Ostensibly, you are correct. However, an increased problem of app curation is that, all too often, perfectly innocent apps can get caught in the cross-fire of bad automation.
The fact that most people get their apps from one of two app stores (Google Play, App Store) makes this situation somewhat worse for people that effectively develop apps for the platform in their spare time. There are alternatives, like F-Droid...but, it's still not the same as mainstream distribution.
I don't have strong feelings about mastodon or this specific app, but the credo of "It's a private company" is just lazy reasoning and thrown around blindly far too often.
Being banned by big tech (whether apps, social media accounts, major payment processors for receiving donations) is in some cases almost equivalent to being shut down ; "it's a private company" : if the company has a monopoly and there's not a significant number of healthy alternatives for people to use (be it out of convenience and lack of skill, doesn't matter), then how about we take that into account?
It's sad and frustrating we wanted an open internet and companies took over a huge share of it and are not stopping amassing influence and control. I wish this wasn't so, but it is, and we have to open our eyes to it when we're debating such topics.
"You can still distribute your app when not being on the Play Store or Apple Store right?" "In theory yes" "Case closed" ; things aren't so simple! In a perfectly 'libertarian' world, I would be more inclined to be on your side. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world of politics, extreme lobbying, complicated tax codes, one million parties with various interests locked into a power struggle for political / social control and influence.
I'd argue that any other stance would acknowledge and justify their position as a utility provider and the Play Store as a public space.
I don't want that.
Instead, Google should be required to provide equal capabilities to third-party app stores as the Play Store now enjoys on Android. Like Microsoft was forced to accommodate for other browser vendors in Windows way back when.
This is in contrast to ISPs, which I whole-heartedly believe should be subject to net neutrality.
I do think that solution has a lot going for it. Probably even best to allow for multiple app stores from the very beginning. For example during setup of the device being prompted:
"There are various app stores to install software from. Each comes with their own form of app curation, and policies regarding payments, privacy, updates and more ; please select the app stores you would like to use. If you'd like to learn more, click here."
with a list of app stores given and 'Google Play' being pre-selected for example.
It's not something I've thought about a lot before, so I'm sure we could do better than that. But in principle that doesn't sound too bad.
> I'd argue that any other stance would acknowledge and justify their position as a utility provider and the Play Store as a public space.
That's a false dichotomy. The options are not:
1. Any company, anywhere and at any time can refuse to do business with anyone, anywhere and for any reason.
2. All companies, everywhere and all the time must allow voices from everyone, everywhere and all the time.
There's a good middle ground - antitrust regulations could be modified so that, if the company has a large enough piece of the market they shouldn't have the /choice/ of denying access for any reason.
> It's sad and frustrating we wanted an open internet and companies took over a huge share of it and are not stopping amassing influence and control. I wish this wasn't so, but it is, and we have to open our eyes to it when we're debating such topics.
They took advantage of this 'open internet' and now they have made it partially closed for everyone since they have control of the platforms that most people do for everyday life. Web Browsing, Email, Chat, Calendars, Maps and now Meetings. The startups that have been acquired by them have just made the tech giants even bigger.
Developers recommending libraries, frameworks and services created by (you guessed it) the tech giants further locks in their app to depend solely on their servers and it makes the migration out of the app store very difficult.
We let them do this for decades and now we complain about it. The only way to fight back is to create free and open source alternatives.
> "You can still distribute your app when not being on the Play Store or Apple Store right?" "In theory yes" "Case closed" ; things aren't so simple!
Practically yes and it is that simple.
Take a look at how Cydia and F-Droid does it. Host a repository on your website, Put a 'Add to Cydia' or 'Add to F-Droid' deep link on your website and the users will freely see all the apps made by you. We need something like this but for the desktop.
It may not even be 'Cydia' or called 'F-Droid' that succeeds in being mainstream on this very old idea, but there will be an accessible alternative that will use this idea and it is free and open source and cross-platform.
Discord desktop is not on any App Store and you can download it freely without a Google/Apple account. Telegram is on Google Play and also self-hosts the APK and is also on F-Droid.
The solution has always been to have a self-hosted backup so that the users always have an accessible way of downloading your app and not just being ONLY available through any centralised App Store.
I agree with you on some parts. Don't rely on Google, be available via other methods as well. But that does not take away from the fact, that if you lose access to Play Store and Apple Store as a means of distributing your application, at that moment you will have permanently lost access to 98% of potential users. The few that bother to install a .apk manually or use F-Droid aren't significant. How many people do _ever_ even search for an app outside of these stores? I'm guilty most of the time myself. One more factor: Especially with social apps the network effect is everything. Even the few hardcore lovers of your app stop using it, if not enough 'non-technical' users do. Having 100 contacts, 98 of them on WhatsApp, 4 of them on some social media app you have to tell your contacts to download the .apk from somewhere in order to use it? More often than not you can't even get people to install Signal, and it's one click.
You don't survive something like this and you won't regain your user count outside of these curated app stores.
It's pretty much as simple as that. The dream of "if it happens enough times F-Droid and alternatives will become more prominent" is just naive, it doesn't work like that. There is no level playing field to compete.
"The solution has always been to have a self-hosted backup [...]" - the solution to what? The solution to compete from outside of these curated stores where companies dictate course? No, it's not a solution for that, because it won't do much for you.
Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should be able to do a thing or that you should do a thing, and it definitely doesn’t mean you should be immune to criticism for doing the thing.
> Google Play is owned by Google and is a private platform. They can remove, ban, suspend any app or app update they want when it breaks their policies.
In this democracy, companies can only do what we, the people, allow them to do.
You, the people, vote for representatives who make the laws that Google has to adhere to. If you disagree with the current laws that allow Google to do what it does, then vote for other representatives.
At least that is how it works in my country, and from what I know, how it works in the US too.
Is that not "people allowing companies what they can do"?
Where does it say that people don't have the right to criticize them for their actions on the platform? Because I don't see how the fact that they have the ability and possibly the right (let's see what the antitrust cases say) to do this means that anybody has to take it without complaint.
I'll be waiting for the next time Google bans another app on the Play Store even after the antitrust lawsuits are over.
In the old days at least for the desktop, one just points to a website to download an app on to their computer. Discord already does this. No Microsoft or Apple App Store required.
For Android, F-Droid has a default main repository which is centralised but also allows you to add another repository if you want. While it is not as intuitive as adding a repository via a deep link at least you can do that.
For iOS, Cydia is an App Store for iOS just like F-Droid where the user can easily add a repository via a 'Add to Cydia' deep link, and they get all the apps from that developer. We need something like that for the desktop, where users can do this freely.
Centralisation of App Stores is not the answer, even if you 'break up' Google which I hope happens anyway. But for now, the Play Store is 'their service'. You're free to complain, critique, appeal, argue, scream, etc but it won't be the last time this will happen again.
The best thing to do is to self-host your app; like how Telegram and Discord are doing it.
Keeping in mind that those who set the policies are the same people who were literally crying in the hallways at work after the 2016 election
And outright saying "WE lost"
When Google, YouTube, et al make decisions that appear to be careless, biased, or downright baffling, remembering this piece of data often provides valuable clarity, context, and insight
This is quickly becoming the "cant yell fire" meme of the 2020's. hell I bet you even believe that meme dont you even though it is been rebutted for decades and universally cited as bad case law?
The "Mah private company" defense is flawed on many levels and you should really stop using
1. Just because they have the right to do it, does not mean people should not criticize them for it. Simply stating they "have the right" is meaningless and does not add anything of value to the conversation
2. There is a overlapping and complex set of principles and laws at play here. There are many avenues that can be explored from a legal front when they ban a company from selling their product on their walled garden, even outside of the Anti-Trust issues there is also contract laws that can be used, and even Deceptive Trade regulations given the uneven standard that their policies are applied.
So it is not as simple as say "Well there are a private company they can do what they want" The law, and society is far more complex than that, and it is time for people to stop using this useless platitude as a defense of bad actions
Let's say they decide to change their policies on a whim, where overnight you are banned for life.
Should we also accept something like that?
I'm sorry but what you are saying is pure ignorance. I consider myself also a libertarian to a certain degree, but in these kind of situations it is completely irrational to let these platforms behave however they want, regardless of the consequences.
I think it would be best to rename this submission to "Tusky (Mastodon app) suspended from Google Play Store" because people who do not use Mastodon have no context for what Tusky is.
The privacy policy should have a button saying "I accept and understand the privacy policy, now sign me up". Instead the actual button is just "Sign up". That language doesn't meet the store policy.
I mean, in practice that would probably work. But an interesting caveat is that apps for federated networks don't typically have one singular privacy policy. It varies server by server. Architecturally, this is a different beast than having a client for a specific service, like Twitter.
I guess they could probably get around it by showing an instance's policies prior to user registration, but not every server actually has them, or needs to (in the case of self-hosted servers)
Just because some company has a thousand pages of legal boilerplate policies doesn't mean you have any meaningful information about what they're doing with your data.
The only thing you can do is try to give them a minimum of data to play with.
OK, so how do I know what the external service is doing with my personal information?
And, separately, how do I know whether the app collects personal information itself (it's effectively in the transmission path between me and the external service) and where it transmits it if it does?
The app is on itself open source, normally it doesn't track users.
I'm also a hoster of my own fediverse instance and data is shared in the network only with the instances with which you interact, and the same thing is for me. And I don't have any privacy policy because I'm the only user in my instance.
I've seen a great many open-source apps add analytics frameworks to the version they deploy to the App Store. Is there any way to verify that the version on the App Store is built from the same code that's in the repository, without modification?
There's the privacy policy of the app and then there's separate privacy policies of the servers. The app sees your data and has access to it independently of the servers so it needs a policy.
They do seem to ague in favor of free software. .. at least as long as app developers do not advertise shunned instances. Power-statements like "sometimes, staying neutral isn’t an option" suggest that they are probably not an ally of those wanting to leave it to the user to decide what hosts to access.
While I have mixed feelings about the article, it is well worth a read, no matter where readers stand on the issue.
