The stated reason for not removing it or making it configurable was "to make it as difficult as possible for far right instances to use Lemmy", but all it really seems to have resulted in is a dozen or so forks dedicated to removing the slur filter and at least one missed customer who doesn't like dealing with "computer says no" nonsense (by which I mean me, I always like trying out fedi tools).
It eventually did get configurable if memory serves me right, but that took several years. I'm sure there's more, these sorts of ideology driven projects always end up with similarly crappy anti-features.
This seems to be along similar lines (though considering how other Reddit alternatives ended up, I guess that's fair enough!)
Can't work with someone who is radicalized, they tend to take criticism as attacks and will attack back, sometimes preemptively if they get paranoid and start seeing ghosts.
In those cases only use it if you can maintain it and fork it. Because you can't trust that someone with so extreme political views will not remove the software because they don't agree with whatever downstream group using it.
Makes sense, but it might as well not be the case.
I guess it depends in exactly what they believe and how they think it should be achieved, since I've met people who were extreme in their positions, but capable of accepting others and staunch critics of their side.
Thinking about it, I guess the main difference with these two guys was that they didn't preach and were old as hell. Probably age earned wisdom, who knows.
With federated services, then at very least the people making the technical decisions around the protocols should try to be politically neutral.
The cost of the actual implementation being under the control of political idealogues is less, since forking doesn't impact the API - but it's still not desireable.