Try this one: https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg/102338564512529338
That one I can read.
FSF intended free software rights to add to human rights, not replace them.
IMHO it’s perfectly fine for F-Droid to run its official social media on an instance that does not federate with anti-humanists like: Gab (social network) - Wikipedia
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There are much more effective ways of improving human rights than
banning political speech. I believe that is why the FSF’s four freedoms
align quite closely to strict freedom of speech. The ACLU is another
good example, they have be instrumental to software freedom, though
perhaps one step removed from the technical world. One good case to
read about is when Jewish ACLU lawyers defended the rights of Nazis to
march in Jewish neighborhoods:
There were also lots of American Nazis before the war, but they were not
banned in the US. Germans are the largest ethic group in the USA. The
Nazis were banned in Austria, and its pretty clear being banned helped
empower them in the end.
If you look at communities and governments that ban speech throughout
history, banning political speech does not put you in good company in
terms of respecting human rights. I personally strongly believe that
banning political speech is usually more harmful than good, though
perhaps very rarely helpful.
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All this theoretical discussion is nice and important and all. But for this specific case we’ll need to make a concrete decision:
Does F-Droid as a project feel strongly enough about this admin policy decision to a) host our own instance with different policies or b) migrate to a different instance which is closer to our desired policies.
For me personally the answer is a clear no. I don’t fully agree with the mastodon.technology admin’s decision here but I can understand and respect it and in that light would vote for continuing to use that instance.
As for the more theoretical discussion. I strongly believe that such things should not be banned at a government level. But I also believe that it might have very strong benefits to not give them a platform in ‘our’ community. To make it clear, that none of that ideology is wanted or tolerated in any way. How to achieve that and the finer points on a technical and policy level are incredibly complex and complicated to get right. I don’t have the time or energy to find our optimal way here. So someone else doing something which goes in the right direction (from my PoV) is good enough for me at the moment.
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Honestly, I see no problem in keeping FDroid Mastodon account under mastodon.technology.
Unless you engage in some free speech debate (which I did) and get called out for being a nazi (and get your account banned thanks to mass reports) because you expressed your opinion. But again I don’t think the social media team will ever do that.
And regarding instance blocks: I am shocked that a certain level of stupidity has reached the fediverse and is affecting the decentralization of it. I find it absolutely stupid that some zones are called free speech zones (read: nazis) and others are just okay to have even though they defend deprivation of human rights, although they’re associated with the other side of the political spectrum. Defending human rights is a neutral stance everyone should have, it doesn’t have a side. But it’s terrifying that some instances are allowed to federate with mainstream ones, while others aren’t, even though both of these are pretty much different sides of the same coin.
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@bubu I fully agree. Sorry, I went off track a bit, based on misunderstanding some technical details. I thought someone was asking F-Droid to also ban people. Seems tolerable to stay on mastodon.technology.
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I fully agree with the admin decision and I wish gargron would see it that way too.
I’d like to make these points:
- Free speech doesn’t cover hate speech. Or in other words: Your freedom to speak what’s on your mind doesn’t trump someone else’s freedom to feel save and tolerated. I’d even say the freedom to remain silent if speaking up would incriminate you should render all nazis mute.
- Banning people from speaking doesn’t harm free speech. Freedom of speech gives you the right to speak up, but doesn’t force other people to give you a platform. In Austria unfortunately smoking is allowed, but that doesn’t mean I have to invite smokers into my house.
- In short: This whole discussion has nothing to do with free speech.
- If you ban instance A because it’s full of hate speech, then it only makes sense to also ban instance B that doesn’t ban hate speech, because of course that instance will be full of hate speech soon too.
The forum CoC says:
Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
so why should we have completely different policies for different channels?
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This is not about freedom of speech, hate speech, etc. This is about the freedom of all to use code and not be judged or restricted based on race, color, creed, religion, or anything else. This was clearly laid out by those that have come before us in development and spread of Free/Libre Open Source Software, and to hard code any restrictions into software based on that goes against everything that has been worked for thus far.
Agree with Gab or not, aiding and abetting this type of development puts FOSS development down a path which I desperately do not want to see it go down and opens up other developers to ban groups as they see fit based on personal bias. Adding an anti-feature that states “some users are marginalized and unable to use this app because of who they associate with” is a bullshit excuse for low moral fortitude on the side of the developers.
This is not FLOSS. You all need to take a moment to really reflect on what FLOSS truly means to the world, grow up and accept that your software will be used in ways you didn’t intend/agree with, and decide to part ways or get over it.
Disgusting.
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I’m a Gab user, am definitely not an anti-humanist, and I sure as hell don’t appreciate you blanket labeling me and others on Gab that share my views as anti-humanist.