Not tolerating xenophobia, racism and bigots in general is a big point for a lot of people. The paradox of tolerance is something that many people should consider.
The problem isn't with the not tolerating, it's with the pushing for others not to tolerate. Freedom requires choice.
Our problem is that we've built almost our entire ecosystem on systems where a single actor's intolerance can deny millions of people access to a product. This seemed like a good idea at the time. Apparently what it comes down to is the entire economy needs to be duplicated? Banks, payment providers, app stores, content delivery networks, web hosting, all the way to operating systems. I didn't realize that it would take that much to get the right to access any app or social network I want to? But apparently that's where the so-called paradox of tolerance has led us.
Seems we should have seen this coming. A certain xkcd about infrastructures comes to mind. Oh well. Since true decentralization is possible, it's just a matter of time in the end.
> Apparently what it comes down to is the entire economy needs to be duplicated? Banks, payment providers, app stores, content delivery networks, web hosting, all the way to operating systems.
What it comes down to is if you're a fascist you won't be allowed to participate in the economy at all to spread your message. Service providers who cater to fascists will be cut off by the banks, and banks that refuse to do their due diligence w.r.t. fash in their customer ranks will be singled out for more in-depth investigation by federal authorities.
> And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.
> And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”
I don't think often of the right to "go away if you don't like something", but that's because it's so basic and essential I barely consider it.
You don't have to tolerate the intolerant, and the people running the app stores are free to make their choices of who they allow into the store.
If you want to be associated with fascists and racists, that is up to you, but you will not be welcome in civilised places. You can always run your own app store which allows those groups.
"Hakuin used to tell his pupils about an old woman who had a teashop, praising her understanding of Zen. The pupils refused to believe what he told them and would go to the teashop to find out for themselves.
Whenever the woman saw them coming she could tell at once whether they had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen. In the former case, she would serve them graciously. In the latter, she would beckon to the pupils to come behind her screen. The instant they obeyed, she would strike them with a fire-poker.
Nine out of ten of them could not escape her beating."
It is a great metaphor. Nine out of ten applications of the tolerance paradox do not pass the fire poker test. One needs a certain level of enlightenment and maturity of judgement to apply it, otherwise it can turn into metooism, mob behavior and plain hypocrisy.
>> "It is a great metaphor. Nine out of ten applications of the tolerance paradox do not pass the fire poker test. One needs a certain level of enlightenment and maturity of judgement to apply it, otherwise it can turn into metooism, mob behavior and plain hypocrisy."
You used a lot of words to make a mundane, unsupported assertion sound profound. Do you have any real examples?
> If it is just users, why ban them and not browsers or anything that can access Facebook?
Because Facebook is controlled by the right people, and Gab is not.
Consider the unbelievably offensive and sometimes illegal content (including child porn) that's been hosted on Reddit. They've cleaned up significantly recently to be more advertiser-friendly, but they were able to host all that content for years without getting deplatformed or facing any real consequences. Because Reddit is controlled by the right people. It's all about power.
Most people operate on a caricature version of the paradox, as opposed to Popper's more measured original.
Most go with something like "If we tolerate people who aren't 100% our version of kumbaya, we'll end up in tyranny", when Popper's original is restricted to people who have stopped listening, and would make their argument with pistols.
Most of the time, the paradox citers are closer to the "not listening" camp than not. Many are hideously fundamentalist ideologues who want to limit discussion to what they themselves find acceptable, not to deplatforming things that really try to deprive others of their freedom of choice.
If Jan. 6 wasn't proof enough that the "election was stolen" crowd has stopped listening and is willing to make their point with arms, I don't know what would suffice for you.
First, Jan 6 is not relevant to the broader claim, and second is that most of the people on Jan 6th came there to protest, and did not in fact invade the Capitol building. The larpers and other assorted idiots who did pretty surely have lawsuits pending against them for obvious reasons. The vast throng may have been deluded, but did not choose to make their point with arms.
There was not a single firearm present at the riot, Brian Sicknick wasn't killed with a fire extinguisher, and the guy with zip ties found them in the Capitol, was there with his mother, and had no intent to take hostages
What are you talking about?
The Federal Courthouse in Portland has been under siege for months by an idea
Jan 6 is proof that 0.001% of the "election was stolen" crowd has stopped listening and would make their argument with pistols. We're talking about people expressing heterodox opinions on social media. They are not the same group. Particularly since the LARPers are in jail.
> The paradox of tolerance is something that many people should consider.
Or even read, it’s barely longer than a page and yet I see it mischaracterised on these threads repeatedly by people who have clearly not read it.
For those with too short an attention span to even search for the text, let alone read it, and to save them from the mendacious cartoon that purports to boil it down, here’s what it says in two lines:
- speech should beget speech, no matter how disagreeable
- intolerance is defined as those who will not engage in speech and have turned to violence instead
That is not the same as deplatforming “bigots”, or punching Nazis. Quite the opposite.
Criticizing speech and advocating, on the basis of that criticism, that people should choose not to relay the criticized speech is speech.
Choosing what speech to relay or not is speech (except when it is “press”, but those are effectively aspects of the same thing called out separately to prevent an artificial distinction from being used to regulate speech.)
Deplatforming is speech, from advocacy to execution.
> Censorship (of which deplatforming is one form) is not the same as choosing not to listen and hence, is not part of freedom of speech.
Deplatforming is choosing not to actively relay speech. While, yes, such does (as “self-censorship”) fit in some of the broader conceptions of censorship, it's absolutely part of the freedom of speech (and central to the idea of the “marketplace of ideas”, the same as people being free not to buy, distribute, and resell your goods is central to classical markets in goods and services.)
The “freedom of speech” isn't limited to choosing not to listen, hence why it isn't called the “freedom to choose not to listen”. Freedom from making speech at the direction of another party is at least as fundamental as freedom not to listen.
Freedom of speech is called freedom of speech and not the “freedom to choose not to listen” because the freedom not to listen is implied by freedom of speech, for anyone that's thought about it. And it's easier to say free speech than recite On Liberty. Shorthand is usually enough.
Deplatforming is censorship because, if done actively and exceptionally (i.e. discriminatorially and out of the ordinary routine) then it is the attempt to prevent the speaker from speaking and anyone wishing to listeners being able to listen.
It seems to me that you're conflating distribution with purchase in your analogy, which might explain your subsequent reasoning, though I find them to be quite different things. If you are going to conflate them then distributors refusing to distribute the goods of gays or blacks based on them being gay or black, given that they usually distribute goods from non-gays and non-blacks, that is not prejudicial discrimination?
I would not agree with that in a marketplace, and that wouldn't fit with my conception of freedom of speech either, given the analogy.
If, however, we were talking about private individuals and not distributors, then I agree that they should be able to choose who they purchase from or even sell to - in a private capacity, not as a business - whether based on prejudice or not. Just as with speaking and listening.
> Deplatforming is censorship because, if done actively and exceptionally (i.e. discriminatorially and out of the ordinary routine) then it is the attempt to prevent the speaker from speaking and anyone wishing to listeners being able to listen.
No, it's not. It's refusing to actively participate in the speakers speech. It is distinct from either preventing them from speaking, or preventing interested parties from listening. The freedom of speech is, as conservatives are fond of pointing out, a negative right, not a positive one.
(The use of “discriminatorially” here is pure noise; all choices are, by definition, discrimination.)
> If you are going to conflate them then distributors refusing to distribute the goods of gays or blacks based on them being gay or black, given that they usually distribute goods from non-gays and non-blacks, that is not prejudicial discrimination?
It's certainly race and sexual orientation discrimination, but that's not what we're discussing, and it's an orthogonal issue to freedom of speech. If you want to argue a violation of existing or ideal public accommodation laws protecting against political viewpoint discrimination, that's a very different argument than the free speech argument. In fact, it's an opposed argument, as public accommodation laws (and the concept of freedom from private discrimination on various axes more generally) is in tension with free speech and free association rights, a tension which is at its maximum when the service involved is relaying speech and the basis for denial is the political content of the speech at issue.
Firstly, there are three ways to "actively participate in the speakers speech" (in terms of freedom of speech):
- speak back
- listen
- transmit
Additionally, repeating what someone else has said (speech) is not transmission of their speech, it's transmission of their ideas.
A television broadcaster or a book publisher, however, transmits. That is their function.
> The freedom of speech is, as conservatives are fond of pointing out, a negative right, not a positive one.
Which is why there was a qualifier of "if done actively and exceptionally (i.e. discriminatorially and out of the ordinary routine)".
If a broadcaster like Sky Sports refuses to have on Noam Chomsky for a discussion about, well, anything, that's not censorship because he doesn't talk about sport nor does he have anything to do with sport. They passively and normally do not transmit his speech, hence it is not censorship. If Chomsky asks to go on then they may still refuse and it not be censorship because even though their refusal is active it is *not* exceptional.
If, however, the BBC political flagship programme refuses to have Chomsky on because he's Chomsky or Chomsky once wrote in support of a Holocaust denier [note 1] then *that is censorship* because it is active and exceptional.
None of that requires positive liberty, nor is it in variance with conceptions of free speech as a negative liberty.
> If you want to argue a violation of existing or ideal public accommodation laws protecting against political viewpoint discrimination, that's a very different argument than the free speech argument.
Given what you've written I can see how you'd think this. As I'm not:
> It's certainly race and sexual orientation discrimination, but that's not what we're discussing, and it's an orthogonal issue to freedom of speech.
If we take your analogy about distributors to its logical conclusion then it is what we're talking about - enabling discrimination that violates negative liberties.
[note 1] He wrote in support of an academic's right to freedom of speech, not in support of his book denying the death camps, but that's the way things get framed.
Edit: formatting. I will forever rage against HN's half hearted markdown flavour.
That is true. You cannot trust Google. They will point to their policies and even if you critique this they will lock and ignore your request. You can't use F-droid as an example of supporting 'Free software' or FLOSS if it is restricting distribution of its list of apps to certain people they don't like in the default repository, which goes against the point of branding yourself as 'free software' in the first place.
