This is a very problematic choice and as much as I want to think it wasn't malicious, at every turn it sure looks like it's meant to be inflammatory.
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
When I follow that link, every single thing on the page is from the Old Testament.
If I remember right, the worst you get in the New Testament is massive sexism, exhortations to obey authority in things you obviously shouldn't, and threats to throw people into Hell post-death. Oh, and a note from Jesus that the rather draconian laws of the Old Testament still apply, including the parts about stoning people to death for random silly offenses, although he doesn't list them and I think that's mostly been munchkined around.
... but both testaments are canonical and authoritative for most versions of Christianity... it doesn't make that much sense to carve up the book, and none of the apps actually exclude the Old Testament.
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
It's all about interpretation, which is the point where you mark something as not appropriate for children so that parents can actively make the choice on if their kids should be exposed to it. In this case there's very little argument about whether we want more people following the voice in their head to kill their son, which is from the bible, or having vanilla sex, which is the definition of hardcore porn (as opposed to softcore porn, not hardcore as in extreme at least that was the definition I'm used to perhaps the meaning has drifted).
People are comfortable with religious texts because they are bought up with them and know which pieces to ignore, just look at the moral panic around teenagers getting hold of a Qaran and going off to join ISIS after 9/11. Hell I find the prevalence and acceptance of genital mutilation encouraged by religious texts horrendous when I spend time considering it.
It's not a hardship to let parents decide whether kids should have access to this stuff. That being said what the tag does in context of the f-droid shop is not really helpful behavior. It's not what most people would expect for parental control and outside of countries where the texts may be proscribed it's not really helpful behavior to hide these apps.
I always viewed it as It's more that it's distinct from softcore porn which if you look up is more nudity and maybe simulated sex acts vs actual explicit sex acts which was accepted as hardcore porn no matter how vanilla. I'm happy to concede the meaning may have drifted as access to explicit porn became more widespreasd and softcore porn lost cultural relevance but even in that case I expect a large chunk of parents would be happier with their kids thinking rough sex is fine rather than thinking self circumcision with a rock or following voices that tell them to kill is ok.
>A thing that appears in book and stories for kids
Sure but does it appear as a moral good thing to do? If it does is it because the voice in the head is telling them to kill evil doers rather than innocents? You can see why you'd want to have a discussion with your kids about it just like you'd hopefully have a discussion about what they may see in porn not being real/healthy for most relationships. This is obviously at age appropriate times, there's a good reason kids aren't being told about Sodom and Gomorrah in all it's detail in kindergarten, why cartoons of the story of the Ark don't focus on the babies drowning as mothers struggle to swim holding them above their heads before succumbing to exhaustion or the cold... only to continue to exist forever in eternal torment.
> Which is super weird definition of hardcore porn.
As far as I know, the definition of "hardcore porn" is and always has been explicit depiction of actual sexual activity (on edit: in a way intended to be sexually arousing to the reader/viewer). In pictures, that generally comes out to genitalia being shown in contact with genitalia or other body parts.
And that's how you do vanilla sex.
What is your super weird definition?
> No, a vanilla sex appearing in a book does not make it hard porn book.
"... and then they had sex" wouldn't. A relatively clinical or relatively expurgated sentence or two wouldn't.
> A thing that appears in book and stories for kids.
What particular book or story do you have in mind here, and exactly what does it say, and how does it present it? Because the Bible presents it as praiseworthy to be prepared to kill your son if you hear God tell you to do it, and gives what it claims is an actual, factual, historical example.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
> Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases?
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps and ignored things like reddit when doing this I would say its just an honest mistake, but they only seemingly marked Bible related apps. In one instance the developers app isn't even an app that contains the Bible, its a Bible reading tracker so you can keep track of which verses you have read thus far, still marked NSFW. There was not enough thought put into this ban and it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
It seems like the point of this comment is to concoct an example for which anyone agreeing with the parent comment would supposedly hold an inconsistent opinion. I'll insert my own consistency: neither should be flagged NSFW.
> If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps. ［...］ it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
F-Droid are in the FA stage of FAFO. If they don't reverse this, they will find themselves in the FO stage. Anyone can hold the opinion that "religion or its texts are ruinous" but you can never apply it in practice in a liberal democracy (even in secular states) simply because religious and expression rights are legally protected.
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
Or this could be the FO itself. Both the threshold for NSFW as well as anti-puritanism sentiment has crept up so high that it has reached "religion is a cancer" stage.
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
I mean, unless you work at an organisation that deals with a specific religion, I would say that they're all NSFW, as there's no reason to be using them at work, and they're bound to cause controvosy at some point.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.
If they insist on flagging things as NSFW then this would be the correct action for those apps that contain the texts. It seems like apps that are bible related and don't contain the text are being flagged though which should be fixed.
This is my issue with it as well, but also, why did the PR only target Bible apps? Seemingly in a very lazy way at that. Had they taken time to understand how each app works and its purpose, they would have only flagged apps that contain the Bible itself. I would hope reddit and other apps that actually contain graphic NSFW content are next?
The only merge request you've seen targets bible apps. How do you know this isn't one part of a larger effort to correctly mark apps? Maybe they've tackled other categories previously, or had intended to tackle other categories going forward. The fact that bible apps is included in one wave of markings doesn't mean only bible apps are affected.
Wait, F-Droid is doing/going to do age verification?
Guess I have to find another app store. To use and to donate to. Stupid wars over what's NSFW are ignorable, but knuckling under to the AV gestapo isn't.
