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Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

One of Apple Fanboy's go-to comebacks when cornered by the totalitarian silo they're allowed to exist in is: just switch to Android.

But seriously, Android is probably a better choice here, given the ability to sideload apps. Even if the Chinese equivalents of the play store don't allow this behavior, there's got to be an open source app you could install by sideloading that enables this for you.

And for the Apple zealots out there - this is a perfect example of sideloading working in the user's favor

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You definitely haven't been in China. Even when they blocked some VPNs, Apple devices are a million times better in China because it has the official app store.

You cannot begin to understand what it means to be forced to use one of those non-Google Play stores. Even if you set your device to English, Firefox will be in Chinese and you get a weird Skype version as well.

I mean it is a pretty interesting experience living Google-free on Android, and you could resort to APKPure to install some stuff like Whatsapp. But honestly, unless you get a Xiaomi phone or equivalent that you can switch to an international ROM, the whole experience is pretty annoying. Spam calls and text blockers on Android are the main highlight though.

Is there free software activism in China? Sounds like they could use something like F-Droid (or work on F-Droid to support chinese users better).

Why is this down voted? F-Droid is very viable alternative to Google Play Store.

If players that big are in the game then no, F-Droid is a dangerous consolidation of power. They really shouldn't sign apps themselves and only sign over reproducible builds.

I really never digged into this, but isn't they already provide an option to do this? [0] And there is even an option to setup verification server [1]. I get it's not perfect, but they have limited resources and someone have to work on such feature full time.

[0] https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Verification_Server/

I lost a lot of respect for them, when they participated in Gab censorship.

@JensRex, What is Gap censorship? From what is available on the internet, Gap seems to be online publishing is decentralized and open using AGPL3.

However, I don't anything about it. Maybe you can share.

It started as a free speech Twitter alternative aimed at republicans. But along with republicans and free speech activists they've attracted right-leaning extremists that were banned from Twitter for a plethora of good reasons. As a result of those users being left unmoderated, Gab gained a certain reputation.

Gab's apps weren't accepted to either app store, they were booted by several hosting companies, had to switch domain registrar and their stripe account was suspended. Switch to a Mastodon fork is a recent development.

"Republicans"? That's what we're calling them now?

> I don't anything about it. Maybe you can share.

Gab ,It's essentially only used by and caters to white supremacists now.

>Gab ,It's essentially only used by and caters to white supremacists now.

Any sources you can share?

There aren't scholarly sources on this stuff. Just stop by sometime and read the drivel.

Gab was a platform advocating "free speech" and as is the meme with those types of platforms these days, it was filled by people denying the holocaust and claiming all black people operate better as slaves. The list is not exhaustive, but you get the idea.

To my mind, no good-faith claim that such things do not need to be ostracised exists.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, social ostracism makes things worse because people tend to continue to group up on other platforms that are worse.

Like Gab- can't use Twitter? We'll make our own echo chamber.

Them being on Twitter is bad, but being on their own platform is arguably worse.

   > To my mind, no good-faith claim that such things do not need to be ostracised exists.

Here's my claim- WRT to the internet, ostracism of extremists generally makes the social situation worse.

(BTW, I really don't like it, either.)

Them being on Twitter is bad, but being on their own platform is arguably worse.

I fully agree with this. It will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy for those arguing against true freedom of speech. When you deplatform a viewpoint entirely, then the people with that viewpoint are going to coalesce onto a much smaller platform, which will end up being an echo chamber for the viewpoints that the rest of the world desires to quash. Then, it will end up becoming an argument to prevent such echo chambers from even forming in the first place, which would effectively make it impossible for smaller players to get an inroad, as they'll just be preemptively accused of being inherently alt-right.

These people don't understand that, when you centralize control over avenues of speech like that, then one day that centralized control can do a 180 and start banning any type of speech, and not just "harmful" or "problematic" speech.

It's literally the same type of tactic that China uses to suppress dissent, just on a different scale (and with a different culture behind it). It's so transparent, yet the prevailing "public narrative" is still highly supportive of deplatforming.

This argument is compelling on the surface, were it not that Europe has had laws against this kind of speech for a fairly long time now and it has made nothing worse. The place where it really is worse is the US, where even people who are not fascists seem to imagine that it is important to give them a "platform".

F-Droid will be blocked by the Great Firewall as soon as it becomes a popular way of circumventing censorship. On top of that, there is a real possibility that most Android phones sold in China are backdoored by the government in some way.

F-Droid allows many ways to update without using its main server - from alternative servers to transfer via NFC/wifi. Perhaps traffic shaping can detect typical F-Droid traffic, but a simple IP block won't do.

I'm not sure if Orbot supports Meek-Azure bridges, but if it does then you can force F-Droid to use Tor for all it's traffic.

Of course there's free software activism in China and there are apps by Chinese developers available via F-Droid. But that doesn't change anything for users who aren't free software activists. They either use the app store preinstalled on their device, or download APKs from their search engine (which often boils down to the same thing).

F-Droid would need coporate backing or SEO to get popular in China, not free software activism.

This seems like a situation where sufficiently effective free software advocacy will be persecuted. Will be interesting to see how it pans out, if at all.

There's one interesting way of having a non-Google Android experience without going to China.

Get an Amazon Fire device

Almost everyone in China is literate in Chinese.

Sideloading would not fix built-in malware that cannot be removed. You would have to flash the device with a ROM like LineageOS, at which point you would have a FOSS (excluding drivers/firmware) system which you can (mostly) trust. F-Droid is a repository / app store of good free Android software apps that you can also mostly trust, which you could then use to add functionality.

But just sideloading would not do much.

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