It’s not as easy as moderating individual posts. Remember, Lemmy is decentralized. If you start your own Lemmy server and I federated with it, I’ll get all the stuff you post on my instance too (intentionally oversimplified).

Its up to you to moderate communities on your instance the way you see fit, and up to me to moderate mine. Even though our instances are federated, I can’t moderate on your behalf. It just isn’t feasible both in terms of the technology and in terms of the sheer volume of content you would have to try to moderate.

If you have a community that posts a mix of things I agree with and things I don’t, I really only have a couple options on my end. Basically I can block that community on my instance or block your instance altogether.

The reason why someone might block a community may be more about the legal risk than any moral justification. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to even host that information. And since Lemmy instances cache posts from other instances, it could be argued that because that community is federated with your instance, you’re responsible for the content posted there.

If you watched the Matrix, you’d know the answer to that. The machines won a nearly infinite number of times.

That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.

Its actually smarter for spammers to infiltrate populated servers. Admins aren’t going to have a problem defederating from a pure spam instance. They’ll think twice about defederating from an instance with lots of legit users.

I saw a little of it. Then I saw the offending instances quickly banned. Then I saw a comment from the admin that they didn’t like having to implement bans of entire instances, but it became a necessity until admin of those offending instances took action.

I dunno, seems like it is working exactly as intended to me.

And it’s far better than a monolithic tech giant. Pointing at Mastodon and calling out spam is utterly silly when compared to the amount of spam on large services. This article reads like a hit piece sponsored by Xitter.

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And realistically, there’s nothing stopping them from setting up a bunch of nondescript shell instances to gather data anyway.

Man, it’s like the good old days of buying physical media. You lose or scratch your CD, you don’t get a new one for free.

The true scandal in all of this 😁

I’m not saying their original statement wasn’t what they meant when they said it. My only point is that hard coding things is a common development shortcut. Everyone knows that it’s bad practice, but when you’re developing software for basically your own use it doesn’t really matter.

Not only that, but Lemmy is open source. So anyone that is so inclined could remove the filter on their own instance if they really wanted to.

My opinion might change if I saw the list of banned words and it contained things other than common curse words and slurs, or only included slurs for one group. But without that, this just seems like a development decision in spite of the poor reasoning behind why they implemented it in the first place.

Oddly specific. I’d like this to become a new meme please. The beef stroganoffadors will have no idea what’s going on.

Yeah, us Americans have got fucking up democracy covered pretty well.

The other beautiful thing is that if you aren’t satisfied with the behavior of mods and admin on one instance, there are literally hundreds of others to choose from. You aren’t stuck dealing with bad actors if you want to participate. And if moderation of a particular community upsets the users, they are free to move to or create a similar community on a different instance.

The major downside of this is that it’s going to create echo chambers, but that’s unavoidable. It’s not like this is a new problem. Communities that reject outside ideas outright have existed long before the internet.

From the first link:

Edit: This comment was written [in 2020] at a time when Lemmy the software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance. At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its different, there are good mod tools, and many different instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0 (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml does).

So basically some developers working on a pet project took a shortcut at a time when other features were being prioritized. Let’s not make this particular item out to be more than it is. I think it serves the conversation better to focus on what the post is about which is widespread bans on certain content.