I remember Lemmy’s devs being adamant on having a hard-coded slur filter (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622). I think it’s been resolved now — not a great way to go about it though.
Or what do you mean with "not a great way to go about it though"? Seems like the following happened:
- Developers implemented something well-intended, poorly-executed
- People pushed back
- Developers changed their mind and disabled the non-customizable slur-filter
Seems that's exactly how you'd want things to go. What's the alternative here that would be better?
The slur filter isn't so much an issue in itself as a red flag -- it makes me wonder what other stunts are they likely to pull.
This is a clear unambiguous example of "well-intended, poorly-executed, then fixed"
From what I've seen, the developers of Lemmy are very political. They run and mod their own instances at lemmy.ml and communism.lemmy.ml, and their moderation has been pretty controversial [2] [3]. But worse, judging by the hard-coded slur filter, they seem to have no issue with mixing up their politics with the platform. Also note that it took quite a bit of pushback to get the slur filter removed, and the devs were not apologetic [4][5]. Who knows what they may add next as an "easy way to keep some groups of users off".
While it's nice that it's federated and open source, the question then becomes, are people prepared to monitor the source code and fork it + maintain it themselves if the devs decide to turn the platform political again?
[1]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/0.16.5/config/config....
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/czae8c
[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/cza14y
[4]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1224#issuecomment-7...
[5]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816#issuecomment-6446...
Whatever political choices they make is their right. People are free to move to other software!
Right, because the developers are "political"?