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.
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Software is inherently political; especially something like this that serves as a communication platform. Developers do have responsibility for not only their own choices ( such as for example choosing to embed trackers in their apps and selling that user data, which is a political decision ), but also how their projects are used by others.
Take ruqqus for instance. I don’t need to look at the code to know their politics, I only have to look at the types of communities they allow (CW) to know that its a bigoted platform.
I think as a broad statement taken as written this cannot be true. I think the lemmy developers have made a small effort to dissuade people with a certain odious mindset from using their software and that’s laudable. But would the lemmy developers really be responsible if I (for an extreme example) used a lemmy instance (unmodified, even) to organize and eventually carry out a lynching? To me, that would be an absurd notion. Software developers aren’t gods; they have no control over what people do with the tools they make and they cannot predict all of the complex outcomes that arise from the interaction of software they write and (potentially) billions of people. Software developers can build their best intentions into their tools which the lemmy developers do, and their responsibility as software developers ends there as far as I’m concerned.
And this is fine! Software, and computing in general, doesn’t exist in a vacuum and can neither solve nor create societal problems by itself. (I don’t think you or anyone else has said otherwise, it’s just worth pointing out.)
Edited to add: of course, being a community administrator comes with a different set of ethical concerns.
I can completely understand that you’d want to keep heinous people from using your software, but I really hope we’ll consider developing ways to empower users and admins to reject instances and users deemed harmful, instead of wasting time and resources in to developing some sort of global, mandated, hardcoded slur filter. The prospect of fitting and maintaining some wildy conflicting 100 languages in it is begging for this to be configurable on a per instance basis instead. With perhaps suggested defaults during the installation process.
And if you believe in the four freedoms, you’ll have to concede that the bad people find it as well. Mastodon drove out Gab, and I’m sure Lemmy will succeed in similar efforts.
This can always be re-evaluated later, but in lemmy’s early growth period, especially when new instances are just getting started up and established, it really helps with building a healthy culture. When a collection of popular instances federating with each other dominate, then we can have the same ability that mastodon does in excising tumors like gab. But masto and its main instances are much more mature than lemmy currently is.
I’m not convinced a hardcoded slur filter does much to deter bad actors from running their instances with it patched out. But I trust in you when you say it shows benefits and I hope it’ll be around only for as long as we don’t have more sophisticated solutions.
Free software is already political.
Thats your opinion. We have a different opinion on this, as we described above.
Politics is always baked inside code. You’re allowing slurs to be used by not including filter in your code? Yep, that’s a political choice. You may not be willing to admit it, but you’ve made a political choice. Just because it’s the one you like doesn’t mean it’s a “norm” or a “standard”.
They are responsible though. Anyone who creates technology should consider how it could be used and implement features for safety.
The consequence of not taking a stance to protect the targets of fascist rhetoric and violence is that you quickly get a space dominated by fascists. And the consequence of that is your project needs to be shut down or abandoned.
Take a look around at platforms like Parler, Voat, and Gab for some real world examples. The slur filter is completely justified. The developers should receive community support for recognising and taking on their responsibility.
it’s pretty much inevitable until an instance pops up that harbours fascists or whatever, all that can be done is to not federate with them, and a little bit of inconvenience to make life harder for them isn’t that big of a sacrifice
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Then you should respect the free will of Lemmy developers and users to have a slur filter.
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Respecting the free will of fascists to spread fascist ideas isn’t good and should not be done.
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Yes. We don’t want fascists to have the freedom to spread their hate on this platform.
Yup, limiting the freedom of fascists is okay, lest they spread their fascist ideas.
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“Free will” is the concept that someone chooses to do what they want instead of it being pre-determined by the universe. It has nothing to do with whether other people want to tolerate or allow them to do it or not.
I think you and I are on the same page
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no system of rules can ever hope to accommodate and perfectly resolve any possible situation
but resisting fascism online leads to more positive outcome than allowing it
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