A feature that should be able to handle this will be in the next version of Interstellar. The feature proposal is here if you have any extra ideas/comments.

The abuse potential would be that I think it opens the door to more easily create convincing doctored screenshots of comments and interactions. It's technically possible already, but I don't think we've really seen it on lemmy yet. There's ways around that, like formatting replaced text differently or marking those comments with a clear icon to indicate a regex replacement was used on them, but I still don't particularly like the idea.

I'm thinking that it would also make it easy for people to have confusing interactions, if somehow a regex ends up changing the meaning of a statement or something, and the user forgets they have it set up. I guess the "big icon indicating regex was applied" idea would work there too though. Maybe the icon could even be a button to toggle it on/off per comment?

The common use case I see for regex features on social media apps and addons is for hiding entire comments that match one of your patterns, and I generally think that's the best choice for implementation.

That said, with a clear indicator it had been applied it probably wouldn't be awful.

I think I could pretty easily shim that into the filter policies in Tesseract (that's the big project for this upcoming release). I already have customizeable regex filter lists for keywords, but those only set the "filtered" flag if they're detected and return the list of regex patterns that were matched.

Since the filter policies can be either global or per community group, you could get pretty granular with it. I'll look into it and see if it's feasible to shim in.

I jokingly thought about adding something like that already.

Basically:

(^Paywall(ed)?$) -> I'm going to contribute nothing to the discussion except whine that you didn't cater to my laziness and make my laziness everyone else's problem until someone else replies with an archive link I could have easily gotten myself

I thought the feature was too absurd to flesh out, but if there's interest, I'm open to adding it lol.