For those who want to see what the slur filter looked like, it's still in their example config [1]. But even though it's now not included by default, the issue runs a little deeper imo.

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...