The only way to distribute your app without all these problems is by self-hosting it yourself like the old days of downloading a .exe, .dmg, from the website or have a app store like Cydia where you can freely add their list of apps with a click of a button that says something like 'Add to Cydia'.
They do still control what is in their main repository. However (big however) anyone can run a repository that works in f-droid. You can't do that with the play store.
Amusing that Husky is still up, a fork of Tusky that has support for some additional Pleroma features and lacks Tusky's blacklist of certain "naughty" instances.
It still blows my mind that Mastodon was explicitly made to escape the 'dictator companies' of closed social networks but that many of the apps made for Mastodon contain blacklists.
I don't agree with the content of said blacklisted Mastodon instances and I agree that developers can do whatever they want with their app, but blacklists seem painfully obviously against the spirit of what Mastodon is supposed to represent.
On the contrary, the idea in the fediverse is that you choose a server that aligns with your needs and preferences. You can always run your own promiscuous instance if you want.
This is in contrary to the status quo, where the vertical integration makes it practically impossible to choose a differently filtered view.
Over time I'm sure we'll see curation markets for filter lists, think adblock lists but tied to some collaboration, voting, incentive mechanisms and reputation system.
OPs point is the app devs are trying to stop you picking your own server by blocking you from logging in to unapproved servers via the app. Instances blocking each other is perfectly understandable.
This is like if chrome started blocking websites google disapproves of.
Gotta keep in mind the concept of "Federation" isn't the same as "Anti-censorship" or "Free Speech".
It's less escaping the censored and restricted megacorp service to freedom or free speech anarchy and more you're able to build your own service that fulfills your own needs and own preferred blend of moderation vs free speech and that service can interact with others own instances with their own rules.
The problem with that argument is that the developers of the application are making the choices not the people that are "building their own service"
This goes to the core of the debate, I am in favor of giving users the ability to block anyone they want, even the ability to subscribe to and distribute block lists
However it is step to far to hardcode or build in unchangeable block lists into the very foundation of the service.
Developers need to empower users to make their own choices, not treat users like they were children
When I build something, I alone get to decide what my labor enables and what it does not. If you disagree with my choices, you’re free to use a tool built by someone whose values better align with yours.
That is fine, just do not market it as a "Free Speech" service / tool / platform like the fediverse try's to do.
The entire marketing of the fediverse software is freedom from censorship.
if you want to build "Authoritarianverse" and place yourself as emperor for life, then you are free do to do just be open with your marketing so people know to avoid your software
Right on the home page of mastodon "Follow friends and discover new ones among more than 4.4M people. Publish anything you want:"
Clearly that is a false statement if they are imposing their view of what "correct" speech is.
They both also license their code under GPL, even though they violate Freedom 0 of the core freedom model the GPL is designed to protect
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
>> escaping corporate control
Which is doubly ironic since they have adopted the same exact policies that many are fleeing Big Tech to avoid. The Silicon Valley Authoritarian left Speech codes
Why did you omit the second half of that sentence? They’re clearly referring to the format, not the content:
> Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video.
You’re misinterpreting the meaning of freedom 0. Tusky and Mastodon comply with both the letter and the spirit:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish means that you are not forbidden or stopped from making it run. This has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, whether it is technically capable of functioning in any given environment, or whether it is useful for any particular computing activity.
> For example, if the code arbitrarily rejects certain meaningful inputs—or even fails unconditionally—that may make the program less useful, perhaps even totally useless, but it does not deny users the freedom to run the program, so it does not conflict with freedom 0. If the program is free, the users can overcome the loss of usefulness, because freedoms 1 and 3 permit users and communities to make and distribute modified versions without the arbitrary nuisance code.
It is sad that as a culture we are loosing the value of freedom and bend over backwards to justify why it is ok for people to limit other peoples freedom
When i first got into the IT world many decades ago it was largely libertarian, free culture was rampant and attempts to lock down peoples speech, and freedom was viewed very badly
Today people like you find anything and everything to not only justify your Authoritarianism and desire for control over others, you do so by attempting to gas light people in to thinking you are actually supporting freedom
Sorry I was there, I lived through the rise of the internet, I lived through the crypto wars, I saw the raise of Free Software, and Open source, I saw it all first hand... I know the dangers if the society you desire, but it seems history will need to repeat itself before people will learn
This trend in some circles to limit speech and thought will not turn out good for anyone, never in history has speech codes and thought police been a good thing for society, and I see no reason to believe that the so called "progressives" that are leading this new round of authoritarian policies will turn out any different.
You don't seem to see the difference between the letter and the spirit.
Sure, Tusky complies with the letter of the definition; that doesn't make it moral
This is what Stallman said:
> If a free program has a malicious feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs and tools on nonfree operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many users do it.
Tusky complies with the spirit of the definition. More accurately, its list of blocked servers is entirely unrelated to whether or not it's free software. Again, the FSF explicitly says of freedom 0:
> This has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, whether it is technically capable of functioning in any given environment, or whether it is useful for any particular computing activity.
What part of your quote does Tusky violate? It's GPL3. Even if you consider that block list a malicious feature (I don't), you are allowed to take it out and distribute a "corrected" version.
Some authors of Fediverse clients banned certain servers not because they wanted to, but because they were told their client would be banned from app stores if they didn't.
He doesn't care what restrictions are in a program's source code, as long as you're both legally allowed and technically able to create and use a modified version of the program without them.
It's still free software. It only wouldn't be if the license said you weren't allowed to remove the restrictions, or if it didn't come with the source code needed for you to do so.
The idea behind federated networks is to spread power.
If power is truly spread out and people there are as heterogeneous as everywhere else it does mean that there will be instances that do not agree on the process on how to handle things. That is by design.
Long term the only one you as a Mastodon user have to agree with is the administrator of your instance. If you are on a mainstream instance where, let's say, zealots push for an ever smaller overton window and isolate the instance you should, ideally, just switch instances as soon as it starts getting in your way.
It is natural that parts of the network will drift in different directions while they iterate on their understanding on how the instance should be governed.
Truly problematic are not instances deciding to go strict but platform providers trying to pressure their vague and intransparent rules onto the network.
... also the ever present risk of software developers adding their own hierarchy to the system, but that problem is inherent to all shared protocols.
They must bend over and accept the blacklists, for our betters at Apple and Google have deemed some of the instances to be too naughty. They will ban the app from their stores if such access is allowed.
Instead, one must access naughty comment through other approved means, such as Chrome or Safari.
The thing is that Mastodon and other libre platforms mantra is not to ensure that everyone express themselves, but that everyone can do so.
I am, personally, totally fine with that: I don't wish to have ideas I hold in contempt sneak into my feed. But the key difference with “dictator companies” is that I decide what I don't see and whom I enclose with.
The protocol is open, so you could even write your own app, or if you lack the skills or time to do so, commission somebody else to write one and nobody can stop you.
In contrast, the siloed "dictator companies" control API/protocol access so it's almost impossible to develop alternative applications.
> There is a dozen apps, and most of these are opensource.
And some of them work in tandem, apparently.
> Not to count that the protocol and the federation are open.
HTTP is open. Would you not consider it problematic if Google blocked accessing websites because some engineer doesn't like the opinions published on those websites?
Yeah, that's called a fork. Now, if you don't like them you can switch to Yuito, Mammut, Ivory, Mastobone, Stegodon, Fedilab, or the web client of your instance, or develop your own.
> Would you not consider it problematic if Google blocked accessing websites because some engineer doesn't like the opinions published on those websites?
They're already doing it, in China for instance; or on Chrome if a website is on their safe browsing list.
And no, I don't find it problematic. Google is a private company, I don't have any say in what they do with their property as long as they follow the law.
There's a joke (can't find the comic or article, darn you Google search) that says when you make a forum with "free speech" you get one civil libertarian and 99 trolls, neo nazis, child pornographers, etc.
Moderation is essential for usable communities. These block lists are a form of moderation to make Mastodon useful. Otherwise it's pushed on to the user, many of whom will just nope out back to Reddit or Facebook, or to the Mastodon server administrators, who are largely unpaid volunteer labor.
The person you're replying to is not referring to blocklists between mastodon instances (so for example, having mastodon.org blocking federation between them and cybre.space), but clients preventing you to login to certain instances.
It's like an e-mail client that supports the POP-protocol preventing logins to pop.myemailserver.com because they don't like myemailserver.com
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
The Tusky blocklists for eg. Gab and Spinster don't impact the actual communities one iota - most Mastodon servers already block them, and the instance and user level are where the filtering should take place in Mastodon's system design. Some rando using Spinster on their phone isn't going to contaminate anyone else.
Not the first time. Fedilab and Subway Tooter (both Mastodon apps too) have also been suspended from Play Store monthes earlier, also the latter one hasn't been recovered until now.
Kinda ironic seeing Google Play's post today about "Boosting developer success on Google Play" [0] with quotes like "Helping developers build sustainable businesses", except that your business can be gone at any moment based on the whim of some Google employee or automated algorithm.
Myself, working in an at-will state, it’s quite a different situation.
If I lose my job there are thousands of other companies that would be happy to have me. Many of whom are filled with great people who are sane and reasonable.
When it comes to selling mobile apps there are two storefronts with unforgiving chaotic management that will drop you at the turn of a hat.
I think this is one of the great unsolved problems of our time. Apple, Google and Amazon (ok and Azure too I guess) are effectively gatekeepers in terms of what products are allowed to exist online. And during the pandemic this is especially relevant, because for a great many people online life is public life for all intents and purposes.
I think almost everyone would agree that a handful of unaccountable corporations should not hold this discretionary power, but we don't have a legal framework or social contract to dictate how this should be handled.
There is a framework for this that was created over 100 years ago when the same problem happened with railroads. They did they same thing and used their monopoly power to discriminate on who could ship goods by rail. Society said that was wrong and we have the idea of a common carrier that must treat all customers the same.
