Last I looked at the lemmy source code, that slur filter was a single line of code. That was a couple of month ago though.

Not to beat a dead horse, but It's not a good idea to have it hard-coded like that. Any conceivable list of slurs will come with its own cultural biases, so regardless of good intent it falls short. Maybe I shouldn't try to read people's minds, but perhaps they're anxious about the very real possibility of horrible people using lemmy to communicate and organize. I get that, but it's something you need to get over when you're making your software available like this. You are not responsible for what people using your software do and to think otherwise is somewhat indicative of some kind of god complex. (This is not to throw any kind of shade on the devs, of course, they seem great and have done a great job.)