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

You say that, but it's a well trodden argument.

> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.

We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).

> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.

Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?

Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".

What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.

Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.

The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.

yes. husky in particular is a fork of another app called tusky, that internally implemented a login blacklist of explicitly-nazi instances and instances with lolicon content, after the author decided they didn't want those users running their software. husky's explicit sole purpose is to be tusky without that blacklist. tusky has not been removed from the play store.

i'm not familiar with the other apps on the list but i expect it might be some issue like promoting such instances in their registration screen.

also interestingly, the instance OP links to qoto.org is known within the fediverse for being full of creepers, because they've implemented a partial defederation and block circumvention. if you have an account on qoto.org, you can follow users who've blocked you, on instances that have blocked you, because it will recognize such, pull a list of posts via RSS instead of via activitypub, and fake an activitypub actor internally to generate posts for your feed. in their defense they have said that the posts are public anyway, and the user could just browse the public feed with a web browser, but it's clearly a bit different when posts from a person who has tried to block you appear in your feed normally as an item you can interact with. it's certainly against the spirit of consent.

This is workable, there's already cutouts for "private" property that serves an important public function like a town square or a mall.

I don't think it's necessarily anti-free-speech. The idea of free speech is that everyone should be able to express their opinions without being prosecuted for it, not that everyone is entitled to a platform for those opinions. You should be able to write an article about absolutely anything, but you're not entitled to put it in my newspaper.

I of course agree that the mastodon ban is a bad move because it sets a double standard where browsers can access arbitrary web content but other apps can't, and because it grossly limits the things that the average user can do with their device. However, these are consumer rights issues, not free speech issues.

I don't like hate speech. But the only thing that worries me more than the fact that there are so many people filled with so much hate is not allowing that to be out in the open where society can address it.