Edit: I’ve been schooled in the comments, this is no longer a thing, they’ve relented and allowed more control over the censor list. But hey, it’s kinda funny still, so, feel free to keep reading if you like…
Original post follows.
Coming here from the Great #RedditMigration. When all of the alternatives were being discussed, one thing I noticed was that Lemmy seems to have one single global slur list that’s literally hard-coded into the software. Your only option (as a server admin) is to either enable or disable it, but the words it’s going to block are permanent and unchangeable unless you can talk the devs into updating the regex for the next release.
And I checked out some of their GitHub issues, and the devs seem almost militantly defensive of this. Like, they are not entertaining any suggestions at all to make it editable. Their actual solution is, if you don’t like it, fork the repo and change it your own damn self, but we’re not touching it, go piss up a rope. Don’t mind one of the words they don’t like? Too bad. English word is perfectly innocuous in your language? Piss off. Want to block the equivalent Djiboutian words? Believe it or not, go to hell.
Seems like such a weird hill to die on. And this is concerning as the lemmyverse is just taking off. This just seems like such an easy and obvious thing to make configurable for all kinds of reasons, and they’re just closing down tickets. Not even a “don’t have time right now but we’ll put it in the backlog and get there soon”. Just, nope.
So anyways. I dunno where I’m going with this really. I’m not in a position to really do anything about it. So this is just a rant I guess. But if the main devs of this thing we’re all migrating to are this… I dunno, arrogant? Opinionated?.. already, then what’s gonna happen later when there are actual real issues that need addressed? We’re leaving one spezhole and going straight to another?
Spez is a symptom of reddit’s problem, not the problem itself. Put someone in who wants to help the users more than the investors, and the investors will just kick them out. Which is why I’m more sympathetic to the Marxists around here.
So far as a ban list goes, it’s better to be hard-coded than a database call for performance reasons, and if it stops 95% of bad actors, that’d be a good thing. Problem is that it won’t, they’ll find a way around the regex. So yeah, this is something that should be handled by mods or communities.
It provides a minor inconvenience to people wanting to set up alt-right instances, and makes them feel unwelcome, so maybe that’s enough to justify it’s existence.