Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

“Unacceptable slur in record” — Bluesky, intent upon banning Homophobic Slurs, bans Frequently Asked Questions

This blog automatically propagates to several platforms, and the blogpost tags – where relevant – are converted into hashtags for those platforms. This morning I was debugging why one of my posts was failing to propagate to Bluesky, and manual testing revealed the message:

“unacceptable slur in record”

For a blogpost about digital identity and anonymity this made no sense; so I started deleting words one by one and found that the “slur” was the acronym for “Frequently Asked Questions”, confirmed by other people:

And someone else pointed at the relevant code where you can see tempting hints that someone wants to prevent the word “fag” being written in any p3rmutat10n of glyphs whatsoever, and it’s probably something to do with that.

Apparently it’s okay to use as a hashtag if you put it in uppercase, but that’s not how Mastodon does things, nor is it terribly obvious.

This is a deeply unfortunate case of excessive and unwise, misconceived overblocking.

Try upper case #FAQ

— Johnny Nucleo (@johnnynucleo.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T10:44:51.289Z

Update: obligatory observation for nerds: by comparison Mastodon uses camelCase not CamelCase for hashtags, declaring that it could be uppercase / case-sensitive is massive exceptionalism for case independent hashtags.

Also, case-sensitive censorship historically has been deeply problematic.

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Comments

2 responses to ““Unacceptable slur in record” — Bluesky, intent upon banning Homophobic Slurs, bans Frequently Asked Questions”

  1. ersatzmaus

    @alecm Clbuttic error. Good to see they've learned from the past. /s

  2. (((IFO)))

    @alecm Funfact: "Fag" (rhymes with Hague) is a widely used Norwegian word. It means "subject" (in school), skill (like carpentry or masonry), a cantilever bridge is called a "fagverksbru" and so on. I have never seen it used as a slur in Norway. We have other slurs for gay.

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