Item — HN Reader

> F-Droid is taking a political stance here.

Very bad decision here.

> "F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things."

You might as well not package FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon clients because there are also bad actors on those platforms who harass others based on their religion, race, gender and other differences.

What is the point of totally banning them when they are just going to keep forking open-source projects. Doing this sort of censorship defeats the purpose of FLOSS and violates the first freedom on how a user should use their software as they wish for any purpose.

As a result, Gab is just going to exercise freedom 4.

2 comments

There is a difference between facebook/twitter that disallow those things, will remove them and app that when presented with those behaviours says that they are welcome. You know that.

Unfortunately nobody taking a stance will lead to that horrible behaviour increasing.

The argument "Because X and Y have similar technical implementations in what users can do" is irrelevant here, it's about the intent/goals/policies/how widespread it is.

I welcome anything that reduces hate speech that is officially accepted on some platforms. That is a real problem and one that needs to be dealt with in any way possible.

So you'd welcome restrictions on freedom of expression (a human right)?

The key word here is promote. Rightly or wrongly, F-Droid maintainers feel that the Gab application is not politically neutral, but rather explicitly promotes these broadly-undesirable things. Given the views that Gab developers have expressed in the past, they might have a point.