Because you don’t agree with the United States’s 1st Amendment, and Gab’s decision to use the law as its terms of service guidelines, does not give anyone the right to blanket ban the entirety of that user base, based on a fraction of users whom you do not agree with. Grow up.
This is about code, and the type of foundations you want to lay for the betterment of the world. Isn’t the goal of the Mastodon project to allow others to escape the clutches of big tech in search of privacy for using social media and interacting with others around the world? You think “others around the world” are only those that you find acceptable and to your standards?
What you do here will set precedent that will have disastrous consequences in the future.
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… do we need CoPs to get the negative (<0) duality of Censorship/Propaganda ?
Community of practice
If this chatter is about F-Droid’s “private” pod then technically you guys need to do the thing that will get F-Droid seen by the maximum number of people, BUT…
Having said that the bigger issue here is with Mastodon(?) itself. I was interested in this decentralised social network but because it has forced this terrible choice onto its users. I’m not interested.
Although I’ve not been on this forum very long I have been able to idenify some witty people, just the type of people who could make a radicalised person reassess what they are doing with possibly very few words and very little effort. This isn’t about fascism, fascism has a precise meaning relating to the melding of govt and corporations. If we want to fight fascism, then banning bigoted stooges on social media is definately not the answer, and in fact I think it would be counter-productive.
Bigotry and racism is learned behaviour. What we debating about here is whether to segregate radicalised people. This is a recipe for disaster because it puts radicalised and vulnerable people in an echo chamber.
The best disinfectant is sunlight. On an open platform, when the bigoted folks try to influence a person or group they can be laughed out of the room with a few simple facts.
The fact that Mastadon(?) wants radicalised entities to communicate and grow unhindered atually makes me suspicious. If I were F-Droid, I’d reassess mastadon generally, if this is the way it behaves. What next? Cut out the Russians for election meddling, lol. Or Wikileaks, rofl? Or Julian Assange!
It’s easy for a person who is board or disenfranchised to slip into an echo chamber that can lead to radicalisation, and the role of a functioning healthy ecosystem/community is to nip that in the bud. No.t to let it fester.
When I heard about this decentralised social media platform I was excited to learn more, but hearing this has been a major turn off.
F-Droid could and I think should use its diplomatic power to try and stop segregation. I’d threaten to delist Mastadon, for this type of behaviour if they are in any way propagating this ultimatum.
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There is no such pod, F-Droid uses a public one.
So what is it about exactly?
Btw is F-Droid preventing the inclusion of Gab’s custom-built client/app?
Not all peole who use gab are bigots btw. They make however question more. The GAB community presents a massive opportunity for FOSS. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to employ a probationn period? If GAB users don’t drive us completely nuts then we don’t need to foster segregation. Win win.
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@webDev that is pretty much the approach we took. When some community members expressed objections to gab, which is within their free speech rights, we received a wave of private messages that included death threats and all sorts of direct insults. So the rest of us now agree: we do not accept software from people who attack and threaten us. They can go setup their own fdroid repos.
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I apologise forthe long reply in advance. I did shorten it.
If this is how they react to some cautionary measures then you may have made the right decision.
Can I ask, were you able to speak to the GAB developers? What public messages were they putting out? What was your initial messaging that triggered the messages? What percentage of the private messages were threatening violence? (It might be worthwhile to publish the violent messages)
My problem is that Gab supposedly has about 1 million people:
a) if a couple of kids are incensed they might be spoiling the Gab project for everyone else.
b) I would not put it past certain entities, who are anti-i2p, anti-tor and pro-surveillance, from attempting to undermine free-speech and grassroots movements.
Speaking from my experience in Australia, our commercial media don’t cover important news properly because they fear that they will lose commercial backers, everything is about maximising income from advertising. Sadly that mindset is even contaminating government-backed network reporting. They are so scared of losing future employment opportunities, and some are too lose to the entities that they are supposed to be reporting on, that the reports are of very poor quality. The same is true for the big tech. F-Droid doesn’t have this problem and so F-Droid can be seen as countering the current trajectory (towards extremism). There are many well-funded entities who sadly benefit from the growing extremism, so they have a motive for it to grow.
To what extent can F-Droid say that they are providing this service without fear or favour?
I don’t want F-Droid to be played here. I do not think the vast majority of Gab users are violent people. I think we are dealing with a few bad apples, if that.
Regarding the Mastadon XAMP(?) protocol/security, how are posts and comments added? Are there heuristics for detecting spam or extreme content in the protocol? Is there a decentralised method for serving captchas to users when users are suspected of spamming or blocked by growing numbers of established pods/people? I can see the need for this feature. I also think that the more blocked the user is the more captchas might be concatinated (from each pod they are broadvasting too(?)). From what I’ve read there are already measures to permanently block individuals/addresses but what about temporary blocking? Is there a random jury system so people who accurately detect violent and inappropriate content are rewarded?
