It’s understandable to get offended at this, but really it could be a lot worse. Also probably we should separate the project from the developer, because with this logic, we shouldn’t even be using Lemmy, since the main devs are controversial to some people.

Who are Lemmy’s main devs controversial to?

They run lemmygrad and are dedicated communists, as well as having a very opinionated “bad words” filter that’s hard coded into the lemmy server software and not configurable without building it yourself.

Edit: commented below, but it looks like at some point they added the ability to customize the bad words filter as part of the site config, so that part doesn’t currently apply. Early on there was a bit of drama about the original hard coded version though.

Exsqueeze me? Where might one see this hard coded bad words filter?

It’s encoded as a regex which you can find here: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/…/slurs.rs#L74

It’s honestly not a terrible list, but there’s at least one entry in there that falls victim to the scunthorpe problem, and it sucks that it’s not something administrators can easily customize.

Edit: looking through the PRs it seems like they made the filter customizable at some point, so this is a little outdated. The whole communist thing still applies though.