>The censorship Gab has faced from those in the Fediverse directly conflicts with the Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software which people in this community su

>The censorship Gab has faced from those in the Fediverse directly conflicts with the Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software which people in this community supposedly uphold. Most notably, censoring Gab goes against the first of these freedoms – “the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.” No, this is not a Freedom Zero violation. Refusing to distribute software is not equivalent to banning you from running that software as you wish - unless there's some vrmsPhone out there that only runs signed F-Droid packages. Refusing to peer with a particular Mastodon node is also not violating Freedom Zero - I mean, "do not connect to Gab" is a valid way to use the software and plenty of people do not want to talk with people who use Gab. Are we seriously saying that having a blocklist in an app is a Freedom Zero violation now? Furthermore, not wanting to talk with someone is not, in and of itself, censorship. If this were Google or Facebook, then maybe you could argue that they have monopoly power, or that we should have some kind of common carrier regulation on them. But those are, at best, special cases justified by the outsize market power of FAANG companies. The argument being put forth by Reclaim The Net is that freedom of speech isn't about being able to speak to willing ears, but about forcing people to listen to you.