Really? You can't go 10 minutes in many LGBT spaces without hearing someone using the f-slur in an affectionate way. Also banned is "b!tch", which is not really considered that offensive in most of the US between female friends, as well as "pu!sy", which is maybe vulgar but not an offensive term at all (I notice "dick" didn't make cut). Maybe for a site like Hacker News those terms aren't usually appropriate, but I see Lemmy \more as a replacement for Reddit and I'd hoped it would be inclusive to everyone, not just to those in their bubble.

I don't know how their system works, if using these words just means the comment won't be shared or if it flags it for a moderator's attention, but I don't think so. Here's a direct quote from a developer:

> I'll have to think about this. Hard-coding it means I don't have to do a database migration every time someone comes up with a new slur. And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

In my view this goes against the core point of the fediverse. The whole reason I like the fediverse is because it democratizes control by giving it to the users instead of a small-group of potentially self-interested owners.

(After googling I found out "n!ps" can be used as a racial slur but I associate it with a funny slang for "nipples". I wondered how the AI conference dealt with this but apparently they changed their name a couple years back to avoid connotations with the slur so maybe it's more widespread/well known than I thought.)

(edit: censored slurs. asterisk didn't work because it triggered the markdown so I used !)