We should declare all app stores to be the same, common carries that may not discriminate. Bottom line, end of story. No BS about "hate speech" or other terms that are made up to make censorship sound more palatable.
I disagree with that. Private companies should be able to remove apps from their store. However, we should make it more possible for alternative stores to be available. Side-loading (including on iPhones) should be a protected ability, not government officials deciding that Apple can’t ban white supremacists from publishing hate speech apps on Apple’s App Store.
>Private companies should be able to remove apps from their store.
Why should they unless the app violates the law?
And please take into consideration the fact that we aren't talking about small / mid size businesses, but giant behemoths and we're trying to apply some rules to the biggest ones.
And why should those huge companies be able to collect rents from their App stores?
Protecting side-loading (legally and technically) solves both problems. And limits the ability of the government to do the same kind of moderating as they’d first have to somehow disable sideloading. (Imagine the government trying to disable ability to run arbitrary code on all laptops or PCs. Possible with enough manpower, sure, but way harder than just moderating an App Store.)
I think protecting side-loading would be a sensible regulation to fix the situation of app-store gatekeeping.
On the hosting side I think it's a bit different. For instance if AWS wants to kick an app off of their platform, there should be a legally mandated warning escalation process, and cloud providers should be required to give clients a reasonable amount of time to migrate their product to a different provider before kicking them off (maybe even 6 months to a couple years). I also think there should be some limits to which reason a hosting provider can use to evict a client from their platform, at least when they reach a certain size. It's very difficult to be competitive in the current market without access to cloud hosting, and there are only a few serious options available in this space, so it should be a very high standard required to remove someone from this type of service.
And then for services like DNS providers, I think they should have to act as unbiased infrastructure, and should not be allowed to deny service for any reason short of a court order.
> Private companies should be able to remove apps from their store.
I don't know about that. It feels a little too close to Verizon cutting off a phone call to my friend because an employment or sentiment detection algo didn't appreciate my tone.
Unfortunately, they can. The publishers/developers agreed to the "terms and conditions" when signing up. The policy strikes that get you kicked out are not enforced consistently, but I'm sure from a legal point of view there's little you can do when your app is banned.
They are. At least in EU. And we need to remember, that we live in free sociaty in a sense that you can do everything what is not forbiden, in contrast to doing only what is allowed. So if in US these apps are not forbiden then US should change that.
I don't think we have laws against the kinds of things that make these apps challenging. If you publish someone's personal information on an app, is it the app's fault? Is the app subject to legal sanction for being an engine of harassment?
Apps with good moderation and communities can do things that other apps cannot. How do you tell the difference, legally, without punishing apps that are trying but have a bad incident?
This is about patterns more than specific moments. The law is about moments. So its hard.
Not even our criminal laws are consistently enforced in the US. I have no faith that this would be any different, and think it would just end up as another tool for systemic oppression.
People love to talk about great the web of the 90's was, and I miss it myself, but what made it work was "the price of admission" which elevated the level of both the posters (who had to understand how to make, and pay for, a web site), and the readers (who had to pay for an internet connection, and understand how to configure the connection). I think categorizing social media services as common carriers is half of it. People who shipped things over the rail line also paid money for the service. I think social media services should charge a nominal fee for the privilege of posting. This alone would keep out a lot of the spammy riff-raff, and would automatically help in taking some pressure off the moderation algorithms and content screeners. If it were up to me, I'd put limits on how large of an enterprise would be allowed to be supported with ad tech.
Does anyone remember the Something Awful forums? One thing that set them apart was charging $10 for an account. People balked at the idea of paying to post on an internet forum but it kept out the spam and crap other forums were inundated with.
Edit: I doubt perma-banning via CC number would be as effective a tool now that things like Apple Pay and virtual credit card numbers exist.
I literally owe many of the major changes in my life to the SA Forums and people I met through them, and yeah, the quality of posts there is high due to the moderation and cost.
Even the creator got perma-banned recently when it was discovered he was a serial abuser who had been using the forums as part of his abuse.
Correct. Hate speech means speech you do not like because it disagrees with your biases and viewpoints. For some the use of speech to coordinate a summer of violent riots is hate speech, for others it is a rally cry of the oppressed.
Using the violence of the state to restrict freedom of speech and thought is never done by people on the right side of history.
It's (almost) always done by people on the wrong side of history. There's an important distinction, there. Should people be free from consequences for these?
• Yelling fire in a crowded theatre
• Posting
nohup sudo -knu cat /dev/zero > /dev/sd*
(but, you know, a working version) as an answer to “how do I recover my backups URGENT!!1” on a Q&A site / IRC.
• Asking a very drunk person to hand their wallet over to the “wallet inspectors” for “indefinite inspection and spending”.
• Asking a bank employee to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Asking a bank computer to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Giving somebody else the DeCSS decryption keys.
• Publishing a detailed procedure for how to build a dirty bomb using common household items.
• Verbally punching down in a way that causes significant psychological distress.
I get this concern, but the hate speech bit is not BS. People using platforms to plan insurrections or other violence are not gonna be protected, whether by private companies or the government.
You’re making my point. The government isn’t going to protect speech more than private companies. Be careful for what you wish for on asking the government to step in.
The government has legal limits with which it cannot infringe on speech. That's not to say it always works perfectly, but at least if the government prevents my speech, I have recourse to challenge it in the court system on constitutional grounds. If Google or Apple does it, I have zero recourse, and the limits of the speech on their platforms are decided entirely unilaterally.
Which is why sideloading should be protected. The government restricting the freedom of companies to moderate pretty terrible content is not great. What we should have is sideloading protected technically and legally. That also prevents Google and Apple from just collecting monopoly rents from their App Stores with no alternative. App stores and the ability of companies to pick and choose the apps that are allowed on them is a legitimate thing. What’s not legitimate is being stuck with ONLY being able to use the company’s App Store on the device you own.
Government sticking their nose in there is likely to have results that are not what you want. The freedom-maximizing option is not to have government-moderated app stores (shudder). It’s to have the freedom to shop at different stores.
The App Store model itself (where sideloading is prohibited and technically impossible) is a single point of failure, and having the government run it is not going to make things more free. I mean for goodness sake, you can’t even swear on FCC’s airwaves, and you’re telling me THAT’S the model you want in App Stores?
Nobody is talking about having the government run app stores. The argument is about regulating app stores to limit the power of the duopoly from having sole discretion over what is and isn't allowed on their store. Mandating side-loading would be an example of one such regulation.
I would rather see the government stay out of regulating software distribution.
Once it gets involved, those regulations will be written by lobbyists and will make it harder for new platforms to arise.
What I’d prefer is mandating that hardware be able to run alternative OSs. If iPhones and Android devices could have a free OS installed, all of these problems would be taken care of.
You have the right to install an alternate OS on your phone now. It's just difficult to do, may result in bricking your device or at least crippling functionality, and even if all goes well, the software ecosystems for the existing alternate OSes is pretty small. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a viable phone OS, but as far as I can tell none of the existing options are ready to be used as a daily driver yet.
They have all the power in the world to control who has access in to my speech. Right now where I live it's illegal to congregate in person. Whoever controls my online communication effectively controls my speech right now.
How do I run my own train on the open train lines? Where are the open source train designs? Why are new railway projects mired in government bureaucracy?
I don't know if I understand what you are trying to say with this metaphor, but I am not sure how government regulation to make software explicitly more accessible would not be in the interest of the consumer and the entrepreneur.
You don’t understand the metaphor of railway regulation?
Why did you introduce it?
Government regulation often doesn’t do what people say it’s going to do. Often it is written to benefit a particular lobby.
If you have specific ideas, those can be discussed in the context of government regulation of software.
If you’re going to say ‘it will turn out the way it did with railways’, then you also have to face that access to railway lines is only available to a small number of companies chosen by the government.
I think that is exactly what would happen if the government regulated software distribution.
It is even broader (and worse) than this. Technological gatekeepers you listed there are often working in concert with financial gatekeepers (credit card companies, payment processors) to prevent funding of alternative information flows.
This can and does happen - but it’s usually limited to a locality (either the landlord or the local government) and you can move outside their jurisdiction relatively easily. It’s rarely a state or federal thing.
But here there is only two at the highest level - and nowhere to turn.
My hypothesis is that Google does not care about anything other than its own interest, and simply has to make small steps to get enough PR on their side to prevent further regulation. (Just like the plan for Chrome to eliminate cookies).
If they ban a client for the content it can access, why don't they ban web browsers entirely ?
Google Chrome allows access to illegal and hateful content too.
Sure ... but society would adapt and make replacement words as derogatory as the words they replaced. The euphemism treadmill is a well-observed phenomenon.
I am glad my immediate worry about active suppression of information is not yet necessary.
Idiot, imbecile, and moron used to be medical terms. Then they got associated with being derogatory and people started using retarded as the new PC term. Not that long ago I got chastised for saying someone who sustained brain damage was now mentally retarded.
This was mentioned earlier in the year when Element client was banned. Google Chrome can load the Element client in the browser and access all the same content.
It's probably just a bad AI trying to help Google manage a massive platform. It's just sad to think about all the developers who can't call on a Twitter following to get their app unbanned quickly.
> It's probably just a bad AI trying to help Google manage a massive platform. It's just sad to think about all the developers who can't call on a Twitter following to get their app unbanned quickly.
How do you think that inference works? Through pattern matching "Mastodon" then raising a flag. Who sets the pattern?
For the same reasons Khamenei can tweet that an entire country is a malign tumor and needs to be removed and eradicated and Twitter is still in the stores.
For the same reasons silly places like Parler get nuked on Jan 6th pretenses when most of the planning happened on Facebook but Facebook's still there.
Power's power, and Lenin's question of who/whom is always relevant.
Partially a percentage of badness fits into the equation too, though. It's not as reducible as you're implying. Facebook, as much as I dislike it, is mostly people sharing memes and life updates with some terrorist planning that is to some extent actively hunted and removed. Parlor is the opposite, except that the conspiracies are encouraged, and indeed the company was built on this philosophy.
