-
-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 253
New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
Anti-features of Mastodon app on F-Droid #579
Comments
This is the server catalog.
This app is intended for new, non-technical users for whom the entire concept of a decentralized social media platform is new. Unleashing this on them would just alienate them. There are more advanced apps for more advanced users.
I believe what you're looking for is here: https://github.com/mastodon/joinmastodon-api And actually, I believe that anti-feature was initially added because the app supports push notifications via FCM. Sure, it only does that on devices that have Google services or their substitute like microG, but that was enough for them. It's first time I'm hearing about API calls to joinmastodon.org being related to that.
It is not. |
Thanks for your rapid response.
Does this mean that the app never calls api.joinmastodon.org if the user goes directly to "Log In"?
Thanks, I'll check.
I'll raise the issue with them, and will keep you informed if you like
You lost me there... Can you develop a bit more please? |
Seems like https://github.com/mastodon/joinmastodon-api leads to a 404 🤔 |
It does still call it to obtain the list of servers for suggestions that appear as you type so you won't have to type the complete domain of the server if it's on that list. I don't see any issue with that.
We don't care about F-Droid much. Being on there falls into nice to have category, but there will be no engineering effort spent on F-Droid-related issues specifically. The primary distribution channel for the app is Google Play, the secondary is the releases section in this repo (those builds come with self-update functionality).
Oops, I didn't notice that it's a private repository. I have no idea why it is private. |
Thanks for your responses.
Can you tell me who to contact? |
My brother, you were part of the discussion actively for months, why lie about that? Ref: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/10909 Ref: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/11874 It was explained multiple times:
The antifeature has clear terms: https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet
Finally some truth |
I re-read it and I assumed that case was closed because
|
The Google connections were part of it, true. But the |
Why does there need to be ToS and a privacy policy for a read-only API? I'm genuinely curious. Cookies? The OkHttp library I'm using for HTTP client doesn't even support them out of the box. |
I'm trying to look at all sides, and am starting to re-pose myself some of these questions, in particular: What harm can it do to contact a non-free read-only API? I thought about tracking, but even if the target page itself would be FOSS and doesn't process any request data, other software on the server could still process the httpd log data. Cookies might be an issue, but wouldn't any (harmful) processing be visible in the app's source code? |
The Mastodon app is labeled on F-Droid as having the anti-feature " "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service". After some discussion with the people on the F-Droid forum I found out that this is due to the fact that the app automatically calls a hard-coded address on api.joinmastodon.org. Considering it in the best interest of both the Mastodon app and F-Droid to eliminate this label, I have several questions:
For more information of the discussion leading me to open this issue, you can read the following topic on theF-Droid forum:
https://forum.f-droid.org/t/mastodon-anti-features/22327
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: