People can say whatever they want, no one can stop you. But people still have every right to judge your character. Being in a free society works both ways, you can say mean shit and I can think you’re mean.

People use “retard” to compare others or themselves to people they deem lesser than. It doesn’t work as an insult if you don’t look down on cognitively disabled people. You don’t have to use it on someone cognitively disabled, the implication is already there whether you have intend it or not.

For me, I think there are much worse words. While I don’t use it, I don’t waste my brain space judging people who do.

As it happens, it organically goes down to who owns the platform. In our conversation if it could’ve happened IRL, there could be two parties of equal rights (to just leave?). In a context of, say, a D&D party or a small gathering\chat, roles are equal with some privilege to the one who collected people together. In the case of some public space on the internet, like a US-based Facebook (as per the article about eating cats), we have Meta’s oversight, then government’s oversight, then community’s admins oversight, then users’ own shit filter. And in the later case, it gets a bit more complicated because it’s established that we let that state use our agency for our own good, then we let a corporation take our agency in their own hands to dictate what it should be by registering on that platform, and then we participate in some community with it’s own rules and mods, and only then other people who can report one’s post to one of these previous ones. That’s how the delegation of opinion to other parties usually works.

But your question is not about how it is, but how it should be. And for that I’d prefer to go down to the second level, when a club and it’s admins set up rules for communication of individuals on their platform, like a Lemmy instance, and users have a saying about how they see the future of their instance and a liberty to quit it. If that doesn’t fit you, you skip town and join another one, or create one yourself. That level of agency has it’s flaws, probably, but it’s better because less parties with different privileges are involved there, and you communicate with only admins and other users without that becoming too complicated.

On the side note though, I need to note, that I as a foreigner from an absurdly conservative country started to refuse myself from using the f@g90t slur that is set deep inside my language to describe a lot of bad things casually. That is because I want to communicate with people and communities that don’t want it there, and as I don’t see any value in this particular slur, therefore I just adapt. I find that a couple of guys I work with wouldn’t like that either, because they are called that by people I despise and don’t want to be associated with. I don’t feel like researching the cases when I or them can call someone a f@g9ot, I just dropmit because people I personally care about find it uncomfrotable. And our language, just like a snake, keeps cliding on top of a dune changing it’s direction whenever most people of it’s users gets some new catchy word or retire an old word as unacceptable.