It depends in part on what you consider to be fact. Part of the problem of the modern day is that the two tribes have in parts wildly diverging views on reality (and by my estimate both believe in some very nonsensical things), and the mainstream outlets very much encourage leftist brands of nonsense.
The other issue is that if the mainstream thing bans certain things, any free speech alternative will be excessively populated by the witches the mainstream platform hunted. This is inevitable especially if the platform is convenient enough to be competitive.
Which is a little tragic since a bunch of the banned people don't get banned just for politically dissenting thought but just plain awful behavior even by other standards. Regardless, it's inevitable, so painting alt platforms as hives of scum and villainy and thus cutting them down being justified more or less ensures that alt platforms won't come to exist in a relevant way.
The fringe spaces will only get less silly if they're allowed to live and we can talk to people. Being able to talk with civilized people doesn't cure political disagreement or argument, but it lets you see the human on the other side of the nickname. I actively hunt interesting people across the political landscape to follow for that reason. Besides, I'm likely to learn something I otherwise wouldn't have from someone reasoned that I disagree with. People with shared politics only go so far. But people also need comfortable base camps from which to explore.
"If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop your tolerance, patience and understanding." - Buddha
Twitter did not ban Trump until his term was nearly over and public opinion was firmly against him. That's like coming out against the Vietnam war during the evacuation of Saigon.
Sadly I am quite sure my app [1] will eventually be removed from the play store as well if it ever becomes popular with the "wrong crowd". All it does is provide a way to connect to peertube (also fediverse like Mastodon) instances and watch videos. Which instance you follow is up to you not me. Content is moderated by the peertube instance owners not me and I am not going to bother adding an instance blacklist for something I don't make any money from. Especially since you can reach any instance just using chrome.
I wonder if these problems could be fixed by showing only a list of family safe instances by default, but allow adding custom urls somewhere in the settings.
Don't show a directory of instances in your app.
This way casual app reviewers would see the family safe content, and you wouldn't have to block anything.
The default instance is mine and I follow almost no one, trying to keep that "family safe". But it looks like I need to also make sure it's "politically safe". The instance list is the official list provided by Peertube. I believe the goal is to make that list decentralised and self-filling as it should be. The NSFW filter is on per default.
BTW, Google blocked an update not long ago because of a typo in my description where a word was repeated...
'family safe' and 'politically safe' aren't much different in the fact that they're arbitrary filters on what is shown in the app by default. Start out with just a url box for 'connect to a PeerTube instance' and you don't have to worry about either.
I disagree, trans ideology is politically safe but isn't family safe. It's politically fine to chemically castrate confused homosexual children but I'm not going along with it
Slowly but surely, the trend of dissatisfaction with Google and Apple is increasing and I welcome it.
The status regarding App Stores are reaching the boiling point and once they do, there is no going back.
This decade is really going to an opposite of the last. The last decade saw the rise of Big Tech and their absolute domination in their sphere of influence. This decade is going to see the regulation of Big Tech, where Apple and Google (and I hope Twitter and Facebook) are going to painfully realise they are not the government, nor are they lawmakers. So their "terms of use" are not laws, and finally we won't see anymore comments on HN regarding "their platform, they can do whatever they want".
Thinking maybe the solution is to have a new device, unplugged from cellular comms altogether. The principle being, if you don't have wifi, you don't need your internet social messenger communities, and if it's urgent, you can tether. Something with a lens cap for the camera, no mic/speakers without an external headset, physical dip swtiches for individual sensors (GPS, wifi, accelerometer, etc) A linux or bsd kernel, with a removable SD card for modules, and some basic mesh network capabilities.
A variation of the CutiePi or PinePhone could do it. It's time for normal people to compartmentalize their tech the way hackers traditionally have.
Tusky is still installed on my phone, though, so I guess Google hasn't decided to yank it off existing devices yet.
Do they even have the capacity to do that? It would be quite irksome here, but I'd see it being useful in the case of apps that are found to contain malware.
They do have the capacity to uninstall apps remotely as far as I know, but I don't think they've ever used it. Perhaps the system triggers when Play Protect finds an obvious strain of malware, but in these cases the default is to remove the store listing and the available updates but leave the app on the device.
> They do have the capacity to uninstall apps remotely as far as I know
As far as I know they have the capacity to do literally anything, since they have root rights on every phone with Play Services installed (which in most cases the user does not).
This brave new era of censorship is going to have some really horrible long-term effects that are not so apparent yet to its proponents. The echo-chambers and divisiveness will only get stronger as the edges slowly get squeezed out of the population.
"I don't agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
This new era of censorship is a reaction to the now obvious long-term effects of lack of censorship. As with most reactions it will probably swing too far the other way for a while.
Obvious is not a word I'd use here. At least in the US, we're driving a lot of change. Personally, I think a lot of the change is for the better... but censorship... well, Censorship is a disease. Bad ideas are a disease. Trying to cure bad ideas with censorship is kind of like trading cancer for congestive heart failure. Historically, censorship really hasn't led to great outcomes. Bad ideas? Usually good ideas end up winning. It just takes time.
I'd like to believe that completely open debate would lead to better understanding for everyone involved, but reality has demonstrated to me that it isn't the case. "A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth can get its boots on". Even in Twain's day they understood the power of unchecked misinformation, and recent events have shown the consequences of allowing misinformation to spread far and wide nearly instantaneously.
I disagree. AI banning an app on content violation grounds is just a terrible and shameful dystopian reality. If not a lazy excuse for absolving big tech as they get away with cutting corners and other costs.
I don't know about you but I expect a human to be on the other hand of the switch when decisions like banning have to be taken.
The best places online I've seen really allow for all kinds, but hold norms for civil discourse. Weirdly, they also often actually manage civil discussion, even if people also row a bit. And what they succeed in from what I've seen is people understanding each other, finding humans instead of political cartoons on the other side of the nickname.
I find Ars Technica seems to mostly strike this balance reasonably well in their comments. It can frequently get heated without actually descending into Reddit levels. Their moderation appearts to do a reasonable job.
How do you discover content on Mastodon? I just intalled Tusky. Didn't have an account and te process of creating one was through some detour and I ended up creating one on qoto.org that I chose randomly. Now I have a feed with pretty random posts and another with even more random posts some in the language I don't know.
Same experience here. I've really, really wanted to like Mastodon but feel like it's all just random toots. And then if I click the wrong button it is random toots in Mandarin!
First, you check if the instance that you are subscribing to caters to your interests - signing up to a random instance is bound to be useless. Then you can just follow people from the local feed, or something that catches your fancy from the global feed. And if you find a mastodon user from a different instance that you are interested in (maybe in a google search), you can follow them and the system will redirect you so your instance connects you to them.
We are generally so habituated to services that plunder our contact lists and auto-populate our social graph that we end up all dazed and confused when checking out privacy-respecting social networks. Like … where are my friends at?
In the fediverse, you can choose your community, you have choices. Most servers (instances) gather around a topic, common interest or subculture and have their own rules and etiquette. An easy place to get started is https://joinmastodon.org/communities. If you discover people who "live" on other instances, you can still follow them.
It might take more time to build your social graph in the fediverse than on the centralized and commercial services, but the satisfaction of having a feed that you put together yourself, without being influenced by nagging recommendation algorithms is worth it – at least to me!
EDIT: To answer your question more directly, I'll add some of the people and projects that I find interesting and follow (and that you probably won't find on other social networks). YMMV:
Thank you for the links. I follow all of them now.
But I think I know what my problem is and it's not what you think.
Mastodon seems to be user centered, but I don't want to follow specific users. I want to be fed with interesting content. So I'd prefer content centered fediverse.
The fediverse I'm looking for should be able to infer my interests and feed me content that is interesting to me as quickly as possible when I don't have any social graph. Because I don't have any relevant social graph. Not on any fediverse, not on twitter, not on Facebook, not on youtube. I just have some interests.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadGoogle Play is owned by Google and is a private platform. They can remove, ban, suspend any app or app update they want when it breaks their policies.
That is tough.
The fact that most people get their apps from one of two app stores (Google Play, App Store) makes this situation somewhat worse for people that effectively develop apps for the platform in their spare time. There are alternatives, like F-Droid...but, it's still not the same as mainstream distribution.
Being banned by big tech (whether apps, social media accounts, major payment processors for receiving donations) is in some cases almost equivalent to being shut down ; "it's a private company" : if the company has a monopoly and there's not a significant number of healthy alternatives for people to use (be it out of convenience and lack of skill, doesn't matter), then how about we take that into account?
It's sad and frustrating we wanted an open internet and companies took over a huge share of it and are not stopping amassing influence and control. I wish this wasn't so, but it is, and we have to open our eyes to it when we're debating such topics.
"You can still distribute your app when not being on the Play Store or Apple Store right?" "In theory yes" "Case closed" ; things aren't so simple! In a perfectly 'libertarian' world, I would be more inclined to be on your side. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world of politics, extreme lobbying, complicated tax codes, one million parties with various interests locked into a power struggle for political / social control and influence.
I don't want that.
Instead, Google should be required to provide equal capabilities to third-party app stores as the Play Store now enjoys on Android. Like Microsoft was forced to accommodate for other browser vendors in Windows way back when.
This is in contrast to ISPs, which I whole-heartedly believe should be subject to net neutrality.
"There are various app stores to install software from. Each comes with their own form of app curation, and policies regarding payments, privacy, updates and more ; please select the app stores you would like to use. If you'd like to learn more, click here."
with a list of app stores given and 'Google Play' being pre-selected for example.
It's not something I've thought about a lot before, so I'm sure we could do better than that. But in principle that doesn't sound too bad.
That's a false dichotomy. The options are not:
1. Any company, anywhere and at any time can refuse to do business with anyone, anywhere and for any reason.
2. All companies, everywhere and all the time must allow voices from everyone, everywhere and all the time.
There's a good middle ground - antitrust regulations could be modified so that, if the company has a large enough piece of the market they shouldn't have the /choice/ of denying access for any reason.
