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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> My understanding is that Parler is a Mastodon instance... I know that every time headlines are posted about the number of employees at X company, people ask why there are so many people working there. But in this case I think it's justified. They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

IIRC, when they were first in the news, I believe they were running some insane thing built on top of WordPress (or some other blogging platform like that). At least that was according to someone who had claimed to hack them and scraped all their user data. I think the site was a rush job meant to capitalize on particular dissatisfactions with Twitter.

I believe gab (not so much MAGA as explicit neonazis) is a Mastodon instance, and that's caused trouble for Mastodon clients on various app stores (i.e. if you can use the generic client to connect to gab, the app could fail the app store's content policies and not get approved).

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> ...caused trouble for Mastodon clients on various app stores (i.e. if you can use the generic client to connect to gab, the app could fail the app store's content policies and not get approved

Then they better start banning web browsers. I yearn for that comparison to be the official PR response, for those individuals that find themselves in the position of power to make those decisions at Apple and Google to feel the weight of its responsibility. A federated blogging client should be well above the acceptable threshold on a spectrum from Firefox to CSAM.app.

Apple, to a certain extent, does ban web browsers other than their own.

Then why don't they ban their own web browser?

Because they apply different standards to themselves than they apply to others.

Though one could say they deprioritize their own browser in order to push producers to using their more lucrative app store.

It doesn’t take much to refute this claim. If iOS browser is so much worse than Android’s, why don’t companies just make an iOS app and tell Android users to use the web app?

Also, it came out in the Epic Trial that 80% of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games.

Outside of games, the most popular apps either front services that don’t have in app purchases at all like Spotify, Netflix, Facebook etc.

Which ones do they ban? I have Chrome, Orion, and the Onion browser on my phone, I'd think one of those would be on the ban list if such a thing existed.

It's easy to escape this argument by allowing for factoring in what percentage of the app's use is for policy violations (which the curator gets to set) and then relying on the browser being used by everyone not just niche groups so always having the majority of user use being in line with what the majority of users agree with as being good use. Not saying it makes banning these clients right I'm just saying this argument doesn't really get you anywhere in the real world.

I seem to remember it was firebase, for some reason.

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