This seems to be becoming the hot topic, the elephant in the chatroom - the balance between censorship / freedom of speech on lemmy. There are solid arguments for both ways, and good compromises too.

IMO the FAQ makes it quite clear what the devs have built here, and why. But recent discussions, arguments, make it clear that a lot of the most vocal users object to it.

I’m very curious. Many active users feel this way? Please vote using the up arrows in the comments.

    • PyotrGrowpotkin
      257·
      4 years ago

      Anyone who complains about not being able to use slurs is basically outing themselves as assholes as far as I’m concerned.

      • AgreeableLandscape
        161·
        4 years ago

        Exactly. Swear words like shit and fuck aren’t “censored”. The only words in the slur filter are actual slurs, words pretty much specifically meant to insult people, often an already marginalized group. The filter is not perfect and can be problematic with non-English instances, but in those cases, admins can just edit the source code to eliminate the false positives.

      • sia
        61·
        4 years ago

        deleted by creator

      • AgreeableLandscape
        101·
        4 years ago

        Agreed on the list and also it should be be easily admin controllable.

        Except it is. Just not from the frontend. It’s actually extremely easy to search for the slur filter in the source code and edit it (we instructed a Danish instance to do this because some benign words in Danish look like slurs in English). It actually doesn’t take much effort to edit the filter and recompile for a specific instance, and I think if you’re going to be administering a public facing server, you should be able to do that.

        However, most of the freeze peach crowd that actively want to drop slurs (note, not just swear words like shit and fuck, those aren’t “censored”, but slurs, words pretty much specifically meant to insult people, often an already marginalized group) are turned off by the very existence of the slur filter, which I imagine stops a lot of them from coming over. To me, that means the slur filter is mostly effective.

        • realcaseyrollins
          83·
          4 years ago

          Hmm…well if it’s so easily configurable that’s not too bad. It would be nice if you could configure it in the FE tho, but making it easily editable is a HUGE step in the right direction. Good to know that this is the case, ty

    • Whom
      42·
      4 years ago

      Ran into it being pretty silly with applying to removedute and other silly cases.

      But that’s imperfect implementation, not a censorship issue lol.