They took advantage of this 'open internet' and now they have made it partially closed for everyone since they have control of the platforms that most people do for everyday life. Web Browsing, Email, Chat, Calendars, Maps and now Meetings. The startups that have been acquired by them have just made the tech giants even bigger.
Developers recommending libraries, frameworks and services created by (you guessed it) the tech giants further locks in their app to depend solely on their servers and it makes the migration out of the app store very difficult.
We let them do this for decades and now we complain about it. The only way to fight back is to create free and open source alternatives.
> "You can still distribute your app when not being on the Play Store or Apple Store right?" "In theory yes" "Case closed" ; things aren't so simple!
Practically yes and it is that simple.
Take a look at how Cydia and F-Droid does it. Host a repository on your website, Put a 'Add to Cydia' or 'Add to F-Droid' deep link on your website and the users will freely see all the apps made by you. We need something like this but for the desktop.
It may not even be 'Cydia' or called 'F-Droid' that succeeds in being mainstream on this very old idea, but there will be an accessible alternative that will use this idea and it is free and open source and cross-platform.
Discord desktop is not on any App Store and you can download it freely without a Google/Apple account. Telegram is on Google Play and also self-hosts the APK and is also on F-Droid.
The solution has always been to have a self-hosted backup so that the users always have an accessible way of downloading your app and not just being ONLY available through any centralised App Store.
You don't survive something like this and you won't regain your user count outside of these curated app stores.
It's pretty much as simple as that. The dream of "if it happens enough times F-Droid and alternatives will become more prominent" is just naive, it doesn't work like that. There is no level playing field to compete.
"The solution has always been to have a self-hosted backup [...]" - the solution to what? The solution to compete from outside of these curated stores where companies dictate course? No, it's not a solution for that, because it won't do much for you.
There is no creative destruction under monopoly capitalism. It is only suffocating and dominance.
In this democracy, companies can only do what we, the people, allow them to do.
At least that is how it works in my country, and from what I know, how it works in the US too.
Is that not "people allowing companies what they can do"?
In the old days at least for the desktop, one just points to a website to download an app on to their computer. Discord already does this. No Microsoft or Apple App Store required.
For Android, F-Droid has a default main repository which is centralised but also allows you to add another repository if you want. While it is not as intuitive as adding a repository via a deep link at least you can do that.
For iOS, Cydia is an App Store for iOS just like F-Droid where the user can easily add a repository via a 'Add to Cydia' deep link, and they get all the apps from that developer. We need something like that for the desktop, where users can do this freely.
Centralisation of App Stores is not the answer, even if you 'break up' Google which I hope happens anyway. But for now, the Play Store is 'their service'. You're free to complain, critique, appeal, argue, scream, etc but it won't be the last time this will happen again.
The best thing to do is to self-host your app; like how Telegram and Discord are doing it.
And outright saying "WE lost"
When Google, YouTube, et al make decisions that appear to be careless, biased, or downright baffling, remembering this piece of data often provides valuable clarity, context, and insight
The "Mah private company" defense is flawed on many levels and you should really stop using
1. Just because they have the right to do it, does not mean people should not criticize them for it. Simply stating they "have the right" is meaningless and does not add anything of value to the conversation
2. There is a overlapping and complex set of principles and laws at play here. There are many avenues that can be explored from a legal front when they ban a company from selling their product on their walled garden, even outside of the Anti-Trust issues there is also contract laws that can be used, and even Deceptive Trade regulations given the uneven standard that their policies are applied.
So it is not as simple as say "Well there are a private company they can do what they want" The law, and society is far more complex than that, and it is time for people to stop using this useless platitude as a defense of bad actions
Imagine you buy a car and use it legally then randomly all the Gas stations ban you. This is a similar situation.
You purchased a phone, so should be able to install any app you like, easily. This needs fixing.
I'm sorry but what you are saying is pure ignorance. I consider myself also a libertarian to a certain degree, but in these kind of situations it is completely irrational to let these platforms behave however they want, regardless of the consequences.
I think it would be best to rename this submission to "Tusky (Mastodon app) suspended from Google Play Store" because people who do not use Mastodon have no context for what Tusky is.
Looking at the title just now, it just says "Tusky has been removed from the Play Store". There's literally no context as to WTF a "Tusky" is. ;)
That being said, people who care could probably do a general online search and find out... :)
The privacy policy should have a button saying "I accept and understand the privacy policy, now sign me up". Instead the actual button is just "Sign up". That language doesn't meet the store policy.
Simple issue with a simple solution.
I guess they could probably get around it by showing an instance's policies prior to user registration, but not every server actually has them, or needs to (in the case of self-hosted servers)
Just because some company has a thousand pages of legal boilerplate policies doesn't mean you have any meaningful information about what they're doing with your data.
The only thing you can do is try to give them a minimum of data to play with.
And, separately, how do I know whether the app collects personal information itself (it's effectively in the transmission path between me and the external service) and where it transmits it if it does?
I'm also a hoster of my own fediverse instance and data is shared in the network only with the instances with which you interact, and the same thing is for me. And I don't have any privacy policy because I'm the only user in my instance.
Accounts never get fully deleted from a Masto instance
TL;DR: Choose your mastodon instance wisely.
Never use your legal name as your nickname and associated email addresses.
VPN is advised too.
(not my work, credit/details https://rage.love/@iantila/105900906491530648)
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.keylesspalace.tusky/
https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html
They do seem to ague in favor of free software. .. at least as long as app developers do not advertise shunned instances. Power-statements like "sometimes, staying neutral isn’t an option" suggest that they are probably not an ally of those wanting to leave it to the user to decide what hosts to access.
While I have mixed feelings about the article, it is well worth a read, no matter where readers stand on the issue.
Our problem is that we've built almost our entire ecosystem on systems where a single actor's intolerance can deny millions of people access to a product. This seemed like a good idea at the time. Apparently what it comes down to is the entire economy needs to be duplicated? Banks, payment providers, app stores, content delivery networks, web hosting, all the way to operating systems. I didn't realize that it would take that much to get the right to access any app or social network I want to? But apparently that's where the so-called paradox of tolerance has led us.
Seems we should have seen this coming. A certain xkcd about infrastructures comes to mind. Oh well. Since true decentralization is possible, it's just a matter of time in the end.
What it comes down to is if you're a fascist you won't be allowed to participate in the economy at all to spread your message. Service providers who cater to fascists will be cut off by the banks, and banks that refuse to do their due diligence w.r.t. fash in their customer ranks will be singled out for more in-depth investigation by federal authorities.
> And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”
I don't think often of the right to "go away if you don't like something", but that's because it's so basic and essential I barely consider it.
https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
You don't have to tolerate the intolerant, and the people running the app stores are free to make their choices of who they allow into the store.
If you want to be associated with fascists and racists, that is up to you, but you will not be welcome in civilised places. You can always run your own app store which allows those groups.
I mean grasp the irony.
That hallmark does not stand up to many examples. Being strictly against another ideology is not really the definition of fascism.
Stop disturbing the peace.
"Hakuin used to tell his pupils about an old woman who had a teashop, praising her understanding of Zen. The pupils refused to believe what he told them and would go to the teashop to find out for themselves.
Whenever the woman saw them coming she could tell at once whether they had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen. In the former case, she would serve them graciously. In the latter, she would beckon to the pupils to come behind her screen. The instant they obeyed, she would strike them with a fire-poker.
Nine out of ten of them could not escape her beating."
It is a great metaphor. Nine out of ten applications of the tolerance paradox do not pass the fire poker test. One needs a certain level of enlightenment and maturity of judgement to apply it, otherwise it can turn into metooism, mob behavior and plain hypocrisy.
You used a lot of words to make a mundane, unsupported assertion sound profound. Do you have any real examples?
Well, that's the game, isn't it?
Btw, like some of your music. Do you have finished tracks online?
If it is just users, why ban them and not browsers or anything that can access Facebook?
Because Facebook is controlled by the right people, and Gab is not.
Consider the unbelievably offensive and sometimes illegal content (including child porn) that's been hosted on Reddit. They've cleaned up significantly recently to be more advertiser-friendly, but they were able to host all that content for years without getting deplatformed or facing any real consequences. Because Reddit is controlled by the right people. It's all about power.
Most go with something like "If we tolerate people who aren't 100% our version of kumbaya, we'll end up in tyranny", when Popper's original is restricted to people who have stopped listening, and would make their argument with pistols.
Most of the time, the paradox citers are closer to the "not listening" camp than not. Many are hideously fundamentalist ideologues who want to limit discussion to what they themselves find acceptable, not to deplatforming things that really try to deprive others of their freedom of choice.
What are you talking about?
The Federal Courthouse in Portland has been under siege for months by an idea
Or even read, it’s barely longer than a page and yet I see it mischaracterised on these threads repeatedly by people who have clearly not read it.
For those with too short an attention span to even search for the text, let alone read it, and to save them from the mendacious cartoon that purports to boil it down, here’s what it says in two lines:
- speech should beget speech, no matter how disagreeable
- intolerance is defined as those who will not engage in speech and have turned to violence instead
That is not the same as deplatforming “bigots”, or punching Nazis. Quite the opposite.
Edit: typo
Criticizing speech is speech.
Criticizing speech and advocating, on the basis of that criticism, that people should choose not to relay the criticized speech is speech.
Choosing what speech to relay or not is speech (except when it is “press”, but those are effectively aspects of the same thing called out separately to prevent an artificial distinction from being used to regulate speech.)
Deplatforming is speech, from advocacy to execution.
That our forums allow for free speech is clearly implied by the form.
Censorship (of which deplatforming is one form) is not the same as choosing not to listen, and hence, is not part of freedom of speech.
Deplatforming is choosing not to actively relay speech. While, yes, such does (as “self-censorship”) fit in some of the broader conceptions of censorship, it's absolutely part of the freedom of speech (and central to the idea of the “marketplace of ideas”, the same as people being free not to buy, distribute, and resell your goods is central to classical markets in goods and services.)
