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A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/ https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

gilrain 6y ago
A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May. Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs). > a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason. At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history. The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
  - cecja 6y ago
    There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far. And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
  - dTal 6y ago
    Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".
- gruez 6y ago
  >but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech Can you elaborate on this?
  - simias 6y ago
    https://gab.com/ https://gab.com/ Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil". The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus. If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
  - snypher 6y ago
    A good start is the Wikipedia page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
    - gruez 6y ago
      The line of thinking seems to be: "Gab's target demographic is users that have been banned from the mainstream platforms for hate speech and conspiracies. Therefore by targeting those users, it's 'purpose built' for hate speech and conspiracies.". My question is, can't you apply this to basically anything that's "free speech"? The mechanism seems to be that most people are content with the mainstream platforms, and therefore the only people who go for the "free speech" platforms end up being the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. By that logic, is tor "purpose built" for criminals, since basically only people with stuff to hide use it? How is it different than gab?
      - simias 6y ago
        If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily. That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.
- oehpr 6y ago
  I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns. I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
    - sipos 6y ago
      It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...
      - FalconSensei 6y ago
        yes. So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
  - sipos 6y ago
    Wikipedia cites a articles that show a number of examples of the company Twitter acocunt saying anti-semetic things, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-invs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.c.... I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
- centimeter 6y ago
  I follow comedians on there that got banned from twitter because they said a bad word.
- G4E 6y ago
  A reminder that Fdroid allows you to run your own repo and host there whatever you choose, controversial or not. Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.
- blahblahblogger 6y ago
  From my perspective we still need other information, do they also ban other apps that are purpose-built for hate speech? Was it just this app because of the controversy over banned Twitter users going to it? I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.
- csomar 6y ago
  Isn't that why F-Droid was created for in the first place?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit. "Google is censoring apps" "It's because those apps can access hate speech" "You can use this other app store" "They ban this app, though" "But that's because it's for hate speech" Come on, this is peak comedy.
  - Carioca 6y ago
    > those apps can access hate speech > it's for hate speech There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
    - mav3rick 6y ago
      Yes, as soon as the narrative went against HNs own point the discussion stopped.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  > but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech. That's just false.
- ManlyBread 6y ago
  And?
komali2 6y ago
That article was written with such blatantly bad faith language it had the opposite of the intended effect and made me start distrusting whatever Gab is (I had no idea before this thread) > 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 If this accurately describes Gab, I don't have sympathy for Yet Another Racist Community pretending that they're defending freeze peach.
- SamBam 6y ago
  Gab was created as a safe-haven for all the alt-right groups that get banned from Reddit. It's entirely populated by people who were banned from Reddit, Twitter or Facebook for harassment or spreading hate.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Gab is a platform, ergo the judgement is about what the users publish on that platform. It's the exact same point Google seems to be making: that platform hosts content we wouldn't host, ergo the app must not be on our app store.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I'd be more worried that they apparently do tolerate harassment and oppression against non-marginalized groups. That's a pretty whopping double standard!
MYEUHD 6y ago
Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository
- ffpip 6y ago
  Even if an app is banned from the play store, the developer can distribute it through f-droid. Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository Even if the app is banned from their own f-droid repository, the dev can distribute his source code and users can build the app with Android Studio. Even if Google bans your Android Studio account, you can use another compiler. Even if the internet bans you, you can mail the code via a handwritten letter to your users, who will copy the code line by line and build it using their own compiler.
  - BubuIIC 6y ago
    Alternative repositories are a first-class feature of F-Droid. Alternative app stores aren't really a first class feature of Android (though they are obviously possible, in contrast to iOS) > bans your Android Studio account Don't give them ideas. (there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account)
    - ffpip 6y ago
      > there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account I meant Google Account. Isn't a google account necessary for anything on developer.android.com? Sorry if I am wrong. Any url on that domain used to redirect me to a Google Login page. Well, atleast you have to accept a Google TOS.
      - BubuIIC 6y ago
        A google account is not required for using the android SDK. You have to agree with the TOS if you download the prebuilt SDK from google, yes. Building the SDK from source is unfortunately quite hard but Debian has made some progress with this.
davexunit 6y ago
Yeah that ruled. Love F-Droid.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Agreed. Good decision on their part.
wtfishackernews 6y ago
good
- dang 6y ago
  Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
orblivion 6y ago
They banned the Gab _application_. They didn't ban all microblogging applications that can access Gab. Though, Tusky in particular does. Not all do.
- orblivion 6y ago
  Sorry, I phrased it incorrectly: Tusky in particular blocks Gab. At least some others do not.
young_unixer 6y ago
I didn't know about this. I'll stop recommending F-droid.
- efreak 6y ago
  Anyone who wants to, including the gab maintainers, can create an Fdroid repository containing any apps they want it to, including gab, with or without the permission of the app maintainers. I run a few Fdroid repositories myself for apps that aren't on the play store or in the main Fdroid repository. The Fdroid server tool is open source. You can host your repository on GitHub or gitlab, and update it using their ci/actions/etc. It doesn't require much technical knowledge. pip3 install --user fdroidserver # or install with package manager. fdroid init # first run only. Now edit URLs and descriptions in config.py cd fdroid/repo wget gab-latest.apk cd .. fdroid update # on first run, add --create-metadata and then edit the files in the metadata folder and run update again. git add repo archive git commit -m update
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  This does not warrant doing that. If the gab devs were somewhat competent they'd create their own F-droid repo and distribute their app through that - F-droid allows this, and cannot stop this.

