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.
It might be worth to ask volunteers (speaking languages other than english) to help adapt something like https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and-Otherwise-Bad-Words
So far we haven’t seen any fascists/bigots trying to use Lemmy in other languages. And adding more words to the slur filter always increases the risk for false positives, so for now we are trying to keep it short by having it English only. Once we add proper multi language support, we will likely add slur filters for different languages.
At least for Dutch that list doesn’t seem to be very useful, for example it includes “aflebberen” which is just a vulgar way to say frenching. Also there is a PR open to include the shortened version of the homophobic f-slur, which shows it isn’t really maintained. The current regex seems already better because it does include shortened versions and multiples.
Fair enough, I didn’t go through all of them [especially since I don’t speak Dutch :)] The point was that many applications use this kind of list so it could be worth to adapt a more complete one (not that we should use that particular one).
Yeah good point. I see the usefulness in sharing a (regex based) list of slurs for multiple projects