The “freedom of speech” isn't limited to choosing not to listen, hence why it isn't called the “freedom to choose not to listen”. Freedom from making speech at the direction of another party is at least as fundamental as freedom not to listen.
Deplatforming is censorship because, if done actively and exceptionally (i.e. discriminatorially and out of the ordinary routine) then it is the attempt to prevent the speaker from speaking and anyone wishing to listeners being able to listen.
It seems to me that you're conflating distribution with purchase in your analogy, which might explain your subsequent reasoning, though I find them to be quite different things. If you are going to conflate them then distributors refusing to distribute the goods of gays or blacks based on them being gay or black, given that they usually distribute goods from non-gays and non-blacks, that is not prejudicial discrimination?
I would not agree with that in a marketplace, and that wouldn't fit with my conception of freedom of speech either, given the analogy.
If, however, we were talking about private individuals and not distributors, then I agree that they should be able to choose who they purchase from or even sell to - in a private capacity, not as a business - whether based on prejudice or not. Just as with speaking and listening.
No, it's not. It's refusing to actively participate in the speakers speech. It is distinct from either preventing them from speaking, or preventing interested parties from listening. The freedom of speech is, as conservatives are fond of pointing out, a negative right, not a positive one.
(The use of “discriminatorially” here is pure noise; all choices are, by definition, discrimination.)
> If you are going to conflate them then distributors refusing to distribute the goods of gays or blacks based on them being gay or black, given that they usually distribute goods from non-gays and non-blacks, that is not prejudicial discrimination?
It's certainly race and sexual orientation discrimination, but that's not what we're discussing, and it's an orthogonal issue to freedom of speech. If you want to argue a violation of existing or ideal public accommodation laws protecting against political viewpoint discrimination, that's a very different argument than the free speech argument. In fact, it's an opposed argument, as public accommodation laws (and the concept of freedom from private discrimination on various axes more generally) is in tension with free speech and free association rights, a tension which is at its maximum when the service involved is relaying speech and the basis for denial is the political content of the speech at issue.
- speak back
- listen
- transmit
Additionally, repeating what someone else has said (speech) is not transmission of their speech, it's transmission of their ideas.
A television broadcaster or a book publisher, however, transmits. That is their function.
> The freedom of speech is, as conservatives are fond of pointing out, a negative right, not a positive one.
Which is why there was a qualifier of "if done actively and exceptionally (i.e. discriminatorially and out of the ordinary routine)".
If a broadcaster like Sky Sports refuses to have on Noam Chomsky for a discussion about, well, anything, that's not censorship because he doesn't talk about sport nor does he have anything to do with sport. They passively and normally do not transmit his speech, hence it is not censorship. If Chomsky asks to go on then they may still refuse and it not be censorship because even though their refusal is active it is *not* exceptional.
If, however, the BBC political flagship programme refuses to have Chomsky on because he's Chomsky or Chomsky once wrote in support of a Holocaust denier [note 1] then *that is censorship* because it is active and exceptional.
None of that requires positive liberty, nor is it in variance with conceptions of free speech as a negative liberty.
> If you want to argue a violation of existing or ideal public accommodation laws protecting against political viewpoint discrimination, that's a very different argument than the free speech argument.
Given what you've written I can see how you'd think this. As I'm not:
> It's certainly race and sexual orientation discrimination, but that's not what we're discussing, and it's an orthogonal issue to freedom of speech.
If we take your analogy about distributors to its logical conclusion then it is what we're talking about - enabling discrimination that violates negative liberties.
[note 1] He wrote in support of an academic's right to freedom of speech, not in support of his book denying the death camps, but that's the way things get framed.
Edit: formatting. I will forever rage against HN's half hearted markdown flavour.
The only way to distribute your app without all these problems is by self-hosting it yourself like the old days of downloading a .exe, .dmg, from the website or have a app store like Cydia where you can freely add their list of apps with a click of a button that says something like 'Add to Cydia'.
Problem Solved.
Edit: https://www.f-droid.org/en/tutorials/create-repo/
Another, lack of hassle.
Both are gone if you have to add a separate repo / PPA / whatever, after finding it first. Still much better than not being able to install it at all.
https://github.com/fwgs/husky
This is in contrary to the status quo, where the vertical integration makes it practically impossible to choose a differently filtered view.
Over time I'm sure we'll see curation markets for filter lists, think adblock lists but tied to some collaboration, voting, incentive mechanisms and reputation system.
This is like if chrome started blocking websites google disapproves of.
If they start using their own proprietary protocol extensions, or closed their instance to other clients, I'd not be as dismissive.
Not if the app stores have a rule that every such client has to ban the servers that the app store doesn't like.
It's less escaping the censored and restricted megacorp service to freedom or free speech anarchy and more you're able to build your own service that fulfills your own needs and own preferred blend of moderation vs free speech and that service can interact with others own instances with their own rules.
Same goes for the clients.
This goes to the core of the debate, I am in favor of giving users the ability to block anyone they want, even the ability to subscribe to and distribute block lists
However it is step to far to hardcode or build in unchangeable block lists into the very foundation of the service.
Developers need to empower users to make their own choices, not treat users like they were children
If you can’t convince an expert to give you what you want, yes, you will need to learn to do it yourself.
The entire marketing of the fediverse software is freedom from censorship.
if you want to build "Authoritarianverse" and place yourself as emperor for life, then you are free do to do just be open with your marketing so people know to avoid your software
As I understand it, their main goal is escaping corporate control, and any freedom from censorship they provide is incidental.
See too Mastodon’s “server covenant”, which seeks to quarantine instances that allow hateful content: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
Clearly that is a false statement if they are imposing their view of what "correct" speech is.
They both also license their code under GPL, even though they violate Freedom 0 of the core freedom model the GPL is designed to protect
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
>> escaping corporate control
Which is doubly ironic since they have adopted the same exact policies that many are fleeing Big Tech to avoid. The Silicon Valley Authoritarian left Speech codes
> Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video.
You’re misinterpreting the meaning of freedom 0. Tusky and Mastodon comply with both the letter and the spirit:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish means that you are not forbidden or stopped from making it run. This has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, whether it is technically capable of functioning in any given environment, or whether it is useful for any particular computing activity.
> For example, if the code arbitrarily rejects certain meaningful inputs—or even fails unconditionally—that may make the program less useful, perhaps even totally useless, but it does not deny users the freedom to run the program, so it does not conflict with freedom 0. If the program is free, the users can overcome the loss of usefulness, because freedoms 1 and 3 permit users and communities to make and distribute modified versions without the arbitrary nuisance code.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
When i first got into the IT world many decades ago it was largely libertarian, free culture was rampant and attempts to lock down peoples speech, and freedom was viewed very badly
Today people like you find anything and everything to not only justify your Authoritarianism and desire for control over others, you do so by attempting to gas light people in to thinking you are actually supporting freedom
Sorry I was there, I lived through the rise of the internet, I lived through the crypto wars, I saw the raise of Free Software, and Open source, I saw it all first hand... I know the dangers if the society you desire, but it seems history will need to repeat itself before people will learn
This trend in some circles to limit speech and thought will not turn out good for anyone, never in history has speech codes and thought police been a good thing for society, and I see no reason to believe that the so called "progressives" that are leading this new round of authoritarian policies will turn out any different.
Sure, Tusky complies with the letter of the definition; that doesn't make it moral
This is what Stallman said:
> If a free program has a malicious feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs and tools on nonfree operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many users do it.
> This has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, whether it is technically capable of functioning in any given environment, or whether it is useful for any particular computing activity.
What part of your quote does Tusky violate? It's GPL3. Even if you consider that block list a malicious feature (I don't), you are allowed to take it out and distribute a "corrected" version.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
If power is truly spread out and people there are as heterogeneous as everywhere else it does mean that there will be instances that do not agree on the process on how to handle things. That is by design.
Long term the only one you as a Mastodon user have to agree with is the administrator of your instance. If you are on a mainstream instance where, let's say, zealots push for an ever smaller overton window and isolate the instance you should, ideally, just switch instances as soon as it starts getting in your way.
It is natural that parts of the network will drift in different directions while they iterate on their understanding on how the instance should be governed.
Truly problematic are not instances deciding to go strict but platform providers trying to pressure their vague and intransparent rules onto the network.
... also the ever present risk of software developers adding their own hierarchy to the system, but that problem is inherent to all shared protocols.
Instead, one must access naughty comment through other approved means, such as Chrome or Safari.
I am, personally, totally fine with that: I don't wish to have ideas I hold in contempt sneak into my feed. But the key difference with “dictator companies” is that I decide what I don't see and whom I enclose with.
But you don't. The app decides for you and blocks what you shall not see.
The problem is when there's no alternative because the platform owner blocks you.
The protocol is open, so you could even write your own app, or if you lack the skills or time to do so, commission somebody else to write one and nobody can stop you.
In contrast, the siloed "dictator companies" control API/protocol access so it's almost impossible to develop alternative applications.
Not to count that the protocol and the federation are open.
Once again, “free speech” is not “spoon-feed you a way to reach millions of people in an eyeblink”, it's “don't prevent you from doing it”.
And some of them work in tandem, apparently.
> Not to count that the protocol and the federation are open.
HTTP is open. Would you not consider it problematic if Google blocked accessing websites because some engineer doesn't like the opinions published on those websites?
Yeah, that's called a fork. Now, if you don't like them you can switch to Yuito, Mammut, Ivory, Mastobone, Stegodon, Fedilab, or the web client of your instance, or develop your own.
> Would you not consider it problematic if Google blocked accessing websites because some engineer doesn't like the opinions published on those websites?
They're already doing it, in China for instance; or on Chrome if a website is on their safe browsing list.
And no, I don't find it problematic. Google is a private company, I don't have any say in what they do with their property as long as they follow the law.
