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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

What does that mean exactly? I could install F-Droid and add the Gab repository, and then install gab via that?

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

One of these days I'll have to look into that, to finally escape from Google :-/

>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

It seems you’re against people having a freedom to express themselves and exchange ideas. Historically denying this freedom accompanies authoritarian societies where propaganda and echo chambers make it seem like these actions are virtuous when they are actually not. Even the word “reactionary” is pejorative and was used widely in Soviet Russia and in China during the cultural revolution. Isn’t it better to let ideas be heard and debated even if controversial or disagreeable?

Depends on the rationale. I hope they'd block people who are violating free software licenses

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