This seems to be becoming the hot topic, the elephant in the chatroom - the balance between censorship / freedom of speech on lemmy. There are solid arguments for both ways, and good compromises too.
IMO the FAQ makes it quite clear what the devs have built here, and why. But recent discussions, arguments, make it clear that a lot of the most vocal users object to it.
I’m very curious. Many active users feel this way? Please vote using the up arrows in the comments.
At first I wasn’t sure about the slur filter, because I thought it could be a bit of clumsy implementation as it could catch a lot of false positives.
But in practice I haven’t noticed it once. I don’t need to punch down on disadvantaged minority groups and call people slurs, so it’s not a problem. If it did catch me, it could be for some slur I had been using without thinking, in which case I would think about it and stop using that word. If it did catch me for a regular word I’m sure I could easily work around it.
Now I think it’s actually a great piece of social hacking, and I fully support it. It seems to annoy and keep away the right kinds of people.
As @[email protected] said in this thread: “I’m not active here, but I would be if there wasn’t hard-coded censorship on the software”. To me that shows that it’s working.
We don’t need another reddit full of “centrist” free speech warriors. And we certainly don’t need another 4chan, 8chan, gab, voat, or parler.
It’s nice to have at least one place where as a minority you don’t have to wade through a bunch of slurs and insults and be constantly gaslit by the same circular arguments of people trying to convince you they’re fighting for some noble cause.
If a community is to have autonomy it needs some consensus on rules and standards of behavior. If we don’t want to have an authority ruling over us, we need to have responsibility, hold each other accountable, and create an environment where the most vulnerable in our community feel protected and like people are actually going to fight for them.
That’s actually a really good point overall. My issue is with hard coding from a technical point of view. The words to be auto filtered should be in a list with full CRUD capacities managed by who ever put up the server. Or at least a separate confing file. The current implementation is just kind of bad from a technical point of view, raising issues with other languages, since the banned words are not in a clear place.
I think it’s probably important to emphasize at this point that what’s being discussed is essentially a decision about whether or not to put something in a config file. Which is a very different conversation than the grandiose free speech debates some want to have.
If anything, my main issue here is that people can point to this issue and use it as a jumping off point to make “free speech” arguments. It would be good to nip that in the bud.
Exactly this. One problem I’ve noticed - there have been several times where people started threads like these, wanting to have long, fisky, point-by-point debates about everything.
I think it would be extremely helpful to say something to the effect of “this is not a place for The Free Speech Argument.” Even if it’s only applicable to this instance of Lemmy.
I agree, and this is well said. I haven’t found a need to slurs, and I feel that meaningful conversations that play out across paragraphs have more going on than just using slurs, so in practical terms (setting aside slippery slope arguments for a moment), I wonder what sense of values a person is coming from where they feel like that kind of filter is preventing them from expressing their values.
Look. The entire reason people started working on Federation and in general decentralized communication platforms, is that people did not want censorship. If you start censoring people, you defeated the entire point of going federated.
That point is that each community can decide what’s acceptable for themselves, and nobody decides in their name. The slur filter managed to defeat this. Congrats, you made a piece of software that’s just more complex to understand but not actually useful
Actually the part of insults will depend on the moderation. Nothing on the software will impede the user to say “go eat ducks” for example.
Ah! the other day I was thinking I made an account in some reddit alternative years ago but couldn’t remember the name of it. Made like 2 posts until I realized it was just the same kind of politics everywhere.
You have ironically stated my reason for not by default holding all Lemmy users to the word blacklist in this comment:
I don’t think I’m saying what you think I’m saying.
What do you think I think you’re saying?