[dleslie]

Here's their statement[0], and this is the meat of it:

> F-Droid as a project soon celebrates its 9th birthday. In these 9 years, F-Droid’s mission was and is to create a place where people could download software they can trust – meaning only free, libre and open source software is available on its flagship repository. As a project, it tried to stay neutral all the time. But sometimes, staying neutral isn’t an option but instead will lead to the uprise of previously mentioned oppression and harassment against marginalized groups. We don’t want and won’t support that. F-Droid is taking a political stance here.

> F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things. This includes that it won’t distribute an app that promotes the usage of previously mentioned website, by either its branding, its pre-filled instance domain or any other direct promotion. This also means F-Droid won’t allow oppression or harassment to happen at its communication channels, including its forum. In the past week, we failed to fulfill this goal on the forum, and we want to apologize for that.

0: https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

[scarby2]

Basically - it became a go to for the Alt-Right, these guys ruin everything.

Sad thing about free speech on the internet is that while i'm largely in favour of it mostly it does create breeding grounds for openly hostile and harmful opinions/people.

Given the lack of education in most of the world this is sadly utterly terrifying and i have no idea what to do about it.

[dleslie]

> this is sadly utterly terrifying and i have no idea what to do about it.

IMHO, accounts need to have non-trivial value, to all users. Social pressure will do much of the rest.

The problem with Gab, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, even HN and such is that accounts are free and do not meaningfully increase in value with time and activity. This allows bad actors to thwart social pressure by simply switching accounts at their leisure.

It also doesn't help that there _usually_ exists few barriers to access to online communities; people tend to have a romantic view of being open and welcoming, and social networks have an incentive to keep access generally open as it increases user retention.