What time it is? It's 5 o'clock... somewhere. So here comes the fifth #FDroid legal post.
It's all about content, transparency, and user protections. It features strong tags like #OnlineSafetyAct #Ofcom #DSA and #DMA and how these shape our own policies.
Will this break some prejudice? One way to find out: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/21/navigating-the-digital-markets-act-digital-services-act-and-the-online-safety-act.html
The vast majority of the world, including where many F-Droid contributors and users live, have strict pornography and gambling laws, as well as regulations restricting mature content. Even if we don’t want to be, we are accountable to certain regulations that meet at the intersection between censorship and safety.
Not to be unkind, but isn’t that their problem? What do you do when your Saudi Arabian contributors are threatened by their government for publishing an LGBTQ-support app? Why would you change your behaviour to support the whims of this or that government just because they decide to pass an intrusive and expression-limiting law? If you’re in the Netherlands, you respect Netherlands law. If you’re trying to please everyone, you’re just going to wind up pleasing no one.
@ret @fdroidorg We have never even tried to please everyone because it is clearly impossible. Thinking about the user helps deal with the world as it is. Let's take your example to show how difficult and gray this is: clearly the LGBTQ users in Saudi want privacy. If Saudi bans F-Droid and arrests users because of that app, did we best serve your example user? If F-Droid has a neutral reputation, provides strong privacy and decentralized access to apps, would your example user be better served?
@ret @eighthave F-Droid (the word) is many things: a repo client, a repo software, a repomaker and an actual apps repo. The "f-droid.org repo" is centralized (w/ mirrors), yes, by its nature of being controlled by the repo admin.
When we say decentralized we mean that: you can use any F-Droid client with any F-Droid app repository out there.
Users are fed the notion of "there can be only one app store", be it from Apple or Google, and find it hard to grasp the idea of what #FDroid can do.
@ret @eighthave Now, following that, the legal post pertains to any #FDroid repository in general, but we can only speak for "f-droid.org repo" since this is the one we admin, is currently the biggest (by volume) and users usually refer to it by saying "F-Droid".
@eighthave forgive me, perhaps I’m ignorant of the technical detail, but how exactly is F-Droid (including the main repo) more decentralised than say, Git, or HTTP? Just because you can stick a different URL in the app and access a different repo doesn’t necessarily change things from the point of view of a censor.
F-Droid is running a central repository, which will be subject to scrutiny from those censors. As far as I understand it, this entire article relates to that. If you didn’t host that repository, I fail to see how the OSA or other acts would be relevant to you at all? You’d be a… piece of software, not a “platform” or a “website”. This is all about the main repo, which isn’t “decentralised” at all.
Again, apologies if I misunderstand any of this, and please do correct me if so.
@fdroidorg