Hacker News Reader

Comment by HMH | Hacker News Reader

> Hardcoded slur filter removed

Nice, IMO this shouldn't have been there in the first place, considering its inflexibility and obvious bias to what the devs consider slurs.

View on HN

I've never really understood why more of this kind of thing isn't optional in the _client_ to start with. There's this weird "I'll control everything" default with some of these projects thats just baffling; given the seeming point of distributed/federated systems.

it was a shortcut to cull the lowest effort 4chan-style spam until moderation tools were implemented. the functionality is still there, in fact it's more configurable now

they did it because social media can't get off the ground if it's full of useless garbage. would you read hn if all the comments were just the same word over and over?

Eh, from what I know, it was very much ideological, at least that's what I heard from people I knew working with it.

To quote the dev on this himself:

>And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.

I don’t really think HN would have taken off if there were such heavy handed approaches to moderation in the first place. Further, I don’t believe a lack of this filter would result in “the same word over and over”. What?

One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user freedom. Why would I want to use F/OSS from someone that had such “my way or the highway” opinions about subjective things like how to handle people using bad words?

Edit: wording

> One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user freedom.

I don't think you are talking about the same kind of freedom. FLOSS freedom is the ability to view and edit the source code. Just because the source code does not do what you want does not mean you are not free to fork the project and change the behavior for yourself...

I would argue that just because the source code is available, that doesn't mean the project is in the spirit of free software or respects users.

Imagine if curl just refused to download specific websites. Or if golang refused to compile code at all if it detected certain words in comments.

Sure, yeah, these would be still free software given that the source code is available to edit to one's liking. But it's really not in the spirit of free software & user freedom to impose arbitrary things like this. The free software / open source landscape would be incredibly irritating to work with in general if this sort of hostile attitude to downstream users prevailed.

Interestingly that's how Aether (https://getaether.net/) works: mods don't control rooms unilaterally, they are voted in. If you don't agree with what a mod did, you can disregard whatever action they took. _All_ content is available locally, you only apply the filter you want.

I've never used Aether but I find that way of working very refreshing.

Finally I can start working on Lemmy again without feeling a moral weight in my gut.

Great move on the part of the creators of Lemmy. I know this was a hard thing for them to do, because I know how much they were opposed to removing the filter, but I think this will be a very good thing for Lemmy in the future.

Slur filters are a clbuttic mistake.

This is good news. It does appear that the major Lemmy instances are ran by leftist groups politically and that most of their development comes from the left, which is their own right. I do wonder though if they will take actions at some point to try to censor instances that may disagree with them politically, whether it takes actions to simply disable federation with them or other actions in the software itself.

An instance of Lemmy is free to federate (or not) with other instances on the Fediverse. Each instance can have its own code of conduct. Seems good for everyone.

Censorship seems to be mainly a problem with rightwing outfits like Gab/Parler actively banning people who don't align with the groupthink.

Groupthink is less of an issue with the left, especially those that self-select into an avant-garde space like the fediverse.

What do you mean, inflexibility? The regex is right there for a server admin to edit or disable, that's as flexible as it gets hah..

That means you have to build from source which kinda goes against the spirit of a decentralized network.

Updating the source code of your software goes agains the spirit of a decentralized network? How? The whole point of decentralized networks is that people with different source code/implementations can communicate with each other.

Because it reduces the operators of said networks to people who know how to build rust/etc projects from source. That is limiting and off putting.

Sounds like a business opportunity.

Federated software vendor: we do the dirty work so you can start a new instance with one click.

There are services like that for Mastodon [0]. But a provider that lets you host from a choice of e.g. mastodon, pleroma, lemmy etc would be interesting.

[0]: https://masto.host/

Masto.host is run by one of those people who put inflexible ideology ahead of the wants and needs of their users. That is ever a concern when having a third party set up and manage everything for you.

masto.host has a great deal of restrictive, somewhat arbitrary content moderation policies for what is basically just a server host[0].

Since that the original problem is that admins may want to override built-in censorship policies to suit their instance's needs and values, I don't think an even more censorious centralized authority is a great example of a solution.

[0]: https://masto.host/tos/

I have no affiliation, nor a recommendation. Just noticed that they do provide that service.

Using any hosting provider is ultimately a risk compared to hosting yourself, that's the price you pay for not having the know-how to host it yourself.

And even if you do selfhost, cloudflare may wake up one day and say "nah".

Does that one click also edit the source code?

I suppose users could apply patches and alter configurations? Caveat Emptor: we do not offer customer support for altered source/configs.

That's true, compiling rust is harsh, but we're are talking about server admins and sysadmins here, I have faith that sysadmins will know how to compile and deploy rust.

TIL the Lemmy Server code is written in rust, hell yeah

Do you want your sysadmin to be someone who provably can't build from source?

Yes. That's what the word "operator" means. You need to operate the software that the network depends on, or trust someone who does. You see this a lot of time in the Bitcoin/cryptocurrency community as well, where node operators complain about the changes "forced onto them" by developers. Ultimately, it's a labor problem—if someone else is writing your code for you, and you don't know how to modify it, you're at the mercy of their decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com