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Comment by smegsicle | Hacker News Reader

Very neat project, first place i look for android software.

Unfortunately political when it comes to marginalized social platforms, as previously covered here:

F-Droids statement on their ban of Gab | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466730

Anyone can create their own F-Droid repo. I added Bromite's[0], for example. I strongly support this type of federation because it gives users control over these sorts of issues.

[0]: https://www.bromite.org/fdroid

NewPipe's official repo is another one worth adding. They push updates there faster than F-Droid does to the main repo. https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/

Fascism isn't politics, it's violence, and gab is a violent platform that supports and encourages as much violence as plausible deniability let's them get away with.

Being nasty on internets isn't violence. Claiming that it is minimizes actual violence. Violence is violence.

Gab routinely hosts hate speech. That's not just being nasty on the internets.

How is speaking about hateful things on the internet not being nasty on the internet? Isn't that the literal definition of hate speech?

I can't imagine hate speech that's not nasty, but not every nasty text is hate speech. Circling back to the topic at hand, Reddit and image boards, for examples, can be quite nasty. Yet F-Droid hosts apps that's sole purpose is to access these platforms. So, and I'm referring my original parent comment, being nasty is not a problem. Hate speech is the problem.

But how would we know what is hate speech and what is just nasty? Do we just ask you every time? This issue comes up? Surely everyone has his own defintion of what should be banned and what shouldn't be? What makes your definition more important than other people's definition?

That's a good question! Hate speech as such is also a legal issue[0]. So if you host a platform, you need to comply with the different laws. I think that takes precedence over the different people's definitions. Other than that, I think hosts are entitled to vet their guests for non-protected characteristics, and for one, a group of your users speaking out against another group of your users might not be something you'd like to host. But that's entirely up to the platform's providers, some mind it more than others.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country

These kind of statements push moderate people towards real fascism. I don't know if that's your goal or if you're exceptionally naive but I don't think it's what people want on this site.

This is only the default repo that they run. Anyone can make a repo and anyone can add it.

My peertube client android app[1] has a default peertube instance that I run. My peertube instance which is the default in the app follows very few other servers because I don't want my app to be kicked out of the play store although also available on f-droid. So in essence I am censoring that instance, however you can easily switch to any other peertube server.

[1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android

FOSS is a political position as well, as is "don't be evil", etc. Nothing wrong with political in itself.

FLOSS is only political in the sense that it's not. For example, given freedom 0, you may use the software at an abortion clinic. No matter what the author thinks of abortion.

It's weird and arbitrary to ban Gab, but not TorServices and related Tor apps.

Tor might enable you to do some bad things, but they don't promote it in their official statements.

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