Having a slur filter on a particular forum instance designed and chosen by the admins of that site is a perfectly good idea. They know the character of their forum, they can choose what is and is not appropriate to say.

I think it does display a narrow-minded agenda for the authors of hosting software intended to potentially host a wide variety of forums to declare unilaterally that all sites hosted using their software must use a particular slur filter declared by them, or else create and maintain a fork.

If you read the GitHub issue, the debate was not over its existence, just that instance operators should be able to configure it, which it sounds like they now can anyway (last comment on issue, he said it was added).

There was no need, and is quite malicious, to imply and talk down to their own users/supporters of their software as anything"-ist" in their motivations, which in many cases is considered a more corrosive/ruinous label (court of public opinion) than "convicted criminal" (court of law) in the West.

>it's mainstream

yeah. in China.

I'm LGBT and slurs are used socially within the in-group.

Nevermind the fact that art such as film frequently relies on the use of slurs when dealing with this subject matter.

We aren't protected in real life from being called words. I've certainly had my fair share hurled at me. By having to deal with it both at a young age and in adulthood, I've grown a thick skin and strong defense system.

I worry that this attitude is more dangerous that what is trying to be accomplished.

I'm a black American and I'm honestly sick of white people telling me when I can use the "n-word." I guess if they can't have it, no one can.

> I guess if they can't have it, no one can.

I'm a white american and I think I agree with this. Making sure that only one race of people can say bad words on the internet doesn't seem practical to me. If we don't want some races saying a word, I don't see a way of preventing that which doesn't sacrifice either anonymity or black people being able to say that.

There's only one implementation that I can imagine, and it's pretty impractical and ethically dubious. The idea is to have some kind of verification process to prove that you're a certain race, and somehow publicly store the public keys of people in each category. Then, when someone want to post a word that only some races can say, they submit a zero-knowledge proof that the message was written by someone who controls the private key of one of the public keys in the appropriate category. But I'm pretty sure that a registry of people organized by race is neither practical or desirable.

The only thing this does is make people invent new slurs.

Says the thromrod!

Good points from you and echelon. This (by which I mean hardcoded slur filtering in Lemmy/LemmyBB) is not a good thing. On the other hand, it's obviously within their rights to code such a thing into their own thing.