[bentley]

Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026)? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096)

If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move to drive public attention to the growing government restrictions on innocuous apps. As far as I know, though, nobody at F-Droid admitted to this; and if they were, why didn’t they mark other widely used apps like Wikipedia and Reddit frontends that provide easy access to much more sexually explicit content in the same protest?

If I’m less charitable, and go by what F-Droid admins actually said, they took this action out of a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors that necessitated flagging, and sincerely believed that Wikipedia and Reddit frontends somehow don’t qualify for the same. If they honestly believed this, it demonstrates (to me) poor judgment; and since the action was walked back almost immediately due to negative public response, that indicates further that they never actually believed this in the first place, and that instead somebody took it upon himself to specifically target religious apps out of his own bias.

Either way, it really soured me on the judgment of the F-Droid maintainers. After a stunt like that, I no longer trust them to fight the battle against oppressive government restrictions on operating systems effectively. Formerly an F-Droid user of many years, this caused me to switch away completely: I’ve started donating monthly to Accrescent instead, download as many apps as I can from there, and switched from F-Droid to Obtanium for any apps not yet on Accrescent.

[9864247888754]

She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse. 21 And so, Oholibah, you relived your former days as a young girl in Egypt, when you first allowed your breasts to be fondled.

Ezekiel 23:20

[caaqil]

Setting aside the context of this quoted verse and how NSFW stuff is judged in religious texts, this doesn't address the more important point that OP raised: the visuals of this verse and more extreme ones can be easily found on Reddit and similar allowed apps. So OP's points stands.

[frenchy]

I find it funny and sad that this is the sort of thing that people like to bring up as somehow bad and not the part where the Isrealites are admonished for not genociding the Cannanites hard enough.

[jajuuka]

Yeah, kids need to read this. Totally. /s

[F3nd0]

My reading is they were simply trying to comply with regulations. It wasn't about what ideas they believed the religious texts were trying to convey, but whether their content met a certain definition set by law. The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about what's appropriate for children.

Does the Bible encourage violence or promiscuity? Not really, no. Does it mention and describe those things in some detail? Yes, absolutely. If that's the kind of content you need to remove from your store, then obviously you need to remove the Bible from your store. Whether that was really the case seems questionable at best, but the stated logic seemed pretty coherent to me.

[warkdarrior]

Which regulations? F-Droid seems to be governed by Dutch law (see https://commonsconservancy.org/dracc/0039/ ). Do they have laws prohibiting all apps with any violence or promiscuity?

(As an aside, if they indeed had to follow some Dutch law and remove Bible and Quran apps, maybe F-Droid can be hosted by freedom.gov, US govt's new anticensorship portal..)

[bentley]

> The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about what's appropriate for children.

If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?

[behringer]

Ironic as Governments use religion to oppress. In facts it's one of religions primary roles.

[eikenberry]

Even mainstream religions are seen at brainwashing cults by many people and my guess is it was something along these lines. They thought they were contributing to the greater good by keeping people from being indoctrinated into a cult. I don't agree but I've seen many self-proclaimed atheists make such statements.

[tasuki]

> a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors

Hey I believe that too. If people are entitled to believe whatever is written in those books, surely people are also entitled to believe it's nonsense and actively harmful.

[bentley]

You’re free to believe that. But the topic here is F-Droid and its board of directors, along with the context that governments are attempting to censor operating systems and app stores. The question is, if you controlled an app store, would you prevent users from making religious choices for themselves? F-Droid is, probably, the biggest and most mainstream free software app store for mobile operating systems, and is trying to drum up community support (“Keep Android Open,” etc.) in response to the new laws. But F-Droid initiated a sudden change in policy—censoring religious apps—wilfully censoring content that’s never been illegal by any reasonable interpretation of the law. Such decisions obviously negatively impact parts of the free software community, and bring up questions about how effective F-Droid and F-Droid’s leaders can be in this fight.

[asacrowflies]

I hope so! What a great move! Masterclass trolling of scumbags and no actual censorship.