Disclaimer: I am a multiply marginalized person on the radical left.
I see various issues with the slur filter.
The biggest one, I feel, is that many, many people in marginalized communities have reclaimed slurs. I’d go as far as to say that some (myself included) strongly identify with reclaimed slurs. The word “queer” is a very common example. Will those who identify with it not be allowed to express themselves fully here? The ban on slurs actually makes me feel far less welcome here as a marginalized person as a part of my identity that I am proud of, embrace, and find power in is banned. Most of my friends with various marginalizations have reclaimed slurs as well and would not feel welcome in this space. The reclamation of slurs can be an essential tool for marginalized people. Who are non-marginalized people to decide which slurs marginalized people are allowed to reclaim? I encourage you to read more about this, because it is incredibly important.
Additionally, the code used to filter slurs is flawed. Does it handle if users use alternate Unicode characters to write slurs? Replacing "O"s with "0"s? Slur filters have been implemented time and time again and the result is always the same: users get more creative in their use of slurs or even invent new ones. There are so many variations of slurs, and language is far too complex for this to be enforced with a simple regex. It’s also critical to consider different languages here. If Lemmy centers English in its slur filtering, it will inadvertently censor non-English words that are not slurs as well as not censoring non-English words that are. Not to mention – centering English is incredibly problematic.
Finally, the code is easily removed, and I speculate that if anything, it will lead to a fork of Lemmy by the alt-right even sooner that will gain significant traction. At the very least, marginalized users such as myself who simply wish to reclaim slurs will have to go through the labour of modifying the code and hosting our own instances.
tldr: as a multiply-marginalized person with experience developing and running community platforms, this is a huge mistake, and will end up alienating many of those that you wish to protect.
Please reconsider this change as it is far more nuanced than it appears on the surface. Thank you.
edit: a simple solution would be to allow individual users the ability to filter out slurs (or phrases, or whatever) that they are uncomfortable with.
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I am not going to stop using Lemmy if the slur filter is not removed but I have to agree a lot, me and all my friends use reapropiated slurs (from Spanish, not English) and it would be really ugly not to be able to use them.
A question: As I understand it, Lemmy is decentralized and federated, so is this as big of a deal as it sounds? Instead of a hard fork, couldn’t someone just host their own instance?
Because the filter is hard coded, you must fork and remove that part in the source code, and then recompile it (Rust compilation is costly in terms of time and memory btw). Then you would have to manually apply patches from upstream whenever there is an update.
TBH, based on the huge amounts of drama about it at chapochat, requiring visible pronouns (including enby-friendly ones) for new users weirds out a lot of rightos. They will outright refuse to use them and incessantly complain about it. It seems like an effective deterrent for everyone but the more determined trolls.
What’s an enby?
non binary equivalent for boy or girl
Maybe it’s an age thing.
I’m sure this terminology makes sense to a lot of people, and I’m sure there’s a good reason for these new ideas. I believe they might be important and there might be an urgency for society to change to be more inclusive of a certain group of people.
But also consider mental energy it would take to keep up to date with these constantly evolving ideas and terms. I can believe it’s an effective deterrent, not only for trolls but for many reasonable people.