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.
While I don’t think it’s that big of a problem in practice, at least not yet, I do fundamentally disagree with this kind of superficial whitewashing. Either you understand what a censored word means and sound it out in your head anyways, or you don’t and are just left confused. This is made worse when quoting, for example, historical texts because the writing style may be so unfamiliar that the meaning of censored words are obfuscated further by the lack of surrounding context. If blanket censorship of certain words are made universal it’ll eventually distort our understanding of history and how language and history have influenced each other. And a poorer understanding of history makes it more likely that we’ll repeat past mistakes.
I also think this is predominantly an artefact of American culture, where the influence of christian fundamentalists have normalized the superficial censorship of swear words. As an atheistic European this has always seemed like a strange and authoritarian approach that does little to address the actual problem, and this impression remains even when extended to words I myself consider insensitive and disrespectful. If you’re an American, I think it would be a good idea to try to consider how authoritarian this appears outside your own culture.
The bottom line is, from my point of view this seems like an authoritarian approach that does little to address the actual problem but causes quite a few other problems. At the very least I’d like to see a clearly argued justification for it. I’m not going to stop using Lemmy, or this instance, just because I disagree with some default though. That really would be ridiculous.
Just to add that I don’t mean to understate the problems that slurs cause either. I just don’t think that immediately reaching for the authoritarian stick is a great idea. It would be worthwhile to try to think about the actual problems and how to best address them in the specific medium we’re in.
So to try to be more constructive, here are a few less authoritarian solutions:
Note that I’m not saying any of these are great solutions either. I’m just trying to illustrate that there’s a wider spectrum of possible solutions out there. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
I would say the main reason for having the slur filter is that it prevents right-wingers from using Lemmy. And it is very successful in that regard.
Is it really? The workaround is a one-line patch file that can be automatically applied to any commit. Not exactly a fool-proof system. I think even right-wingers should be able to figure this one out… eventually.
But if it helps you sleep at night, by all means…
I don’t think there is any metric that would show that the slur filter is working how it is presented here.
All they do is complain. There was one fork, but I think it was discontinued pretty quickly.