How to handle self-promotion which is tangentially related to F-Droid/free Android?

Related to this post, there came up a discussion:

This topic is intended to publicly talk about this question.

2 Likes

@NicoAlt Disguised ads, please close this topic.

Uhm… not sure if I just did the right thing to start a discussion about the moderation of this topic.

@anon99929151 @NicoAlt I’m not quite sure what to do about this.

I agree with @hotlittlewhitedog that this is disguised advertising. It’s not blatant spam though, I mean it could actually be relevant if it weren’t for the fact that there is no mention of f-droid on the kickstarter page. But then again this might be just a technical detail for now that is not yet announced?

I guess we don’t really have a policy for such self-promotion things which are tangentially related to F-Droid/free android yet, right?

Thoughts?

I didn’t really see it as spam either. I even reposted it to the Fairphone forum (where I think it’s more relevant as it is a modular smartphone) and a discussion started about it (mostly not too positive):

1 Like

Ah, yeah, that’s difficult to decide. To be honest, I would not have it removed from the forum but either talked publicly about this question:

As you already have noticed, I like to be transparent about things. Therefore I feel better if we would republish this topic and make our reactions public in a separate topic, talking about the questions mentioned above. I can do this, if @Bubu and @anon99929151 agree.

It’s one option and it’s OK now, but I would have done it by starting a private topic with all moderators and @hotlittlewhitedog, linking to this topic and hiding it while being in discussion. If we decide to go the way described by me, I can restore everything without problems. So everything’s fine.

That’s what I thought about, too. Letting it be on the forum, but starting a discussion about all these things with “open hardware” and “binary blobs”.

2 Likes

Fully agreed! Please do as described :slight_smile:

1 Like

There is also the option of whispering among moderators (posts hidden to non-moderators), but that seems to be disabled here.
That’s what we usually do in the FP forum in similar cases: (Optionally) hide the topic, whisper about it until we made a decision and then if necessary publicly post the decision and unhide the topic.

Though in this case, where it’s about not having a pollicy for something I agree that it should be a fully public discussion.

1 Like

Thanks for the consideration shown to this post, everyone! Spamming isn’t my intention. Getting the word out to people is.

Due to some strange technical problems with my internet connection, I am ending up typing this on my smartphone. I will respond on the topic thread.

2 Likes

I think first and foremost, free software is about ethics and preserving freedom. I think some people think that free software means non-commercial, which I believe is a mistake. We all need money to survive, and if people can make a living creating ethical software and hardware, then we will have more of it, and less proprietary stuff. For example, quite a few F-Droid contributors have been paid to work on F-Droid.

Posts related to commercial activity do need to fit into the ethical standards of free software and the F-Droid community.

1 Like

I should add, I do also think that the amounts of money are important. Posts that are self-promoting that are aiming to make sustainable projects are quite a separate thing from self-promotion that is focused on making people weathly.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.