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Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

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Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#121

Post by angio »

moneywoes wrote: post #89
john_moscow wrote: post #64

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…

All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though

lemmy.ml does moderate content and does not allow hate speech. Once federation is implemented they said they will ban "free speech" instances.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#122

Post by Barrin92 »

mc32 wrote: post #95

It always starts like that. People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. Eventually the definition of hate or whatever it is that’s offensive is very removed from the original meaning, and now we all bear the brunt of the sensible people who with best intentions wanted to make things better.

>It always starts like that.

many places have cultures and also law that for decades has worked perfectly fine reigning in the very worst forms of hate speeech (say holocaust denial in my country) while not descending into a sort of activism that starts to get silly.

There's no automatic mechanism that turns sensible rules into insensible ones, and it's also need not be the case with sensible hate speech rules.

With cases like Google's play store the issue seems more concrete. On the one hand it's the overwhelming power and lack of due process that large firms have over software. Decentralise this and put authority into the hands of people who know their networks and the situtation will imporove. Secondly it also seems to be a very activist employee base at companies like Google that's gone somewhat overboard. Again, an accountability issue. If these things were decided publicly, it would moderate to reasonable levels.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#124

Post by djsumdog »

gilrain wrote: post #92
grahoho wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.

and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May.

Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).

> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech

We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.

At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.

The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#125

Post by naravara »

moneywoes wrote: post #89
john_moscow wrote: post #64

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…

All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though

I think that's a natural selection bias. Most people are either fine with reddit and therefore don't care about finding alternatives, or they aren't interested in what Reddit has to offer, in which case they ignore it. Even if they'd be open to an alternative that's better, spending a lot of time on a subreddit focused on alternatives, shopping through curated lists of them to try them all out is a pretty high investment of time and energy.

The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#126

Post by anoncake »

danShumway wrote: post #66
judge2020 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a specific exception to web browsers, so Mastodon app(s) could probably classify as one by prominently displaying the web url of a post above the post.

:) I wonder how this fits into the Chromium team's insistence that URLs are user-unfriendly and that browsers ought to redesign them?

Unless the rule these apps actually broke is that you aren't allowed to do things that go against Google's profit interests.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#127

Post by judge2020 »

newacct583 wrote: post #108
matsemann wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't podcasts apps recently been removed as well? Something about it being possible to listen to stuff about covid on them. Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427 And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.

They didn't remove Podcast Addict, it's right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po... That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting. I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with…

Honestly it's somewhat telling that Automation for app review can get messy fast and that Google should invest in Apple's approach to app review (but I also agree that the poster is extrapolating the app denial into something much more than what it is)

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#128

Post by matsemann »

newacct583 wrote: post #108
matsemann wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't podcasts apps recently been removed as well? Something about it being possible to listen to stuff about covid on them. Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427 And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.

They didn't remove Podcast Addict, it's right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po... That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting. I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with…

It's not a desire to scream about sensorship. It's more about how the rules are arbitrarily enforced. And how every app's fate is in the hand of two big players, so you're sol if they ban you. Even if the ban is a mistake, good luck getting it reversed unless you're going viral.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#129

Post by MYEUHD »

grahoho wrote: post #77
daniel-s wrote: post #18

A reminder that F-Droid [1] is a free software app store that can be used to download free/open source software, including Mastodon clients. [1] https://f-droid.org/

A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#130

Post by afwaller »

vbezhenar wrote: post #109
mc32 wrote: post #95

It always starts like that. People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. Eventually the definition of hate or whatever it is that’s offensive is very removed from the original meaning, and now we all bear the brunt of the sensible people who with best intentions wanted to make things better.

It might be Apple forcing them to do so. For example you can't publish app with porn content. Even if your app is some kind of forum, you're obliged at least to filter out explicit content in the app. Browser seems to be an exception.

I know nobody reads the articles but what about reading the title?
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