Recently there have been some discussions about the political stances of the Lemmy developers and site admins. To clear up some misconceptions: Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others. While @dessalines and I are communists, we take decisions collectively, and don’t demand that anyone adopt our views or convert to our ideologies. We wouldn’t devote so much time to building a federated site otherwise.
What’s important to us is that you follow the site rules and Code of Conduct. Meaning primarily, no-bigotry, and being respectful towards others. As long as that is the case, we can get along perfectly fine.
In general we are open for constructive feedback, so please contact any member of the admin team if you have an idea how to improve Lemmy.
Slur Filter
We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy. Not so much on lemmy.ml itself, but whenever Lemmy is recommended elsewhere, a few usual suspects keep bringing it up. To these people we say the following: we are using the slur filter as a tool to keep a friendly atmosphere, and prevent racists, sexists and other bigots from using Lemmy. Its existence alone has lead many of them to not make an account, or run an instance: a clear net positive.
You can see for yourself the words which are blocked (content warning, link here). Note that it doesn’t include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people. If you want to use any of these words, then please stay on one of the many platforms that permit them. Lemmy is not for you, and we don’t want you here.
We are fully aware that the slur filter is not perfect. It is made for American English, and can give false positives in other languages or dialects. We are totally willing to fix such problems on a case by case basis, simply open an issue in our repo with a description of the problem.
Although I’m more right-leaning than left, I personally think it’s great that the people leading lemmy are communists, anarchists, etc. I think it helps provide a counter-balance to the more right leaning groups trying to avoid mainstream social media.
I like the idea of a slur filter as a moderation tool for any instance I am a part of, but I feel like it goes against the whole purpose of federated social media. Isn’t the point of federated stuff that you are free of centralized control, with the freedom to pick an instance which suits your desires? It seems wrong to impose any moderation, no matter how justified, on an entire federated platform.
Generally though, I love this platform! Thanks so much for all your hard work!
I’m clearly “left-leaning”, so I might be biased, but I don’t agree with your criticism toward the slur filter : the project is open source, and as such people wanting to use these slur can work they way to another version. The devs explain here a clear intention to make this change difficult enough to prevent at least partially the migration of some communities they don’t want to support and/or give a platform to. I think that’s an honest way to do things ?
It also open up the debate on free speech and how saying some things actively attacks fundamental rights of others. In those cases, defending free speech as a “right” becomes irrelevant since both sides of the debate can use this logic to defend opposing actions. Trying to be short here, hope you understand what I mean !
The devs explain here a clear intention to make this change difficult enough to prevent at least partially the migration of some communities they don’t want to support and/or give a platform to.
I’m happy it’s becoming harder for neonazis to find a home online, however i’m not happy that this makes lemmy english-centric, and i’m not happy that honest discussion about some topics (including thoughtful criticism) will be made harder.
Related example: on another message board a few weeks back i couldn’t post a message containing my criticism of “bitcoin” because bitcoin was part of the slur filter to filter out the crypto-capitalist clique… i understand and appreciate why it was put in place, but i felt really powerless as a user that a machine who lacks understanding of the context of me using this word, decided i had no right to post it. I appreciate strong moderation, but i don’t trust machine to police/judge our activities.
I quite agree with you that moderation is hardly a machine job, and not saying it is the perfect solution. It sure as it’s drawback. I am just arguing that the benefits outweigh them. I would prefer to be in a world where there are not needed, be as of the world today, I admit I prefer having this filter rather than not having it, mostly because of the systemic effects I explained.
I agree that the relevance of he content of the filter can be discussed too, and that banning some words can make it difficult to discuss certain topics. But I think some words are almost always meant to harm, and can be easily replace by more positive or neutral term.
As a direct example : I can talk in this post about homosexuality, and I can event paraphrase to talk about the way some f word is used as a slur for it and how I think allowing it here isn’t a good idea in my opinion. See, I can talk about it, be respectful about it. I just prevent to call you a [insert here whatever banned slur] pretending to use my free speech.
That’s the defence of the “slur filter” that everyone can agree on. It’s harmless because it does almost nothing. It has no real benefit or cost.
The people who say it deters fascists - it just doesn’t hold water.#
I prefer having this filter rather than not having it, mostly because of the systemic effects I explained.
That’s also the case for me, in case that was not clear :)
I think some words are almost always meant to harm, and can be easily replace by more positive or neutral term.
I don’t think it’s that easy, because of the context. Should all usage of the n***** word by black people be prevented? Should all usage of w****/b**** words by queer/femmes folks in a sex-positive context be prevented? etc… I agree with you using these words is most times inappropriate and we can find better words for that, however white male technologists have a long history of dictating how the software can be used (and who it’s for) and i believe there’s something wrong in that power dynamic in and of itself. It’s not uncommon that measures of control introduced “to protect the oppressed” turn into serious popular repression.
