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.
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.