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Is lemmy.ml turn into authoritarian?
(lemmy.nz)
I just realised, I can't post anything on lemmy.ml
So, I checked https://lemmy.ml/modlog, there's a new moderator.
All posts and comments talking about China, Jinping, Russia, and Putin have been deleted and users banned
I'm not surprise by this. Seeing how Lemmy has a hard coded wordfilter specifically to discourage "right-wingers" from using it. They did remove it. But still, it's not a good look.
From the first link:
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.
Okay. Why didn't they say that in first place? Why say, "because we dont want to make it easy for right-wingers to use Lemmy."? It's like they edited the comment to make them and Lemmy look better.
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.