81–90 of 996 posts
For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money. [0] https://w…
That being said, imagine if this happened on the Apple App Store...
First they came for Alex. Then they came for the frog...
then they came for the corona and now they come for all the elephants in the room.
And on that front I completely understand where Google is coming from. Because the fediverse has a laissez faire attitude towards moderation (i.e. instance owners don't really block much) much of what you see on the fediverse is stuff that would get you banned on mainstream social networks [1]. And that content is the default experience unlike a web browser/chat programs/communities where you have to seek out that kind of content.
I expect that an app tied to a specific instance that put effort into moderating their content and put up some safeguards against seeing content on other instances by default with some popup like "content on other servers is not vetted, are you sure?" would be allowed to stay.
[1] Which makes sense since these are some of the only havens for people who can't make it on Twitter/FB/Reddit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there is. This happens all the time--recently, a podcast app was removed from the Play Store because it could be used to listen to content which didn't meet Play Store guidelines. The only way to fix it is to post about it and generate enough outrage that Google hears about it and can undo the ban.
When you say that's the only way to fix it, you are literally correct. There is no real ticket or support mechanism, no appeals process, nothing. The fastest way to raise an issue with Google is to email a journalist or hitup your twitter followers.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...
The open web has never been more important. What next, will Google's Chrome browser start blocking fediverse web domains? That's their 'platform', too.
In respect to this move by Google, there are no differences between web browsers and Mastodon browsers. The only difference is that if Google applies their ban equally and fairly, they lose tremendous amounts of money by banning all web browsers.
We shall see if Google follows it's own policy on this manner or if they are descriminating based on what lines their pockets.
There is probably more than what is being said here otherwise clients for reddit or 4chan would have been removed a long time ago.
In the case of the Fediverse apps they can't block anything because firstly there's no resources to police it, and secondly it's kind of the whole point of federation to let the user see what they want without getting in the way.
For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money. [0] https://w…
Without getting into the details of this - yeah I disagree with it - but, Android allows side loading. Isn’t that what everyone wanted from Apple? On a higher level, what’s the problem and what should be changed? Google has a policy that people don’t like, Android can side load, isn’t that exactly what people want?
Because the policy is unfairly applied. There’s plenty of hate speech on Facebook, but their app remains. Chrome allows you to access sites with hate speech too, but it’s not going anywhere.