That was achieved by the instance level blocking. Clients breaking protocol to antagonize instances the developers don't like and F-Droid arbitrarily kicking apps despite them following the inclusion policy is where this breaks down.
Nonsense. F-Droid kicking apps is still freedom of association, as is Clients changing their protocol. They are also run by entities that have freedom of association.
Just as you have the freedom to not use those apps if you don't like them.
If I was the developer of a chat client app, I certainly wouldn't want to see screenshots with my app branding in them alongside alt-right content and I would do the same to prevent it from being used for such things.
I will point out that Facebook has just as abhorrent discourse yet the third party clients for it still exist on F-Droid. Which of course they should, F-Droid is a platform that encourages the proliferation of free and open source software. To block access to an open source Facebook client would be antithetical to it's mission.
Yet when a rising social media company chooses to deliberately use an open source project as their first party platform, this is when F-Droid decides an exception has to be made? I thought we wanted the world to embrace FOSS, but apparently not.
F-Droid doesn't need to be consistent or explain their desire to dissociate in any way (legally speaking).
So let's speculate: perhaps they agree with you that Facebook has abhorrent discourse but also felt that FB had some beneficial content as well so decided to not ban it not to mention it's popularity. Association with Gab clearly provided no such benefits.
Legally speaking F-Droid can do a lot of things, but the law has no bearing on the discussion of whether it was the right thing to do, if it will help with FOSS adoption or finally if they are somehow absolved from criticism for their inconsistent and politically biased policy enforcement.
I see no reason why we should restrict FOSS adoption to only people within an arbitrary and unrelated political sphere. Everyone wins when everyone is using FOSS, even the people we don't like. Unfortunately F-Droids decision on this matter hurts FOSS adoption from conservatives who will only continue to associate FOSS with the left-wing.
Sophist nonsense, I am critiquing them on a public forum for breaking their own policies and for what I perceive as harm to the FOSS movement. If you choose to rely on vague trust in authorities in lieu of an actual discussion, then don't reply at all.
To the extent that Facebook does have such discourse (and it does), it's mostly failure in their implementation of their community standards policy, not a laissez-faire community standards policy.
This exists currently. Many web browsers block third-party cookies. I say, let the developers develop as they must, let the users use as they must, and let us all be free to choose.
Personally, I find it very annoying that clients block these alt-right instances. It feels like a layering violation.
