the developers of Lemmy are not assholes

A-holes, perhaps they are not, specifically. But their stance on this antifeature is a very jerk-like move, on their end.

[Lenny is] a fork that [doesn’t] work well and isn’t Fediverse

Ooh interesting! There are key differences between Lenny and Lemmy? What functionality does Lemmy have that Lenny is missing?

I can see them trying to block Lenny sometime in the future tho

Heh well if you think blocking a small list of words will keep people from saying alt-right things, I can’t help ya, buddy.

If you want to prune extremism from a platform just moderate your spaces properly.

I’m not arguing against moderation, I’m just saying that maybe a communication platform shouldn’t have hard coded word bans 🤷🏾‍♂️

I’m not against automated tools for moderation, I actually support them and advocate for that feature to be added to Mastodon and Pleroma. But it should be an easily customize feature disabled by default that allows instances to pick whatever words they want to ban, or to not ban words at all.

I feel like being able to say whatever words you want isn’t too much to ask for but here we are! 😂

Does federation between Lemmy and Lenny not work properly?

You probably know better than that, Lemmy bans curse words as well as slurs. This limits the shareability of news articles, is more of an encumbrance and inconvenience to the end user than anything else

Open communication requires people to be comfortable.

This is false. Open communication requires that communication be unrestricted, or with as little restrictions as possible.

Sounds like a lot to me! It allows for fewer restraints while posting.

Lemmy is okay, but it won’t be a completely usable tool until it allows open communication, which the devs are opposed to.