If there are measures in place to stop bad practices then I think that we need to let the Gab users in.
If the appropriate measures are not in place then we/you have every right to request that those measures be in place first before accepting Gab’s client. To throw another spanner in the works here, I would say that if Mastadon don’t adopt high enough standards for fighting spam, violent and inappropriate content (Im no expert in this area, they might be) then maybe they are the problem, or limiting factor in this situation, not Gab.
I think the best option is too allow the Gab client on F-Droid. If it, and Mastadon, doesn’t have security measures to limit spam, violent and inapproriate content then that should be stated as a Potential Drawback, on ALL the clients/apps (including email apps and IM apps). If people know the risks going in, they can setup their own personal defenses. I realise this might be seen as a turn off by a few but if the user reads this Potential Drawback, they will understand why we have added it.
People in marginal groups should employ higher personal defenses anyway. Someone who wants to advertise to the world that they are into a fringe thing that some people might be repulsed by, need to understand that they might be well-served to share that that aspect of their life either as a distinct “Aspect” or as a different identity.
Is anything wrong with the above approach? To my mind, its a win win, and may boost FOSS development in social media!
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I’ve done more reading on how this debarcle started, now I’m more concerned that it’s actually Mastodon that is arbitrarily throwing around the term ‘fascist’. There seems to be a mixture of sycophantic group-think in effect on his thread where people fawn over his idea to segregate people without any critical thought. For example its not questioned when he implies that everyone who is critical of immigration is a fascist, this is very wrong, even Bernie Sanders in 2015 said open borders is a terrible “Koch Brothers” idea that would destroy wages.
Is Bernie Sanders a fascist? If so I missed that news item.
Comparing mastodons website to gab, gab have been really active in talking about bitcoin as “free speech money” whereas I don’t see any effort from Mastodon to garner any dontations, bitcoin or otherwise. Mastodons website, as of today doesn’t even have a donate button. It looks like another centralised service, if you look at Gab you see a real dialog with its users and prospective donors, who they call “investors”, they seem open about the problems facing the Internet and censorship, they seem to be providing innovation in this space, although it does also appear to be centralised.
I think Mastodon are dictating their ideas of what ‘fascism’ is onto its users and other users in the Fediverse. In effect they are likely being more oppressive than those they seeked to “escape” from, ie. apparently “fascists” on Twitter and Facebook, according to the instigator. Seriously. According to what he said, the purpose of Mastodon is for it to be a safe space, and they seem have their own arbitrary definitions of what is safe and not safe. Porn is readily available on the site.
All I will say is if F-Droid is afraid of loosing their 4000 followers, maybe don’t be. I have hosted pages with more followers and given up on the platform, due to its oppressive nature, and not-so-clandestine shadow banning.
Do you guys have a sense that the followers that you have amassed on Mastodon are all real users? Can anyone estimate how many fake accounts there might be are on Mastodon as a percentage? Are you reaching a good percentage of your users? I found that on Minds most of my followers were bots.
My suspicion is Mastodon is not really about creating a safe space but this is about nipping the competition. They are afraid of the competition that the Gab client will provide and they have introduced a fast and loose definition of fascism to justify pre-emptively banning them.
I didn’t know about Mastodon before last week, and I’ve been looking for an open-source, decentralised platform. I’ve been interested in LBRY, steemit and even opened an account on Minds. It hasn’t taken long to see that Mastodon are not a viable, alternative to Facebook and Twitter for my needs. To be honest, I’m far more inclined to federate as a Gab instance.
I’m happy to provide links forming the basis of my argument. Its just a massive chore to do it from my device (wifi is down at the moment, again). One of the links is provided by someone else already.
To fight spam, violent and inappriate content we need a to develop a holistic decentralised system that maintains the anonymity of users while opening them up to a jury. There also needs to be an element of risk for those who inappropriately flag content.
I recommend including Gab clients and softwares on F-Droid if technically possible. Also suggest adding a “Possible Drawback” item (spam, offensive or inapprorpriate content) to all communication apps, which details the extent to which the app employs methods to stop such, ie. using
- no known system
- a centralised system,
- a centralised system based on laws in
- a semi-centralised or permissioned system
- a using a decentralised jury system
- a using a decentralised, zero-knowledge jury system
I have wasted hours of my life tonight haven’t I, lol.
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Hi stonerl, Reading that was the first time that I had heard about this problem. Hence my above replies.
“I think the best option is too allow the Gab client on F-Droid.”
No!
When the worm is in the apple, it’s too late.
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