I only used “muskrat” and “Cheeto” as derogatory terms, not to hide who I’m talking about. You make a good point about filters but I’m pretty sure if someone hates Elon enough that they don’t want to see any mention of him, they’ll add “muskrat” to their filter. As an aside, I didn’t think lemmy had the ability to filter out posts with key words yet, am I mistaken?
What I find much more annoying personally is people self censoring swear or trigger work. It’s f***ing ridiculous to write like that on websites that don’t ban those words.