Curation != moderation.
It's a constant source of friction with quasi-monopolists, whose employees bristle about how they'd feel if they went independent and their own company was held to these standards. Your $10M company doesn't have to do this stuff. Nor your $1B company 9 times out of 10. But if you're FAANG you're goddamned right you have to follow these extra rules.
What I'd hope we'd get in this space here is metacuration. Give me a curated list of curators for subject areas. I want a feed that's 30% environmentalism, 20% futurism, and a mix of random stuff I should care about but maybe don't look at too often.
I believe this reduces the censorship element by splitting responsibility into more of a chain.
I would love this. The closest I can think is a manually-curated RSS feed, and https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
You can connect whatever "collection of apps" source you desire but you're correct that you do get the "F-Droid List" out of the box.
It may feel odd to show no apps when initially using F-Droid but, in theory, one improvement may be to have the user explicitly choose a source list and maybe the "F-Droid List" is first in the list among others.
Going in that direction would also help expose that particular feature as I wasn't even aware that you could add / change sources for F-Droid, which sounds like if easy enough to add may be an easier avenue to self publish apps than the major app stores.
> F-Droid also makes it easy for anyone to publish their own repository, with their own curation rules.