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Gab also used Mastodon but they don't anymore anymore. They did run as a Mastodon instance[1], but after being blocked from most instances and even at the softw

Gab also used Mastodon but they don't anymore anymore. They did run as a Mastodon instance[1], but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and wrote their own new backend that does not federate. Gab has also been banned from Fdroid[2]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... [2] https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/ https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

vadfa 5y ago
It's pathetic all they did to Gab and it shows how biased the open source community at large is.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  “Biased”. As if your own point of view isn’t. People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up. Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes. That’s not really bias, it’s called having a moral compass. You’re free to disagree with its tuning of course.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    People are either for free speech or against it. If a site that states "supporting free speech" as reason for their existence decides against free speech, it is disappointing. Of course everybody can decide what they want, but it can still be disappointing and a betrayal of trust.
  - vadfa 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - nemothekid 5y ago
      >let everybody say whatever they want. So SPAM is ok?
    - blowski 5y ago
      > My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that. That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual.
      - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        What is "the community's right to shut somebody up"? If a country elects a dictator, it is fine if that dictator then shuts people up? Mastodon (afaik) already has the feature that communities can decide what outside content can enter their servers. What is the point on making it impossible for others to use the software at all? It doesn't server the purpose of protecting that community from nasty speech, because that is already accomplished by not communicating with the evil servers.
        oblio 5y ago
        If the dictator is democratically elected, well, kind of yes. Plus you've already lost. The real protection against abuse by the majority is generally through constitutions. Plus having a well educated populace.
      - chrismcb 5y ago
        The community does not, and should not have the right to shut someone up. They have a right not to listen.
      - nobody9999 5y ago
        > > My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that. >That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual. I completely disagree. The individual's right to speak is greater (at least in the US) than the government's right to shut them up. However, other individuals (or a group of individuals, such as a corporation like F-Droid) have the same right to speak, as well as the right to control the speech on their private property. There is an important distinction there. From a legal standpoint, the government are restricted from (except in very narrow circumstances) limiting an individual's speech. However, private actors have no such restrictions on their private property. a "community" of individuals can absolutely express their dislike/dissatisfaction with the speech of others by banning them from their private property. It's only the government that's restricted from doing so.
  - totony 5y ago
    >People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up. If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits, it's that you have a poor understanding of what your morals are. A lot of people like free software because it's hip, but when faced with the very reason free software exists they turn back on it very fast.
    - kyralis 5y ago
      That's a very simplistic way of looking at the world. It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for, and the world isn't a series of black and white with bright lines between them. Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill" being quite a bit more nuanced in reality, because it turns out most real-world moral questions are a little more complicated than single questions.
      - totony 5y ago
        >Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill" I don't think that's true. Most people are very vengeful and do not hold that view. >It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for imo "absolutist" is mostly used pejoratively. It's dissonance to believe both "People should be able to express themselves however they way" and "Racists should be ostracized." The logical consequence of the second is to disallow racists to speak. It might be OK according to your moral compass, but that's antithesis to free speech and more akin to "people should be able to express themselves if what they say is something I allow."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits I think you're missing the point here that their morals aren't your morals and they can be entirely self-consistent and do what they're doing if they don't share your exact priorities. They obviously prioritize other concerns above freedom of speech absolutism and they aren't hiding that, thus remaining entirely consistent within their frame of reference.