gilrain 6y ago

A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.

djsumdog 6y ago
and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May. Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs). > a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason. At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history. The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
- cecja 6y ago
  There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far. And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
- dTal 6y ago
  Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".
gruez 6y ago
>but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech Can you elaborate on this?
- simias 6y ago
  https://gab.com/ https://gab.com/ Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil". The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus. If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
- snypher 6y ago
  A good start is the Wikipedia page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
  - gruez 6y ago
    The line of thinking seems to be: "Gab's target demographic is users that have been banned from the mainstream platforms for hate speech and conspiracies. Therefore by targeting those users, it's 'purpose built' for hate speech and conspiracies.". My question is, can't you apply this to basically anything that's "free speech"? The mechanism seems to be that most people are content with the mainstream platforms, and therefore the only people who go for the "free speech" platforms end up being the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. By that logic, is tor "purpose built" for criminals, since basically only people with stuff to hide use it? How is it different than gab?
    - simias 6y ago
      If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily. That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.
oehpr 6y ago
I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns. I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
  - sipos 6y ago
    It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      yes. So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
- sipos 6y ago
  Wikipedia cites a articles that show a number of examples of the company Twitter acocunt saying anti-semetic things, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-invs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.c.... I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
centimeter 6y ago
I follow comedians on there that got banned from twitter because they said a bad word.
G4E 6y ago
A reminder that Fdroid allows you to run your own repo and host there whatever you choose, controversial or not. Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.
blahblahblogger 6y ago
From my perspective we still need other information, do they also ban other apps that are purpose-built for hate speech? Was it just this app because of the controversy over banned Twitter users going to it? I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.
csomar 6y ago
Isn't that why F-Droid was created for in the first place?
renewiltord 6y ago
Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit. "Google is censoring apps" "It's because those apps can access hate speech" "You can use this other app store" "They ban this app, though" "But that's because it's for hate speech" Come on, this is peak comedy.
- Carioca 6y ago
  > those apps can access hate speech > it's for hate speech There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    Yes, as soon as the narrative went against HNs own point the discussion stopped.
young_unixer 6y ago
> but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech. That's just false.
ManlyBread 6y ago
And?

komali2 6y ago

That article was written with such blatantly bad faith language it had the opposite of the intended effect and made me start distrusting whatever Gab is (I had no idea before this thread) > 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 If this accurately describes Gab, I don't have sympathy for Yet Another Racist Community pretending that they're defending freeze peach.

SamBam 6y ago
Gab was created as a safe-haven for all the alt-right groups that get banned from Reddit. It's entirely populated by people who were banned from Reddit, Twitter or Facebook for harassment or spreading hate.
luckylion 6y ago
Gab is a platform, ergo the judgement is about what the users publish on that platform. It's the exact same point Google seems to be making: that platform hosts content we wouldn't host, ergo the app must not be on our app store.
thu2111 6y ago
I'd be more worried that they apparently do tolerate harassment and oppression against non-marginalized groups. That's a pretty whopping double standard!

MYEUHD 6y ago

Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository

ffpip 6y ago
Even if an app is banned from the play store, the developer can distribute it through f-droid. Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository Even if the app is banned from their own f-droid repository, the dev can distribute his source code and users can build the app with Android Studio. Even if Google bans your Android Studio account, you can use another compiler. Even if the internet bans you, you can mail the code via a handwritten letter to your users, who will copy the code line by line and build it using their own compiler.
- BubuIIC 6y ago
  Alternative repositories are a first-class feature of F-Droid. Alternative app stores aren't really a first class feature of Android (though they are obviously possible, in contrast to iOS) > bans your Android Studio account Don't give them ideas. (there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account)
  - ffpip 6y ago
    > there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account I meant Google Account. Isn't a google account necessary for anything on developer.android.com? Sorry if I am wrong. Any url on that domain used to redirect me to a Google Login page. Well, atleast you have to accept a Google TOS.
    - BubuIIC 6y ago
      A google account is not required for using the android SDK. You have to agree with the TOS if you download the prebuilt SDK from google, yes. Building the SDK from source is unfortunately quite hard but Debian has made some progress with this.

davexunit 6y ago

Yeah that ruled. Love F-Droid.

heavyset_go 6y ago
Agreed. Good decision on their part.

wtfishackernews 6y ago

good

dang 6y ago
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

orblivion 6y ago

They banned the Gab _application_. They didn't ban all microblogging applications that can access Gab. Though, Tusky in particular does. Not all do.

orblivion 6y ago
Sorry, I phrased it incorrectly: Tusky in particular blocks Gab. At least some others do not.

young_unixer 6y ago

I didn't know about this. I'll stop recommending F-droid.

efreak 6y ago
Anyone who wants to, including the gab maintainers, can create an Fdroid repository containing any apps they want it to, including gab, with or without the permission of the app maintainers. I run a few Fdroid repositories myself for apps that aren't on the play store or in the main Fdroid repository. The Fdroid server tool is open source. You can host your repository on GitHub or gitlab, and update it using their ci/actions/etc. It doesn't require much technical knowledge. pip3 install --user fdroidserver # or install with package manager. fdroid init # first run only. Now edit URLs and descriptions in config.py cd fdroid/repo wget gab-latest.apk cd .. fdroid update # on first run, add --create-metadata and then edit the files in the metadata folder and run update again. git add repo archive git commit -m update
0xdeadb00f 6y ago
This does not warrant doing that. If the gab devs were somewhat competent they'd create their own F-droid repo and distribute their app through that - F-droid allows this, and cannot stop this.