Still, like i said i like this filter in practice, and it’s part of the reason i’m here (no fascism policy). As a militant antifascist AFK, i need to reflect on this and ponder whether automatic censorship is ok in the name of antifascism: it seems pretty efficient so far, if only as a psychological barrier. And i strongly believe we should moderate speech and advertise why we consider certain words/concepts to be mental barriers, but i’m really bothered on an ethical level to just dismiss content without human interaction. Isn’t that precisely what we critique in Youtube/Facebook/etc? I’m not exactly placing these examples on the same level as a slur filter though ;)
As often in cool debate, I think in the end we mostly agree. I especially agree with you on the point that reclaiming a word is a valid way of using some slur, and that it should not be to a privileged group to choose when a word is ok or not. On this point I have to point out that this is still the case with manual moderation, if most moderator are privileged. So I agree that diversity should be push in all places of power, and all decision are better made (and more legitimate) with a diversity in the group that make them.
But on the automated part, I really think the psychological aspect is strong and should be questioned. You talk about “human interaction” but this definition is really hard non only to define, but also to defend as an efficient way of reaching you goals. I am quite sure that when the devs made their filter, there was quite a lot of human interaction and debate around it, and the simple fact the put one show that they interacted with other people around them. And is a “manual” moderation a human interaction when you don’t see or know the person, don’t know their culture, the context, their tone, etc. Moderation will never be perfect, will always involve bad decisions, errors. When errors are mades “directly” by humans, compassion and empathy help us to try and understand before judging (but judging nonetheless in the end don’t get me wrong). Why is it so different when an automated system (created by an imperfect human) ? Why is an automated error worse than a human one if the consequences are the same ?
Long story short, I don’t like thinking along great principles like “automated moderation is dangerous”, but rather try analyze the situation and think : would this place be better if there was not this automated moderation ? I agree that this is a wide and difficult debate one what is “better” of course, but the focus should always be this one : how to make things better.
Thank you so much for your answer, i’m not used to debate online because I didn’t feel at ease anywhere else before, but I love it and it is thanks to people like you and all the other interesting answers I get that I can enjoy that and think about it so much ! Thank you thank you <3 !!
(edit : typo)
Thanks for your comment, I’m really happy to read something like this. I’m glad that people can really get along here :)
I think it helps provide a counter-balance to the more right leaning groups trying to avoid mainstream social media.
I think this point is important regardless of political spectrum. Lots of really nasty people have migrated to alternative platforms so that they can be nasty, but I’m glad Lemmy makes it clear enough that it’s not one of their nasty spaces.
Ideological freedom encourages nasty people. And restrictions encourage thoughtless people.
You can go on notabug and ignore the crazy psychos and chat with the creative people.
You can go on reddit and find endless people with no independent thought, repeating things and not listening to reach other.
Lemmy is in the middle. But IMO that’s not an objective good thing, it’s a preference.
False dilemma, no?
So as @PP44 is saying, it’s open source. The devs work to make sure that anyone can set it up straightforwardly to run with their own modifications, not just the main version – and that means modifying the slur filter is also supposed to be straightforward, even though it’s not encouraged. There isn’t actual moderation on the whole platform per se, since two instances can federate even if one has no slur filter. There are lots of “points” to federated stuff, though, so the existence of a slur filter works well to help keep Lemmy from attracting the cesspool-types while still enjoying those other benefits.
Seeing the pile of comments on here, I just wanna go out of my way to say I think the slur filter is a great idea. Fascists will appropriate any leeway they’re given regardless of the ideological motivations under which said leeway is provided
And developed by people who hate the fact that you’re alive!
A comment about Lemmy I saw on Reddit. The slur filter really pulls its weight and keeps the bigots out, it was a great idea.
Every time we get recommendations to remove the filter I think of this. These bigots end up staying on reddit, or moving to other bigoted platforms, and avoid lemmy, making our lives a LOT easier :smiling face: . I could care less about “growth” if that growth means an influx of disgusting racists. I’d much rather have a smaller, positive community that defends members of targeted communities.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this stance!
I think the slur filter is a brilliant idea, especially given the type of person it seems to bother most, and this site feels a lot less toxic than other online communities, probably as a direct result.
I could care less about “growth” if that growth means an influx of disgusting racists. I’d much rather have a smaller, positive community that defends members of targeted communities.
You have no idea how good it is to see this attitude from the central developers of the platform. How much better wouldn’t the world be if more people were thinking like this? Kudos to you all!
