“Curation is necessary and won’t result in censorship.”
Only free (free as in freedom and open source) software is ever acceptable. Everything else eventually leads to Hell.
Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
311–320 of 851 posts
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. This doesn’t seem very sensible to me, I would even say it seems to be the opposite of sensible, probably because I am not American.
hate speech is a crime in many european countries too[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
That’s a non sequitur. What do you mean “too?” What does this have to do with the claim that “it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government”?
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#313I'm surprised they take it down. Why would they do that? Is the fediverse a threat to Google? It's a super niche thing for the a small minority of people who are not Google target users anyway.
Because they don't consider people who disagree with their political views legitimate, and wish to wipe them out via any means possible. The fact that the fediverse is small is neither here nor there: indeed, starting by picking off smaller players is a good way to establish a precedent and desensitise employees, so the next round of shutting down bigger players doesn't seem so bad. Boiling the frog, right in front of us.
As for why they do it, this essay may prove enlightening:
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.
I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. Wh…
If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#315This does highlight how important the relative freedom of Android is. This is unfortunate but it does not stop the ability for people to load the APKs or get them off of F-Droid. That being said, imagine if this happened on the Apple App Store...
It didn't happen on the App Store because Apple wouldn't have allowed it on in the first place
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#316Some Fediverse apps have ban lists within them for certain instances. This has been hugely controversial in Fediverse community, to the point where some apps that fork apps with ban lists and republish them without those ban lists, sometimes get removed from F-Droid! You can't just keep banning Fediverse instances. It's like banning websites. So what is this going to mean? Approved instances. Here's a list of 200 ins…
> to the point where some apps that fork apps with ban lists and republish them without those ban lists, sometimes get removed from F-Droid!
Do you have links? The only example I could think of was Freetusky, which was unmaintained while upstream Tusky itself got regular updates. That's what I'd guess as reason for its quite recent archival: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/commit/f9b7a9540f368f...
Latest version is 8.0.7 while upstream Tusky's latest version is 12.1.
Back when it was new, the F-Droid devs actually defended Freetusky and didn't follow demands for its removal. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/1736
I don't think that F-Droid should pander to people who don't care about FOSS or maintaining software, no matter their views.
Disclaimer: F-Droid maintainer/contributor (but gotten inactive for unrelated reasons).
Edit to add: note that another Tusky fork had been uploaded to F-Droid (Husky) before Freetusky got removed.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.
I don't think it's a question of the medium but a question of the actor doing the censoring. If the feds mandate the censoring on a private medium, I don't think it makes it legal. I think one difference is the enforcement, Google can't censor an individual universally, just on their platform, whereas the government can enforce it universally with force/jail/etc.
> If the feds mandate the censoring on a private medium, I don't think it makes it legal
FCC regulation of TV broadcast comes close, but apparently obscenity isn't protected under the First Amendment (perhaps you can tell I'm not a lawyer, or for that matter an American).
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet. There's a certain "side" that wants to have that both ways Private companies can't censor "bad opinions" But private companies can also arbitrarily refuse service for say, making a "gay wedding cake" How is this disconnect rationalized?
Comparing "allowing/disallowing the use of a tool" to spread YOUR message, to the "demanding that an artist/artisan create a message of YOUR liking" is very disingenuous. To be fair, I'm a libertarian and in a perfect world, you can do whatever and allow whoever you want to use/not use YOUR business. But this analogy of the gay wedding cake is simply not a good one.
It was the first one that came to mind, forgive me.
The basic thesis of my analogy was "you want 'free speech' forced upon private companies, but also want to allow them the freedom to dictate what content they allow under their 'brand'"
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches. I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/d…
Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either. So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative p…
This is an interesting point!
However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ?
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
doesn't it go both ways? if you flip both positions, it's also inconsistent.
I have to say I generally agree with you that when someone points out a contradiction in some common political stance, the reverse of that contradiction exists in the opposite stance. It seems pretty common, though it generally results from distilling a more complex view into a simplified statement (which may edge into the territory of creating men of straw).
>generally results from distilling a more complex view into a simplified statement
couldn't agree more. it's so frustrating seeing this everywhere online. this isn't twitter, you can write as much as you want. I read comments online to try and understand other viewpoints, and I can't do that without substance.