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    >Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes. The vast majority of people who support this deplatforming have been whipped up into a hysteria by their peers and media and unironically believe that half the country belongs to the party of racism and white supremacy and anti-science, and that platforms like gab are merely hangouts for extremism and insurrection plotting. Ironically, this sort of treatment is going to breed extremism, and if I may say, rightly so. You don't demonize and dehumanize half the country by associating them with "whiteness" and nazism, especially while claiming to be anti-racist. At best, this path leads to construction of a parallel society, with it's own infrastructure. At worst, genocide, but which side will do the genociding is hard to predict, the way things are going. There's no excuse for this blatand politicization of all of our institutions, and the way that they all implicitly and explicitly collude to effectively deny voices to half of the country while worshipping SCIENCE! as though it were some unreproachable religion.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      I agree that demonizing and “othering” people on the Other Side is a bad idea for the reasons you state. I also agree with your overall point. I disagree that deplatforming gab is demonizing anybody. It’s tackling an absolute cesspool of a community. It’s among the worst of the worst that’s available out there. I’m sure they’ll survive without it.
      - twofornone 5y ago
        That's only because our media does not scrutinize the other side with the same intensity. You have literal communists LARPing about the coming revolution on reddit alongside entire subreddits dedicated to celebrating deaths among so called "plague rats", on a platform where the TOS ostensibly state that there is no tolerance for such behavior. But it's not surprising given that for a brief period last year the TOS explicitly stated that hate against the "majority group" (i.e. white people) is totally fine. If this were legitimately about extremism it'd be one thing, but the way it is shaping up, one side's extremism gets a pass, and that bias is toxic to a functioning society. The same way that excuses were made by all of our institutions for the nationwide, year long protests during a pandemic. Our institutions have clearly chosen a side. And I'm not necessarily saying that the act of deplatforming gab is demonization, but what I am saying is that this one sided demonization/dehumanization is used as an excuse to target platforms like gab.
  - yuuu 5y ago
    "Most people," huh? You sure are an expert on what "most people" think. Maybe just replace that phrase with "I" if you want to stop being intellectually dishonest.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      Would you care to take a guess at which field of study makes one an expert in figuring out what most people think?
      - yuuu 5y ago
        Okay, let's see your source that proves "most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous," Dr. Statistics.
yesco 5y ago
This is actually pretty disheartening honestly, being blocked by other instances is one thing, but everything else solely for political reasoning, especially F-Droid, is further evidence of diminishing integrity in this space.
- 0xy 5y ago
  It's really disappointing to hear F-Droid is just as censorious as the Google Play Store. I guess I assumed they'd be beyond the politicization of Google policies.
  - jude- 5y ago
    You are not entitled to use F-Droid's or Google's distribution network, anymore than they are entitled to be installed on your phone.
- Iolaum 5y ago
  Freedom of association also implies freedom to disassociate with people you don't like ;)
  - yesco 5y ago
    That was achieved by the instance level blocking. Clients breaking protocol to antagonize instances the developers don't like and F-Droid arbitrarily kicking apps despite them following the inclusion policy is where this breaks down.
    - devmor 5y ago
      Nonsense. F-Droid kicking apps is still freedom of association, as is Clients changing their protocol. They are also run by entities that have freedom of association. Just as you have the freedom to not use those apps if you don't like them. If I was the developer of a chat client app, I certainly wouldn't want to see screenshots with my app branding in them alongside alt-right content and I would do the same to prevent it from being used for such things.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I wasn’t aware that F-droid banned Gab. That is very disappointing. I am not sure why I need F-droid if they’re going to practice the same censorship and political bias that the walled gardens of big tech offers.
- AWildC182 5y ago
  Depends on the rationale. I hope they'd block people who are violating free software licenses
- miloignis 5y ago
  F-Droid allows you to add your own repositories! I think that's the best of both worlds - you're free to add whatever software sources you like, and F-Droid's not obligated to host content they disagree with, and it all works together nicely in one place.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    What does that mean exactly? I could install F-Droid and add the Gab repository, and then install gab via that?
