, and it is not configurable, which is intended and publicly made clear that the original devs don’t want to make it configurable.
Lemmy is good because it is a FOSS Reddit alternative that is not centralized. That’s a really good thing. The way of “soft-forcing” the developers personal view on what a slur is and what is none is a bit odd, but shouldn’t prevent people from doing a fork and make it configurable. I guess most people prefer it that way. And if you ask me, it is a sane thing to do. In fact, hard-coding anything is stupid. Everything should be configurable, at least with a config file, not everything has to have a nice UI with explanations and all that shit. But at least configurable.
I find the slur filter to be bad, both in idea and quality. It removes words even when you meant to write something completely different. It’s a rather simple and blunt filter. If “ass” would be on the slur list, you couldn’t write “pass”, for example.
It actually happened to me, without me realizing. There is no alert or notification, they simply and silently change your post. Also, even after finding out which exact letter sequence was the offending one… I’ve never ever heard of that slur, and it was something that is only a slur in a specific region, and apparently even there not very common. If you can’t read the list, you can’t avoid using the words that count as slurs in other regions of this planet.
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