A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That’s not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here’s a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
Some of piefed instances put removed in italics where the word cunt was. Obviously that would only be a deal breaker for the ones that do it.
I only remember Lemmy forcing its hard coded “slur filter” on all instances. It took a lot of backlash to get them to make it optional.
That was a temporary measure very early in development, when moderation tooling was still very incomplete. This was to avoid ending up like Voat. Once mod tools were implemented, the slur filter became optional. Simple as that.