How does the profanity filter work?

That's tied to the instance. The French word for slow is the same as a word commonly used as an insult in English, so the .ml devs have it baked in to their slur filter.

It's more of a slur filter than a profanity filter. People can say fuck and shit and ass and the like, but slurs that dehumanize certain groups of people are a no go. In your case, it involves an ableist slur for dehumanizing people with intellectual disabilities. Other words that get caught in the filter include the N word, the F slur for dehumanizing homosexuals, b*tch and c*nt which people consider misogynist for some reason, and some others that escape me at the moment.

The fact that your speaking a different language shows why most people think the slur filter is dumb af.

Join us, won’t you? :)

sh.itjust.works

Yeah it's server-side with .ml. You can switch to a French instance, or I imagine many English-speaking instances don't block that word. I guess you can try view that comment from different instances to check.

The "Slur filter" is a server setting. The filter makes use of a "regex" (a text matching algorithm) to automatically remove any text that matches those words. An admin needs to explicitly set the rules for that regex. The regex does not take language into account, it is a simple text matching algorithm.

The box is in the Admin settings page and looks like this:

I know that lemmy.ml makes use of a strict set of regex rules. The translation of the french word for "late" matches an ableist slur in English, and so it is removed by lemmy.ml. I am not sure about whether you can check regex for each individual server, but I believe that most instances don't filter that specific word out.

EDIT: Ah, I found out how to check the regex. You can check an instance's regex by going to the the URL https://{instance}.{TLD}/api/v3/site and looking for "slur_filter_regex". For example, for lemmy.ml you would go to:

https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/site

Well that’s fuckin slow

what fucking profanity filter? damned if I've ever seen it

Fuck if I know.

Read Rule 3 in the sidebar

Ah, the Scunthorpe problem... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

You should leave lemmy.ml, they have a profanity filter which doesn't consider the language.

(before anyone comments, yes I know they call it a slur filter, but it also blocks some mild profanity so it isn't just for slurs)

Lemme.ml: Where you can call for murder and warfare against meat eaters and landlords, but don't even think about saying a no-no word, mister!

Edit: funny how all the negative comments flood in at once, almost like folks clocked in for work.