Moderation is essential for usable communities. These block lists are a form of moderation to make Mastodon useful. Otherwise it's pushed on to the user, many of whom will just nope out back to Reddit or Facebook, or to the Mastodon server administrators, who are largely unpaid volunteer labor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304453
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26486737
You wouldn't build your brick and mortar store on a contract that allowed the landlord to kick you out at a whim without compensation.
And the reason is the same as in developers build upon Google Play and Apple Store: they don't have another choice to make a living.
If I lose my job there are thousands of other companies that would be happy to have me. Many of whom are filled with great people who are sane and reasonable.
When it comes to selling mobile apps there are two storefronts with unforgiving chaotic management that will drop you at the turn of a hat.
the equity for all is what guarantees what you have experienced not an at-well work state
I think almost everyone would agree that a handful of unaccountable corporations should not hold this discretionary power, but we don't have a legal framework or social contract to dictate how this should be handled.
In the digital world we have... binding arbitration clauses in terms & conditions of use.
We should declare all app stores to be the same, common carries that may not discriminate. Bottom line, end of story. No BS about "hate speech" or other terms that are made up to make censorship sound more palatable.
Why should they unless the app violates the law?
And please take into consideration the fact that we aren't talking about small / mid size businesses, but giant behemoths and we're trying to apply some rules to the biggest ones.
Protecting side-loading (legally and technically) solves both problems. And limits the ability of the government to do the same kind of moderating as they’d first have to somehow disable sideloading. (Imagine the government trying to disable ability to run arbitrary code on all laptops or PCs. Possible with enough manpower, sure, but way harder than just moderating an App Store.)
On the hosting side I think it's a bit different. For instance if AWS wants to kick an app off of their platform, there should be a legally mandated warning escalation process, and cloud providers should be required to give clients a reasonable amount of time to migrate their product to a different provider before kicking them off (maybe even 6 months to a couple years). I also think there should be some limits to which reason a hosting provider can use to evict a client from their platform, at least when they reach a certain size. It's very difficult to be competitive in the current market without access to cloud hosting, and there are only a few serious options available in this space, so it should be a very high standard required to remove someone from this type of service.
And then for services like DNS providers, I think they should have to act as unbiased infrastructure, and should not be allowed to deny service for any reason short of a court order.
I don't know about that. It feels a little too close to Verizon cutting off a phone call to my friend because an employment or sentiment detection algo didn't appreciate my tone.
Apps with good moderation and communities can do things that other apps cannot. How do you tell the difference, legally, without punishing apps that are trying but have a bad incident?
This is about patterns more than specific moments. The law is about moments. So its hard.
If you categorically don't have faith in the laws and the justice system, you might as well emigrate or start planning a revolution.
Edit: I doubt perma-banning via CC number would be as effective a tool now that things like Apple Pay and virtual credit card numbers exist.
I literally owe many of the major changes in my life to the SA Forums and people I met through them, and yeah, the quality of posts there is high due to the moderation and cost.
Even the creator got perma-banned recently when it was discovered he was a serial abuser who had been using the forums as part of his abuse.
Hate speech can be defined as anything that those in power choose they want to suppress, which means in practice its really just censorship.
Besides which, it's counter productive.
Using the violence of the state to restrict freedom of speech and thought is never done by people on the right side of history.
• Yelling fire in a crowded theatre
• Posting
(but, you know, a working version) as an answer to “how do I recover my backups URGENT!!1” on a Q&A site / IRC.• Asking a very drunk person to hand their wallet over to the “wallet inspectors” for “indefinite inspection and spending”.
• Asking a bank employee to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Asking a bank computer to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Giving somebody else the DeCSS decryption keys.
• Publishing a detailed procedure for how to build a dirty bomb using common household items.
• Verbally punching down in a way that causes significant psychological distress.
I know what I'd answer to these.
Government sticking their nose in there is likely to have results that are not what you want. The freedom-maximizing option is not to have government-moderated app stores (shudder). It’s to have the freedom to shop at different stores.
The App Store model itself (where sideloading is prohibited and technically impossible) is a single point of failure, and having the government run it is not going to make things more free. I mean for goodness sake, you can’t even swear on FCC’s airwaves, and you’re telling me THAT’S the model you want in App Stores?
Once it gets involved, those regulations will be written by lobbyists and will make it harder for new platforms to arise.
What I’d prefer is mandating that hardware be able to run alternative OSs. If iPhones and Android devices could have a free OS installed, all of these problems would be taken care of.
I support the right to install an alternate OS on hardware you own.
Just to clarify your point, since you have written it in an ambiguous way:
Are you asking me whether I realize that the things I support would also require government regulation?
Do you live in China or some other jurisdiction where the web is filtered?
If they spread lies, sue them.
Don't have a third-party ban them arbitrarily with no recourse.
Why did you introduce it?
Government regulation often doesn’t do what people say it’s going to do. Often it is written to benefit a particular lobby.
If you have specific ideas, those can be discussed in the context of government regulation of software.
If you’re going to say ‘it will turn out the way it did with railways’, then you also have to face that access to railway lines is only available to a small number of companies chosen by the government.
I think that is exactly what would happen if the government regulated software distribution.
But here there is only two at the highest level - and nowhere to turn.
And both goes. That’s only logical.
Very soon only web browsers that censor to their bias will be allowed in the play store.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-b-tch-to-boss-exten...
Basically a bad word filter. But to GP's point the way things are going don't be surprised if extensions like these are someday set to default on.
I am glad my immediate worry about active suppression of information is not yet necessary.
It's probably just a bad AI trying to help Google manage a massive platform. It's just sad to think about all the developers who can't call on a Twitter following to get their app unbanned quickly.
How do you think that inference works? Through pattern matching "Mastodon" then raising a flag. Who sets the pattern?
For the same reasons silly places like Parler get nuked on Jan 6th pretenses when most of the planning happened on Facebook but Facebook's still there.
Power's power, and Lenin's question of who/whom is always relevant.
Surely this is a relevant distinction?
The other issue is that if the mainstream thing bans certain things, any free speech alternative will be excessively populated by the witches the mainstream platform hunted. This is inevitable especially if the platform is convenient enough to be competitive.
Which is a little tragic since a bunch of the banned people don't get banned just for politically dissenting thought but just plain awful behavior even by other standards. Regardless, it's inevitable, so painting alt platforms as hives of scum and villainy and thus cutting them down being justified more or less ensures that alt platforms won't come to exist in a relevant way.
The fringe spaces will only get less silly if they're allowed to live and we can talk to people. Being able to talk with civilized people doesn't cure political disagreement or argument, but it lets you see the human on the other side of the nickname. I actively hunt interesting people across the political landscape to follow for that reason. Besides, I'm likely to learn something I otherwise wouldn't have from someone reasoned that I disagree with. People with shared politics only go so far. But people also need comfortable base camps from which to explore.
I think it's not about just formal power, but also about political affiliation.
[1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
Don't show a directory of instances in your app.
This way casual app reviewers would see the family safe content, and you wouldn't have to block anything.
Or would Google complain about that too?
BTW, Google blocked an update not long ago because of a typo in my description where a word was repeated...
The status regarding App Stores are reaching the boiling point and once they do, there is no going back.
This decade is really going to an opposite of the last. The last decade saw the rise of Big Tech and their absolute domination in their sphere of influence. This decade is going to see the regulation of Big Tech, where Apple and Google (and I hope Twitter and Facebook) are going to painfully realise they are not the government, nor are they lawmakers. So their "terms of use" are not laws, and finally we won't see anymore comments on HN regarding "their platform, they can do whatever they want".
A variation of the CutiePi or PinePhone could do it. It's time for normal people to compartmentalize their tech the way hackers traditionally have.
https://tusky.app/
Do they even have the capacity to do that? It would be quite irksome here, but I'd see it being useful in the case of apps that are found to contain malware.
Google showed their capability years ago (https://www.tomsguide.com/us/Android-Google-Applications-And...) but I don't know if they have the same capabilities now with the new Android permissions system.
As far as I know they have the capacity to do literally anything, since they have root rights on every phone with Play Services installed (which in most cases the user does not).
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.keylesspalace.tusky/
"I don't agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
I don't know about you but I expect a human to be on the other hand of the switch when decisions like banning have to be taken.
How can I find anything worth reading there?
In the fediverse, you can choose your community, you have choices. Most servers (instances) gather around a topic, common interest or subculture and have their own rules and etiquette. An easy place to get started is https://joinmastodon.org/communities. If you discover people who "live" on other instances, you can still follow them.
It might take more time to build your social graph in the fediverse than on the centralized and commercial services, but the satisfaction of having a feed that you put together yourself, without being influenced by nagging recommendation algorithms is worth it – at least to me!
EDIT: To answer your question more directly, I'll add some of the people and projects that I find interesting and follow (and that you probably won't find on other social networks). YMMV:
- https://mastodon.social/@mntmn (researcher building an open source laptop, amongst other things)
- https://social.coop/@compost (a magazine about the digital commonts)
- https://mastodon.art/@BenjaminBrinckmann (talented painter / artist)
- https://indieweb.social/@bonfire (a project building a system for easier self-hosting of federated services)
- https://chaos.social/@delta (Instant Email Messaging App)
- https://fosstodon.org/@flockingbird (Federated version of LinkedIn in the making)
- https://floss.social/@forgefed (Vocabulary and protocol for federation of project and repository hosting)
- https://mastodon.social/@zrythm (young DAW software project)
- https://chaos.social/@ConnyDuck (Creator of Tusky, now banned from Google Play Store)
- https://linuxrocks.online/@dnkl (Developer making the great terminal emulator "foot")
But I think I know what my problem is and it's not what you think.
Mastodon seems to be user centered, but I don't want to follow specific users. I want to be fed with interesting content. So I'd prefer content centered fediverse.
The fediverse I'm looking for should be able to infer my interests and feed me content that is interesting to me as quickly as possible when I don't have any social graph. Because I don't have any relevant social graph. Not on any fediverse, not on twitter, not on Facebook, not on youtube. I just have some interests.
Another fediverse project that might fit your needs better is Lemmy, which behaves more like Reddit/HN.