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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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What role do you think Lemmy developers should have in limiting the way that private instances can be used?
For example, (IIRC) you can't say the n word on any unmodified Lemmy instance—even one that you host yourself. I wonder what other such limitations are currently in place or may be added in the future. Can any open source contributor add such a limitation?
Edit: Regardless of whether you think such limitations are appropriate, I think it's an important question. I also expressed this comment in a neutral manner.
Why would you want to be able to say the n word? Are you racist? Why's your mind go to that first?
I don't care about the n word specifically, but I think it's a good example of something that can be positive or negative depending on the context. There was a similar post about the q word. My concern is more generally about limiting what people can do with their own hardware.
Your style of argument has been used to argue against many different kinds of personal rights and freedoms that most people now recognize as important. It seems that the slur filter was removed a little while ago, but my point still stands.
I have been running an instance without a slur filter for about a year and a half. It is not a big instance, but big enough to have some experience in the field.
In case you are curious, 100% of the many times that I have encountered the n-word in my instance it has been in the context of a very banable offense, and it often requires spending some effort investigating and purging images from the database. The slur filter would block many these federated posts and comments from reaching my instance without the troll/spammer getting any feedback about this.
The filter can be a useful practical tool. The reason I keep it off is because I'm stubborn about not policing the words that people can and can't say. But when I consider what I have experienced and reflect about this, I become more and more skeptical about my choice. The problem is still manageable for my small instance, so I can keep the slur filter off. But I can see that when dealing with this problem at a much larger scale one would want to use any tool at their disposal to make the job easier.
Do you realize that the post you linked is 2 years old and the slur filter is no longer populated by default?
I think the example isn't correct anymore. See this comment.
IIRC this functionality was ripped out a long time ago, instances define their own slur lists now