Is it true that Lemmy censors casual profanity like "bitch"? I first heard of Lemmy a few days ago, in the context of somebody dismissing it because it allegedly performs such censorship.
It does. This doesn't make the concept doomed, though, being on the Fediverse it's already interoperable with Kbin, a hybrid microblogging and link aggregation platform.
A capable person with different views could fork Lemmy while keeping compatibility, and that has happened many times with other Fediverse software.