Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
I meant the slur filter. Honestly, I hadn’t heard about the other issues - but having seen what I’ve seen of Dessalines, I’m not really surprised.
Goddammit, I just want to enjoy some social media without the enshittifacation bullshit. And I know many people in my life who would also be interested - but I can’t in good faith recommend this in the current state. Why does it have to be so hard…
Literally every person that I’ve ever recommended this space to irl has outright chided me for having done so. And eventually I saw that they were correct to have done so.
It did not help that (1) a Google search (remember, I’m talking to mainstream normies here, okay?) for “Lemmy” at that time returned Lemmy.ml (nowadays it shows Lemmy.world iirc, but a year or so ago it behaved differently), (2) the default sort for Lemmy.ml is different than most instances, and instead of showing Global it shows only Local, (3) combine this with fluctuations that seems to occur just before any Western election and you get a feed that is very different from what 99% of us here experience for ourselves. Unfiltered Lemmy in this manner is truly bOtH sIdEs SaMe bullshit (of the kind that lets just say discouraged voting for Kamala Harris), and virtually nothing else (again, showing LOCAL rather than GLOBAL on Lemmy.ml).
Mainstream non-technical normal folks are never going to come over to “Lemmy”. It simply has too much historical baggage - and this on top of the continued toxicity still existing in the present. Just one conversation with a hexbear user… by a white, Christian, straight, centrist, “normal” (/mainstream) person is enough to send most of them back to Reddit (or sometimes Bluesky). Whereupon they bitterly complain about us here, warning others against making the same mistake. Oh and yeah they take their OC with them.
Some even stuck around here for a LONG time - like a year or more. Before they too succumbed and went back. I don’t even blame them, and presume that when (not even an “if” in my mind) Donald Trump refuses to step down and this place becomes an absolute shitstorm I am very likely to do the same. Tiny Reddit subs are not the same as the large ones, whereas there are virtually no tiny ones here - at least, not enough to take more than 5 minutes a day to fully catch up on.
Incels will never learn that no means NO, rather than that they simply need to push forward even harder. At which point the issue wraps back around to us, who thereby have to answer what we will actually DO about it.
I’m not a fan of the slur filter but all it does is replace slurs with removed, which is different then hiding entire posts/users/communities.
Well it also decides what is a slur entirely without context.
“But what would the context for the N-word be?”
Well, black people can say it, at least black Americans, but that isn’t the only type of “slur.”
It also bans “bitch,” even if you’re just talking about that bitchin’ game you just bought (slang for “awesome”), or a female dog (wouldn’t want to offend dogs ofc), it presumes misogyny without evaluating context.
It does the same with “pussy.” Pussy is a slang term for vagina, and a vulgar one at that, but are “slang terms for vagina” themselves “slurs?” I’d argue not, even being sexist and reducing a woman to only her body parts by calling her “a hole” isn’t “a slur” (and it’s only ok during sex, and if she is into that sort of thing. More are than you’d think tbh…). BUT what’s more “pussy” itself when applied to a weak cowardly person IS NOT saying “you’re like a weak cowardly woman,” it’s short for the oft forgotten word:
While it does say “manly” in the second definition, it comes from the latin word “pusillus” (very small) which is related to “pusus” (boy), the comparison isn’t “manly vs womanly” it’s “manly vs child-like (boy).”
So “pussy” itself is IMO “a slur” in no context across either of its entirely separate definitions, though it can be used in a sexist manner just like “dishwasher” can be, so I guess they need to add that too.
It also makes me sound worse lol, if I say “you’re acting like a removed,” did I just call them a bitch? A pussy? The n-word? Who knows, fill in the blank I guess lol, the censor just lets your imagination decide.
Allow me to add something else to your comment: Lemmy slur filter, and similar non-RegEx filters, also suffers from “Scunthorpe problem” (or should I say, “Sremovedhorpe problem”), insofar it replaces every occurrence of the substring, regardless of the surrounding characters.
E.g., the name for the purple fruit used for making wine would be unreadable because it happens to share a substring with the four-letter name denoting non-consented intercourse, which was one of the slurs filtered in the Lemmy-UI.
!fedimemes@feddit.uk