Lemmy's team is very politicized, but even then it took significant pushback to change their minds about an issue that the community was decrying for reasons that were almost entirely technical.
It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior.
Maybe they were abrasive in initially fighting the request to make technical changes to the slur filter, but hey when you ask for free enhancements to open source code you either do the work and provide a pull request or be prepared to be told no.
I empathize with their concern about becoming another Voat or Gab. They want federation but they don’t want a Wild West.
The problem is that the stance is incredibly shortsighted and in a way bigoted itself. Take a word filter that contains some regex for n**a. They are saying you should never use slurs and this word in particular in public discourse.
So the word above word is used in lyrics of a music genre with predominantly black musicians. In addition to saying we don't want our software to be used by racists, they also say "we don't want our Software to be used to discuss certain kinds of black music" (arguably a racist stance just by itself). Talk about unintended side effects.
yes, this is one of the trade offs of any system built where one must decide between human moderation/curation vs automating moderation/curation.
if automation is chosen there will absolutely be situations where perfection is impossible. if human’s unparalleled ability to see nuance is chosen then the cost scales along with the amount of information.
the fact is, if we want a community and we want to keep signal above noise, we will need some form of removal of spam, child porn, racism, etc…
automatic tools can’t nuance as well as humans.
then human mods start nuancing and someone will point at stuff and call it biased.
> It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior.
It did not seem to me a politicized discussion but a technical issue with filtering using hardcoded blacklists that are just too prone to the Scunthorpe Problem. Perhaps because too many people in the USA despise the mere existence of other languages :)
I think we have to remember that this isn’t a commercial product, it’s a small project. They had a quick and dirty solution and weren’t willing to abandon it but also weren’t initially willing to put in the time to make a more robust solution.