    - miloignis 5y ago
      Yep, that's the idea! I don't know if Gab ended up making a F-Droid repository though, they said they were going to but the tweet seems to have been removed
      - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        One of these days I'll have to look into that, to finally escape from Google :-/
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >I am not sure why I need F-droid i can only speak for myself but i'm always glad to support competition and open platforms and if they throw racists off their platform that's a plus for me Many economic and software freedom related things wrong with proprietary stores or Google but that they deplatform reactionaries isn't one of them as far as i'm concerned
dnmllr_ 5y ago
I was under the impression that they still used Mastodon and that's why they publish their source: https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source Is that wrong?
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  It's pretty hilarious that they publish their source code in a single 21 MB ZIP file checked into a git repository.
  - 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
    You'll find this often – lots of SoHo routers comply with GPL2 by tossing a tarball of the software they run on a crusty FTP site somewhere. Download it and pop it open and you'll often find README.txt and a .tar.bz2 of Linux 2.6 whose SHA matches what you'll find on kernel.org... because they didn't actually modify any GPL2 code. Compliance doesn't mean they don't have to make it easy for you ;)
    - my123 5y ago
      And often, a giant .patch near it for the vendor modifications.
  - mwint 5y ago
    What’s hilarious about that? Seems like a pretty simple way to do it. Especially for a file that isn’t going to be downloaded enough to require a real CDN.
    - lupire 5y ago
      It's open source but not open development, and one doubts that the snapshot is up to date.
    - bink 5y ago
      It's just funny because they're removing it from a source code repo, packaging it up into a zip, and adding it to another source code repo. If they didn't mind including the change history they could've just published the code as-is as a clone. If they did want to strip the change history they could've published it as a shallow clone or an artifact. But instead they chose to push a ZIP file into a repo with a single branch. I guess at least they'll have a history of their ZIP files.
crocodiletears 5y ago
I posted this yesterday in the Mastodon discussion, but the thread had long since lost its steam, so I'll put it here in hopes of an answer: Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I think Fedilab doesn't block any but haven't confirmed yet.
  - crocodiletears 5y ago
    Thanks, I'll look into it.
- riffic 5y ago
  fork, modify, and recompile. Not sure why this question needs to get asked so much.
1023bytes 5y ago
I'm definitely not a supporter of Gab, but this is pretty disappointing. Imagine if a web browser blocked certain websites on this level.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Yeah. If people don't have a problem with gab being blocked on fdroid for essentially dressed-up political reasons, then they also shouldn't have a problem with the play store or apple's app store blocking stuff for political reasons.
  - eropple 5y ago
    This doesn't follow unless you allow the sneaking in of the idea that all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character. I will not allow that sneaking-in because the idea is nonsense. It's quite reasonable to criticize a company for treating gay people poorly and to also nod in approval when they tell fascists to leave and to not let the door hit them on the way out. It's also not meaningfully inconsistent for one to do the reverse, but it's telling on yourself.
    - generalizations 5y ago
      > all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character Sneaking in? That's my point, plain and simple. If anything, you're sneaking in the implication that it's a shameful thing to claim, so I have to "sneak it in". There's this idea that we should respect the opinions of others, and even defend their right to express them, no matter if we disagree ourselves. In my mind, it's a matter of intellectual honesty. It does seem telling that you might disagree.
      - eropple 5y ago
        Platforming fascists is shameful, yes. It does require a sneaking in of a profound false equivalency to let that kind of assertion stand and I refuse to do so. It, like the fascists in question, can get right out of a functioning body politic, because if it doesn't it won't be functioning much longer.
lupire 5y ago
What F-droid did, may be in opposition to free speech, but it is in no way in opposition to free or open source software. Anyone can get a copy of Gab from a friend or vendor and install it and redistribute it (at least as much as they good if F-droid hosted it.) Anyone can fork F-Droid and run a store that publishes Gab. Free and open source has never been about forcing other people to publish unrelated software.