I keep saying this: the very existence of the slur filter, even though it’s actually trivial to remove or modify, acts like an alt-right/MAGA/bigot/freeze-peach repellent even though it’s trivial to remove or modify. Just look at the types of people on /r/RedditAlternatives who say they’ll never go to Lemmy because of this, and what their priorities on platforms they’re actually interested in are. To me, that’s half the battle.
“We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy.”
- The funniest and most ironic thing about this is that the same people who criticize the filter are the first to insult you… These people already have a home. That home is called Reddit. And even if they’re more fascist, they’d better use Gab. But no, this social network better not be corrupted. Lemmy is a very healthy social network. People are friendly, curious and intelligent. It sounds a bit cliché, but it’s the truth. I like to make comments and posts here. I feel more free to express myself, unlike in Reddit. I just hope the core developers continue to moderate as well as ever, without giving in to pressure from those troublesome users. Keep it up 💪🏽💖
You have obnoxious people on all sides of the debate, including people who avoid listening to foreign ideas by labeling the other sides.
To be honest, nobody knows how the culture would be different under a different sweet of rules, especially the people who act most confident about it.
Social games, that is, sets of rules, are studied under many different disciplines. Things have been tried. Experiments have occurred, papers written. We know some stuff about how different kinds of rulesets work. Sorry if you dont like the fact that others have studied and tested things, but that does not mean you get to deny their knowledge.
Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others.
❤️❤️❤️
In general we are open for constructive feedback
My one big fear right now is that a mod could delete my words, and they would be lost forever.
Sometimes I write long essays here. They are ideas that I think are important and original. I write them so people will be able to read them many years into the future.
It’s important that anything deleted by a mod or an admin can be saved by the creator afterwards.
I’d argue it’s necessary that nothing can ever be fully deleted, if you want people to ever write anything important here.
That’s why historically most of the most important world-change essays were written to newspapers. Once a newspaper is published, it is available forever. It can never be expunged.
I see your problem but I dont think this can be fixed with any rule change or Lemmy feature. It would be possible to let people access posts after they are removed by a mod, but that wont help if your account gets banned. Or if your account gets hacked and deleted. Or if the instance goes down permanently for some reason.
If you are worried about your content disappearing, you should keep backups. For example with an API client which regularly downloads everything to a local file. There is also a feature request for a functionality to export an archive with user data. Even better would be an external service like reveddit.com which reads content from the API and stores it.
I suggest you create a new post to discuss this problem, then more people can give their ideas and opinions.
I’m always the first to start these threads.
But it’s good to remember, we chose Lemmy over sites like notabug because it works better. Some good decisions by the devs created a good website, enabling good discussions, which you just don’t see elsewhere.
Some things like the “slur filter” seem sketchy, but you have to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. They clearly know a couple of things about forum design.
At the same time, it’s important to talk about this stuff. Better ideas usually come from debate.
The question is where you draw your line. Yes you have written rules, but rules are never clear enough not be overstepped or interpreted to the liking of the admins. Most abused rule would be “hateful, hurtful, oppressive remarks”. These are the same rules that made reddit a liberal safe space. If that is your goal, then I deem lemmy redundant.
I ask you concretely what is your stance on reddits ban of:
r/the_donald r/gendercritical r/braincels r/pizzagate r/darknetmarkets
Your answer I have to take as a starting point of where things will be in 1, 2, 3 years, because a development towards abuse of power is almost inevitable.
I can tell you one thing, your username is not acceptable.
Because it has “hitler” in it? because that automatically makes me a fan of him? If that’s all you can answer to my post that’s incredibly sad. Go on living in your little bubble, go on living a life where the main purpose is to identify people to look down on from your little ivory tower of virtue. Congratulations, you’ve created a completely useless project. Bet you think you’re a man of great thought. What makes a man great is going beyond his ego, having original thought and the integrity to stand by it. So literally the opposite of you. Bye.
I don’t see how filtering very few words could annoy anyone, none of them are used in normal circumstances (except b***h I guess).
Instead of filtering the words, you could change them for something nice. Like changing “idiot” for “dork”; sounds like it’d make it fun (and of course, still filtering the worst offenders).
I set up a slur filter first thing when I made r/antifastonetoss – but I left reddit last year, so I don’t know how the discourse progressed after that. But the mod team on AST is composed of various ideologies and marginalised people which was instrumental in setting up a slur filter without seeming like we dictated our vision too much on the community.
