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.

  • @xe8@lemmy.ml
    1•3 years ago

    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 @realcaseyrollins@lemmy.ml 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.

    • @realcaseyrollins@lemmy.ml
      0•3 years ago

      You have ironically stated my reason for not by default holding all Lemmy users to the word blacklist in this comment:

      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.