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.
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.