We made it to foster a safe environment where people can feel welcome to, and so they feel they have the right to participate. Ultimately it needed some tweaking, because the community used some words a lot and their status as a slur was not entirely clear yet. IIRC we only ended up removing the words id.ot and st.pid from the filter. Overall, it worked well. It did remove a lot of bad actors straight up (fascists and reactionaries who wanted to argue), with very few false-positives.
Even in the case of words that could be used in several ways (homophones mostly), we basically knew how many instances of false-positives and true-positives there was and could decide to filter them on a case-by-case basis. Of course if you want to deploy this to a whole project and its future instances, it’s a different question.
It’s a dialogue between your users and your vision. I firmly believe you get the community you deserve, meaning that your actions as a community manager (or moderator or admin whatever) will shape your community. We removed the words mentioned above because it was causing a lot of frustration and we never had someone write us to say “hey I’m glad you filter these two specific words”. Or even after removing them, we never had someone say “I prefered when they were filtered because I feel targeted”. Lacking a proper audit of our community, this was our way to gauge . So in the end it removed some frustration and the users were overall happier that they could use these two words, even if I personally believe there are other words that work just as well. We felt we were driving people away and it was counterproductive to keep them in when it was having 0 noticeable benefits. Of course this doesn’t work for every word lol. I’m reminded of the “t-word” debate on animemes and in this case I think they were right to ban it.
Yes, some words have been reclaimed. And not everyone considers the same words to be slurs. What we did was err on the side of caution, and figure that words that have been reclaimed were allowed because there was only a very small chance of someone using it disparagingly – and if they did they would usually be mocked in the comments. Of course though this applied to a subreddit where a) we live with fascists on the whole site (one of the reasons I left reddit altogether) and b) our community was already mostly aware of these issues and knew not to push the buttons. We could also trust them to push back against people using these words as slurs, as did the mod team.
As for words that some didn’t consider a slur when it applied to them, we kept them in if the status was unclear. Because while some people didn’t think it was a slur and laughed about the word, others did consider it a slur, and we took the stance of doing more good than harm which was to ban the word.
We also allowed people to censor the words with some characters (asterisks aren’t ideal because markdown uses them), YMMV. We figured that in most cases a censor would be enough not to trigger anything but we’d see if someone would mail us to say censors are not enough for them. Ultimately nobody did, so we kept it like this because
There’s also one other very important benefit to a slur filter: not only does it frustrate fascists so much that they just stop writing (and their comments are not seen, that’s a win-win), but the filter also helps keep conversations level-headed. I don’t want to be a lib and worship peace, but in our project it was important that people could get along and focus their anger at stonetoss, not at each other. If your comment gets removed because you didn’t think and used a slur, it would get removed, and you’d get a private message telling you which word you used and to please censor it or delete it. That also gave them time to think about what they really wanted to say, because often you realize after writing your comment that you don’t really care all that much and what is even the point of sending it?
People circumventing the filter was never an issue, except to fascists who would get banned for other reasons. We did take a no-nonsense policy on this and flat out said in the private mail that circumventing the filter on purpose will result in a permanent ban. Most of the time if there was any issue, it was people not understanding how some word was a slur, but after explaining it they usually understood. That’s why people – in this particular community at least – didn’t circumvent the filter; they understood to some extent that the word wasn’t a good one to use. And really it’s easier to put in an asterisk or period than to try and make it go through.
But I wanted a slur filter day one on antifastonetoss to make people understand what kind of community we wanted. We didn’t want the edgy teens, we didn’t want the cryptofash, we didn’t even want the libs. We wanted leftist people who wanted to really hurt a fascist and could remain respectful between themselves. We wanted people who had some amount of knowledge about these issues in the first place because again, you get the community you build. Of course we had no issues with newcomers and understood that some people had no idea about fascism (which is why I wrote some articles for the subreddit) or that they may not understand why we had a filter, and we were prepared to explain that with the help of the more knowledgeable part of the community.
As a Scottish person, I’ve been tripped up by the slur filter only twice. Once was when I used the c word to describe Dominic Raab (I still stand by that), and the other was when I used twit by with an A instead of an I. I genuinely had no idea that it actually meant vagina! I’ve heard it since I was a child and had no idea what it actually meant.
Still, you can’t really complain about it, it’s more of a trivial thing to people who aren’t being offensive.
I like how the slur filter is described here:
“Note that it doesn’t include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people.”
but I guess the devil is in the details. Where do I see the actual words that are being blocked? When I clicked on the link I just saw a page of code which I cannot understand.
Lemmy is a fabulous creation - keep up the good work. I am excited to see what the future holds for Lemmy.
I dont know if the slur filter for lemmy.ml is posted publicly anywhere, but its just insults which no one would use in normal conversation. Also, each instance can define their own filter, or disable it completely.
