Remove Ruqqus

[polzon]

While this site is open-source, it really should not be advocated for, or recommended.

It's a far-right transphobic[1][2][3], racist[1][2][3], anti-vax/mask & covid conspiracies [1][2][3][4], and sexist [1][2][3] website that is entirely hate-speech.

These are not cherry-picked examples either, they are literally pulled from the front-page. You can just take a peek at the front-page of the site for yourself to verify. There's nothing redeeming about this website.

[monokrome]

One of the benefits of it being open source is that people could host their own instances if the site itself has a trash community - which is an apparent issue here.

I think that it's a bit excessive to rate the quality or recommendation of the software itself by the quality (or in this case, lack thereof) of content that a specific hosted instance's community seems to have.

Is there something I'm missing here? Are these people that you linked the actual authors of the software itself?

Are you sure that they just don't need more help in terms of trust & safety and moderation? That's a hard problem for a small software project. Have you seen this behavior from the community of developers who work on the project?

In which way do these suggestions have anything to do with the software and it's authors itself? My understanding of this repository would be that it is recommending the software, and not necessarily vouching for the content on hosted versions of it although maybe that's something the author could clarify.

[monokrome]

A potentially more concerning point of contention here, however, may be that the software seems to have CloudFlare's tracking technology in the header, which is directly opposed to the privacy of it's users. As you can see in the network tab, it reaches out to cloudflareinsights.com via an asynchronous request on every page.

I'm not sure if this is a default in the software itself or not, but the fact is that if it is then it's tracking users and if it's not then they are not using the same code that they distribute to run the site. Either way, this seems fishy.

[monokrome]

Oh, cool. We also have the NewRelic user agent which is known to be a tracking disaster.

Maybe it's time to write a bot scanning things on this list that don't respect user privacy.

[polzon]

I do see the admins of the site encourage this speech. I don't think they consider it a problem and just consider it free speech. The lack of moderation is pretty much the entire point of the website, rather then privacy. You also don't see pro-privacy mentioned anywhere on the site or Github. The opensource aspect is mostly a bonus.

I do think when recommend a site that the community should be an important factor. You're recommending the site, rather then the platform that it's built on after all. If you go on Ruqqus, there is no avoiding its community. Maybe instead, link the to Ruqqus Github instead?

Funny enough, Ruqqus forks spawned a website that is basically the entire opposite and is a feminist site. There's also this Ruqqus fork which I can't tell much about what this community is about, but is kind of looks like another hatespeech site.

[pluja]

I see. I understand the concerns on what the Ruqqus community is promoting, but I also don't want to remove this as it is a Reddit alternative. I will instead link to their repo and mention this issue right after the service description.

Thanks for reporting this.

[monokrome]

@pluja What about the literal privacy issues that I brought up? This software is tracking it's users. The trackers are not only on the site, but embedded in the code itself:

https://github.com/ruqqus/ruqqus/search?q=cloudflare
https://github.com/ruqqus/ruqqus/search?q=newrelic

This is not privacy-focused software and should not be in a list of such things.

@polzon

I do see the admins of the site encourage this speech

I'd be interested in seeing cases where the authors directly encourage this speech. Any examples? Free speech isn't the right term, but the habit by current society standards is definitely to over-correct for past mistakes. This leads to a situation where people who fight the over-correction will often over-correct their won response as well. That's how humans "solve problems".

Whether it's a problem or not is separate from whether it's okay to constantly censor content away to make it look like a place with no problems. There is a culture problem that is more important than the Ruqqus problem, and these communities often make the argument that hiding it doesn't really help anyone - whether they see the culture problem or not.

[pluja]

Thanks for this. Ruqqus is being delisted.

[pluja]

Maybe it's time to write a bot scanning things on this list that don't respect user privacy.

@monokrome As it is stated in the ABOUT.md:

This list may contain some errors and some services may be delisted in the future after discussion. Before going for a service/app make your own investigation, take time to explore and don't trust anybody. This list is just an index of privacy-friendly apps and services but it is not a guarantee that some issues could be discovered in the future for a particular service/app.

It is me alone making the investigations for each service, and there may be services where I mistakenly miss some things. This is why this list is collaborative and there are issues and pull requests to discuss.

Also if someone writed a bot to scan the list searching for this kind of issues, it would be great. I will write it myself when I have some free time if it hasn't been done yet.

[monokrome]

@pluja Yes, I understand this. I was considering writing a bot for that. I wasn't trying to feature request and/or berate anyone. If it seemed that way, I apologize for confusion. I just wanted to make sure it was clear that the Ruqqus project is not privacy-focused. 😸