vadfa 5y ago

It's pathetic all they did to Gab and it shows how biased the open source community at large is.

scrollaway 5y ago
“Biased”. As if your own point of view isn’t. People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up. Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes. That’s not really bias, it’s called having a moral compass. You’re free to disagree with its tuning of course.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  People are either for free speech or against it. If a site that states "supporting free speech" as reason for their existence decides against free speech, it is disappointing. Of course everybody can decide what they want, but it can still be disappointing and a betrayal of trust.
- vadfa 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    >let everybody say whatever they want. So SPAM is ok?
  - blowski 5y ago
    > My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that. That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual.
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      What is "the community's right to shut somebody up"? If a country elects a dictator, it is fine if that dictator then shuts people up? Mastodon (afaik) already has the feature that communities can decide what outside content can enter their servers. What is the point on making it impossible for others to use the software at all? It doesn't server the purpose of protecting that community from nasty speech, because that is already accomplished by not communicating with the evil servers.
      - oblio 5y ago
        If the dictator is democratically elected, well, kind of yes. Plus you've already lost. The real protection against abuse by the majority is generally through constitutions. Plus having a well educated populace.
    - chrismcb 5y ago
      The community does not, and should not have the right to shut someone up. They have a right not to listen.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      > > My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that. >That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual. I completely disagree. The individual's right to speak is greater (at least in the US) than the government's right to shut them up. However, other individuals (or a group of individuals, such as a corporation like F-Droid) have the same right to speak, as well as the right to control the speech on their private property. There is an important distinction there. From a legal standpoint, the government are restricted from (except in very narrow circumstances) limiting an individual's speech. However, private actors have no such restrictions on their private property. a "community" of individuals can absolutely express their dislike/dissatisfaction with the speech of others by banning them from their private property. It's only the government that's restricted from doing so.
- totony 5y ago
  >People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up. If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits, it's that you have a poor understanding of what your morals are. A lot of people like free software because it's hip, but when faced with the very reason free software exists they turn back on it very fast.
  - kyralis 5y ago
    That's a very simplistic way of looking at the world. It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for, and the world isn't a series of black and white with bright lines between them. Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill" being quite a bit more nuanced in reality, because it turns out most real-world moral questions are a little more complicated than single questions.
    - totony 5y ago
      >Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill" I don't think that's true. Most people are very vengeful and do not hold that view. >It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for imo "absolutist" is mostly used pejoratively. It's dissonance to believe both "People should be able to express themselves however they way" and "Racists should be ostracized." The logical consequence of the second is to disallow racists to speak. It might be OK according to your moral compass, but that's antithesis to free speech and more akin to "people should be able to express themselves if what they say is something I allow."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits I think you're missing the point here that their morals aren't your morals and they can be entirely self-consistent and do what they're doing if they don't share your exact priorities. They obviously prioritize other concerns above freedom of speech absolutism and they aren't hiding that, thus remaining entirely consistent within their frame of reference.
- twofornone 5y ago
  >Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes. The vast majority of people who support this deplatforming have been whipped up into a hysteria by their peers and media and unironically believe that half the country belongs to the party of racism and white supremacy and anti-science, and that platforms like gab are merely hangouts for extremism and insurrection plotting. Ironically, this sort of treatment is going to breed extremism, and if I may say, rightly so. You don't demonize and dehumanize half the country by associating them with "whiteness" and nazism, especially while claiming to be anti-racist. At best, this path leads to construction of a parallel society, with it's own infrastructure. At worst, genocide, but which side will do the genociding is hard to predict, the way things are going. There's no excuse for this blatand politicization of all of our institutions, and the way that they all implicitly and explicitly collude to effectively deny voices to half of the country while worshipping SCIENCE! as though it were some unreproachable religion.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    I agree that demonizing and “othering” people on the Other Side is a bad idea for the reasons you state. I also agree with your overall point. I disagree that deplatforming gab is demonizing anybody. It’s tackling an absolute cesspool of a community. It’s among the worst of the worst that’s available out there. I’m sure they’ll survive without it.
    - twofornone 5y ago
      That's only because our media does not scrutinize the other side with the same intensity. You have literal communists LARPing about the coming revolution on reddit alongside entire subreddits dedicated to celebrating deaths among so called "plague rats", on a platform where the TOS ostensibly state that there is no tolerance for such behavior. But it's not surprising given that for a brief period last year the TOS explicitly stated that hate against the "majority group" (i.e. white people) is totally fine. If this were legitimately about extremism it'd be one thing, but the way it is shaping up, one side's extremism gets a pass, and that bias is toxic to a functioning society. The same way that excuses were made by all of our institutions for the nationwide, year long protests during a pandemic. Our institutions have clearly chosen a side. And I'm not necessarily saying that the act of deplatforming gab is demonization, but what I am saying is that this one sided demonization/dehumanization is used as an excuse to target platforms like gab.
- yuuu 5y ago
  "Most people," huh? You sure are an expert on what "most people" think. Maybe just replace that phrase with "I" if you want to stop being intellectually dishonest.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Would you care to take a guess at which field of study makes one an expert in figuring out what most people think?
    - yuuu 5y ago
      Okay, let's see your source that proves "most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous," Dr. Statistics.

yesco 5y ago

This is actually pretty disheartening honestly, being blocked by other instances is one thing, but everything else solely for political reasoning, especially F-Droid, is further evidence of diminishing integrity in this space.

0xy 5y ago
It's really disappointing to hear F-Droid is just as censorious as the Google Play Store. I guess I assumed they'd be beyond the politicization of Google policies.
- jude- 5y ago
  You are not entitled to use F-Droid's or Google's distribution network, anymore than they are entitled to be installed on your phone.
Iolaum 5y ago
Freedom of association also implies freedom to disassociate with people you don't like ;)
- yesco 5y ago
  That was achieved by the instance level blocking. Clients breaking protocol to antagonize instances the developers don't like and F-Droid arbitrarily kicking apps despite them following the inclusion policy is where this breaks down.
  - devmor 5y ago
    Nonsense. F-Droid kicking apps is still freedom of association, as is Clients changing their protocol. They are also run by entities that have freedom of association. Just as you have the freedom to not use those apps if you don't like them. If I was the developer of a chat client app, I certainly wouldn't want to see screenshots with my app branding in them alongside alt-right content and I would do the same to prevent it from being used for such things.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I wasn’t aware that F-droid banned Gab. That is very disappointing. I am not sure why I need F-droid if they’re going to practice the same censorship and political bias that the walled gardens of big tech offers.

