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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea whether this is correlated with the other recent de-platforming events, but the rapidly growing list of examples is now getting ridiculous. It’s crazy to imagine that the rug could get pulled out from beneath any of us, any time, under any pretext (or no pretext at all!). I don’t know whether a more apt metaphor alludes to serfs on feudal land, or The Trial by Kafka.

If it turns out this is because of specific discussions/channels then banning the Element app for that makes about as much sense as banning Facebook/Twitter for what some people said, or Google because of what some website says.

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This is the upside down crazy we are faced with when a tiny number of giant companies make decisions on whims of ever changing policy.

We need to fight back with things like PWAs to bypass the app stores, web socket chats, distributed social platforms, and plain old web pages to publicly document these attacks on free speech. Call/email Congress too. Get friends and neighbors to do the same. They are already alerted to this growing abuse by these monopolistic giants.

Good point. https://hydrogen.element.io works very well as a PWA, but doesn’t have push support yet.

HSTS preloading blacklists may at some future point, block PWA as well.

The real problem is indeed how much power society has given these corps. It's time to take back some power or we will never be able to.

> HSTS preloading blacklists may at some future point, block PWA as well.

What on earth are you talking about?

1) As far as I am aware, there is no "HSTS preloading blacklist". I'm not sure what that would even mean.

2) HSTS preloading is not a prerequisite for creating a PWA. Nor is presence on the HSTS preload list (not "blacklist") an obstacle to creating a PWA.

Even easier, the website used by the PWA can end up on the blacklist of Google Safe Browsing [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366

In the medium/long term, this would just train people to ignore those popups. Or to use a patched browser.

There is simply no way to suppress content as long as there's enough demand. Somebody's always going to find a way to deliver. That's even true for really illegal stuff like drugs, copyright infringement or child abuse material, but so much more for content which is legal.

I was thinking specifically about PWA on Android. I don't think you can change the browser used in that case, and I could see Google decide that you cannot open a PWA if the website is on the blacklist.

Apple has a hard requirement that you use the safari rendering engine for all browsers. So even Firefox on iOS is really just reskined safari.

Android is much more open, you can download Firefox on Android and it will infact be Firefox.

What would be more scary is if the force all browsers on the Google store to implement and enforce the same deny list.

Banning Element because of channels created on a decentralised network makes as much sense as banning a web-browser because of websites created on a decentralised network (i.e., the Internet). Looking forward to Chrome's imminent removal from the Play Store.

only if chrome is not censoring internet which google is happy to do

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