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.
Myself I’m personally not sure what is a slur about the term for a female dog, or a prostitute for that matter. Seems like those words can be used for expressing more than simply misogynist rhetoric, but whatever. Or maybe my belief that the phrase "ain’t that a b**ch* isn’t offensive is outdated. If that’s the case, so be it.
Don’t have much against a slur filter per se, but it will always be controversial, and I don’t necessarily believe some of those who view it negatively are better off not joining. But, it is what it is.
Just because a particular word isn’t offensive to you, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a population that itvs meant to insult. Claiming that you find an insulting term to be fine suggests that anyone who is offended by it is just being overly-sensitive. That’s not a great way to approach looking for methods of reducing insulting speech.
I’m not even implying the words bch or wh* to not be offensive, because they are. I’m saying I’m not sure if those words specifically (out of all the very specific and pointed offensive terms to use towards a certain group or subset of individuals which are also banned on here) are so pointedly offensive to warrant an outright ban on them. I’m also not entirely convinced those words were or ever have been used to disadvantage an entire group of people in the way the words that I feel are justifiable in their banning have been. If anyone feels calling a woman those two terms is on the same level or at all comparable to the other words on the list then I absolutely disagree, even though I also agree that calling a woman either of those terms to be offensive and wrong.
At the same time I feel their use outside of that context warrants allowing them to be used even so. Especially if we’ve decided the term cunt is evidently fair game when to call a woman that would be much further over line than either of those other two banned terms.