AWildC182 5y ago
Depends on the rationale. I hope they'd block people who are violating free software licenses
miloignis 5y ago
F-Droid allows you to add your own repositories! I think that's the best of both worlds - you're free to add whatever software sources you like, and F-Droid's not obligated to host content they disagree with, and it all works together nicely in one place.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  What does that mean exactly? I could install F-Droid and add the Gab repository, and then install gab via that?
  - miloignis 5y ago
    Yep, that's the idea! I don't know if Gab ended up making a F-Droid repository though, they said they were going to but the tweet seems to have been removed
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      One of these days I'll have to look into that, to finally escape from Google :-/
Barrin92 5y ago
>I am not sure why I need F-droid i can only speak for myself but i'm always glad to support competition and open platforms and if they throw racists off their platform that's a plus for me Many economic and software freedom related things wrong with proprietary stores or Google but that they deplatform reactionaries isn't one of them as far as i'm concerned

dnmllr_ 5y ago

I was under the impression that they still used Mastodon and that's why they publish their source: https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source Is that wrong?

jacobmischka 5y ago
It's pretty hilarious that they publish their source code in a single 21 MB ZIP file checked into a git repository.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
  You'll find this often – lots of SoHo routers comply with GPL2 by tossing a tarball of the software they run on a crusty FTP site somewhere. Download it and pop it open and you'll often find README.txt and a .tar.bz2 of Linux 2.6 whose SHA matches what you'll find on kernel.org... because they didn't actually modify any GPL2 code. Compliance doesn't mean they don't have to make it easy for you ;)
  - my123 5y ago
    And often, a giant .patch near it for the vendor modifications.
- mwint 5y ago
  What’s hilarious about that? Seems like a pretty simple way to do it. Especially for a file that isn’t going to be downloaded enough to require a real CDN.
  - lupire 5y ago
    It's open source but not open development, and one doubts that the snapshot is up to date.
  - bink 5y ago
    It's just funny because they're removing it from a source code repo, packaging it up into a zip, and adding it to another source code repo. If they didn't mind including the change history they could've just published the code as-is as a clone. If they did want to strip the change history they could've published it as a shallow clone or an artifact. But instead they chose to push a ZIP file into a repo with a single branch. I guess at least they'll have a history of their ZIP files.

crocodiletears 5y ago

I posted this yesterday in the Mastodon discussion, but the thread had long since lost its steam, so I'll put it here in hopes of an answer: Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.

vorpalhex 5y ago
I think Fedilab doesn't block any but haven't confirmed yet.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  Thanks, I'll look into it.
riffic 5y ago
fork, modify, and recompile. Not sure why this question needs to get asked so much.

1023bytes 5y ago

I'm definitely not a supporter of Gab, but this is pretty disappointing. Imagine if a web browser blocked certain websites on this level.

generalizations 5y ago
Yeah. If people don't have a problem with gab being blocked on fdroid for essentially dressed-up political reasons, then they also shouldn't have a problem with the play store or apple's app store blocking stuff for political reasons.
- eropple 5y ago
  This doesn't follow unless you allow the sneaking in of the idea that all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character. I will not allow that sneaking-in because the idea is nonsense. It's quite reasonable to criticize a company for treating gay people poorly and to also nod in approval when they tell fascists to leave and to not let the door hit them on the way out. It's also not meaningfully inconsistent for one to do the reverse, but it's telling on yourself.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    > all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character Sneaking in? That's my point, plain and simple. If anything, you're sneaking in the implication that it's a shameful thing to claim, so I have to "sneak it in". There's this idea that we should respect the opinions of others, and even defend their right to express them, no matter if we disagree ourselves. In my mind, it's a matter of intellectual honesty. It does seem telling that you might disagree.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Platforming fascists is shameful, yes. It does require a sneaking in of a profound false equivalency to let that kind of assertion stand and I refuse to do so. It, like the fascists in question, can get right out of a functioning body politic, because if it doesn't it won't be functioning much longer.

lupire 5y ago

What F-droid did, may be in opposition to free speech, but it is in no way in opposition to free or open source software. Anyone can get a copy of Gab from a friend or vendor and install it and redistribute it (at least as much as they good if F-droid hosted it.) Anyone can fork F-Droid and run a store that publishes Gab. Free and open source has never been about forcing other people to publish unrelated software.