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Comment by IiydAbITMvJkqKf | Hacker News Reader

People need to stop bringing up F-Droid in response to Google supsending accounts. F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

https://old.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/ceyzuz/the_fdroid_d...

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The thing about F-Droid is that you can add alternative repositories that allow you to host the APKs yourself without also writing an update mechanism. Hell, you can even get around the open source requirements F-Droid puts in place that way.

Every app store will try to get rid of applications that make the store's life harder, that's why the ability to add repositories is such an important (and underrated) feature.

>Your only option is self-hosting APKs

F-Droid (a program) allows you to specify your own repos. Eg: NewPipe

> F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

Interesting. In fact, that is actually a good point. Now you put it like that, self-hosting makes EVEN more sense. Apps like Discord does it with their desktop apps and Telegram does it with their Android APKs. I completely support this.

Now. Here's a very good question:

This is one of the reasons why F-Droid banned Gab, from their own quote from [0]:

'Things like racism, sexism, verbal abuse, violent nationalist propaganda, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, antisemitism and a lot more things become popular on such instances.'

This same reason can be applied to Telegram. So why have they not taken a 'political stance' towards removing Telegram like they have also removed Gab?

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

The same applies for most of the social platforms. Especially for those with E2EE messages. By definition, content cannot be moderated on there.

It is rather diffucult area and the decisions are often made based on by the popularity and the variety of the users on the platfom . It is easy to ban an app which is mostly used by rightwing-extremists for example, but not the app which is used by everyone. So, what is the right way?

Google is not available for Huawei phones, so self-hosted APK is a respect to their users

>Android only

Well, so is F-Droid...

I mean literally, "It's in the name"

(... and now I have EA lawyers searching for me)

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