Edit: I've been schooled in the comments, this is no longer a thing, they've relented and allowed more control over the censor list. But hey, it's kinda funny still, so, feel free to keep reading if you like...
Original post follows.
Coming here from the Great #RedditMigration. When all of the alternatives were being discussed, one thing I noticed was that Lemmy seems to have one single global slur list that's literally hard-coded into the software. Your only option (as a server admin) is to either enable or disable it, but the words it's going to block are permanent and unchangeable unless you can talk the devs into updating the regex for the next release.
And I checked out some of their GitHub issues, and the devs seem almost militantly defensive of this. Like, they are not entertaining any suggestions at all to make it editable. Their actual solution is, if you don't like it, fork the repo and change it your own damn self, but we're not touching it, go piss up a rope. Don't mind one of the words they don't like? Too bad. English word is perfectly innocuous in your language? Piss off. Want to block the equivalent Djiboutian words? Believe it or not, go to hell.
Seems like such a weird hill to die on. And this is concerning as the lemmyverse is just taking off. This just seems like such an easy and obvious thing to make configurable for all kinds of reasons, and they're just closing down tickets. Not even a "don't have time right now but we'll put it in the backlog and get there soon". Just, nope.
So anyways. I dunno where I'm going with this really. I'm not in a position to really do anything about it. So this is just a rant I guess. But if the main devs of this thing we're all migrating to are this... I dunno, arrogant? Opinionated?... already, then what's gonna happen later when there are actual real issues that need addressed? We're leaving one spezhole and going straight to another?
I'm glad they've relented and made it editable. But, imo, "fork it yourself" does not invalidate any argument. Thats just going to result in Lemmy, and Lenny, and Lambchop, and Lemmiwinks, and lord knows what else... Or, worse, people are gonna fork whatever the current version is and then have to constantly merge upstream changes into their fork. Or not. So now you've got Lemmy 0.17.4 and Larry 0.16.5 and Loser 2.5 (because that dude changed the version number for shits and grins) and Microsoft Lemmy ~~2000~~ ~~Me~~ XP Pro Student & Teacher Edition. Because someone was capable of getting his server up and running but doesn't have the time or inclination or experience to keep it properly up to date, because keeping it properly up to date is now much more difficult than it needs to be, because he had the audacity to disagree with one guy about what words he does and doesn't want to see.
It may be an argument in and of itself against making a given change, but it certainly doesn't invalidate any other arguments. And I don't think it's a very compelling argument anyway.
The whole idea of this federation business seems to be about freedom of choice and getting away from "them" telling "us" what we can and can't do with our time, our content, our data. And basically my first experience with this platform was seeing the primary dev shutting down multiple issue tickets full of perfectly reasonable arguments because... I dunno, "Nazis are bad and I'm smarter than you, mmmkay", I guess?
Just not a good look I don't think. It definitely turned me off. I'm still here giving it a shot, but that kind of attitude doesn't make me overly confident in the future of the platform.
Like I said, I'm glad they've relented, and I really hope this all works out.
The attitude I guess is what bugged me the most, so I'm really glad that's changed. I do understand that forking is a valid option for those with the wherewithal to do it, just seemed pretty arrogant of them to force that decision on everyone and not even entertain anything else. Thanks for setting me straight there!
That's always been the nature of open source software. Any large instances will have people who can handle forking code and applying patches to fix any issues that they have locally.
As the software environment matures there will likely be many many different flavors of Lemmy, hopefully this is something that can be kept from being too fragmented by the developer making the code modular and supporting plugins or similar but if they don't and there is a strong need then someone else will.
As long as interoperability is maintained (and it will be since everything is built on ActivityPub) it doesn't matter what flavor of web interface you're using.