Very few of those laws apply to services that only have "incidental" content, especially if they're small, and for those that actually do apply, the right answer is to refuse to serve the affected states.
They would definitely have to blacklist the UK as well. And other places if I remember right.
Seems legit. These topics should not form any part of work or government. What you do in your own time is of course completely up to you, as with any other NSFW content.
The US Constitution's First Amendment protects religion from government. There is no amendment protecting porn or gratuitous violence. Marking the religious apps as NSFW may be a violation of the First Amendment and could potentially be challenged in court, to a potentially huge sum of money and F-Droid's potential detriment.
The First Amendment does not apply to fucking app stores. It applies to the government and only to the government. That does include the government leaning on people, but it does not include editorial or curation decisions made by totally private organizations.
If you tried to take your position to a court in the US, even now, you'd be treated as a frivolous litigant... which, to be clear, means being told to fuck off and not come back.
Please stop posting this kind of ignorance. It burns.
My point is that the letter of the First Amendment and the spirit of the First Amendment are at odds when faced with modern day reality. Between government and corporations, and being fined, vs being put in prison, it's all up for debate. We can look at the letter of the First Amendment and twist and turn it to come to a definition that the courts can agree on, but stepping back from that, the bigger picture is the people are trying to speak and that this entity that isn't the government, is restricting that, with downstream effects. You're right that the First Amendment doesn't apply to app stores run by a private corporation. It's still a restriction on speech by a large organization against an individual, and the freedom of speech gives people the right to complain about it.
Generally speaking, only images/videos are NSFW-taggable.
The argument can be made than an app which displays religious imagery is not suitable for the workplace, but if it's just a reader with texts, then not.
If someone wants to spy over your shoulder to read text on your screen, and it doesn't jibe with their religion, that is their problem.
And, if that's where the goalposts lie, then atheistic texts could be offensive in such a way. I.e. a Mastodon post claiming "there is no god" should be marked NSFW and blurred out until you click something.
There is a world outside the USA where most of what you wrote doesn’t apply.
Here I think the labelling doesn’t really make sense but it never does anyway and pretty much means "this content is part of a corpus American think is objectionable and wouldn’t want to be seen with in public”.
I enjoy the controversy for putting in light the usual imperial blindness however.
This seems reasonable. The content includes themes (death, rape, violence, etc) that are generally considered NSFW by most modern day rating agencies. Just because cultures have historically seeded the texts for a long period of time doesn't make them SFW. If ESRB/MPAA had to rate a modern reboot, I don't think it would get a T/PG-13.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
It's only reasonable if reason is applied, rather than one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities. Unfortunately, there is zero logical consistency in what is marked NSFW and what isn't. That's the entire problem. F-Droid's authoritarian moral-policing crew are coming up with any flimsy justification for censorship applied inconsistently rather than taking an objective look at the issue. Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending, not collaborative and "Hmm, I can see how maybe this line of policing is inconsistent." This is how this kind of political-bias-pretending-to-be-objectivity tends to unfold with religious adherents, which these F-Droid contributors seem to be.
This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
What Bible reader wants that fact hidden? That is the opposite sentiment of everyone I've actually seen. That honestly makes it seem even more illogical.
It's not just Islamists, either. Any religion can become extremist and support all sorts of internationally illegal crimes.
Evangelism is a danger to kids, and unfit for the workplace too. We should not encourage young Americans to indoctrinate themselves with nonsense propaganda that encourages killing.
I feel like you didn't read the discussion at all? One of the apps does not contain any Bible verses, it is used to track which books, chapters and verses you've read.
Does it matter? F-Droid is a distributor, they're allowed to reject apps they consider controversial or outside their wheelhouse. The person who spoke up was correct, the ruling is consistent and the definition of NSFW content makes sense to me. Evangelism isn't exempted from being called and labelled as slopware.
These people can perfectly well distribute their apps without F-Droid's help, they're not refusing to sign their app or somesuch.
The consistency is that the presence of a Reddit app or a Youtube app per se doesn't reveal too much about the device owner.
A Bible reader/tracker app, a Quran learning app... now that's where you enter a more sensitive area, religious beliefs are among the higher protected classes of data under GDPR.
And now there's a few potential threat sources: family members snooping through their relative's phones, border control snooping through phones (remember, apostasy is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries), or the worst one, random ad SDKs pulling in and distributing lists of installed APKs and pushing these to the mothership, where the data can then be hoovered up by anyone willing to pay for it, with the same result [1].
I wish I didn't need to write this, but it's not just some random Middle East theocracy going for its citizens as usual for the crime of not believing into the god of choice, we're seeing people being threatened for their faith (or lack of it) right in the United States of America, right now.
No, there are plenty of other examples (just in games alone) to write off as a mere one-off oversight. It certainly seems targeted since they've targeted religious apps that don't even have any explicit content.
For an app store that is supposed to advocate for freedom this is disturbing and very off-putting. The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.
Who is "they" here? The person who opened the PR? The person who wrote the NSFW definition? The moderators correcting the mistakes?
> The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.
It's not censorship, you can still install the apps to your phone. You just cannot promote them to impressionable audiences like children, or pretend it is appropriate conduct for something like the workplace. Your same logic could be used to argue that porn apps shouldn't be labelled as NSFW, or that gore and shock content is free expression.
F-Droid is not (and will never be) compelled to host the tools of evangelism. You don't need F-Droid's help to reach your audience. I'm a proud F-Droid user and defend their stance wholeheartedly.
> 2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
Why pick out a tiny bit of Ezekiel when you have the entire book of Song of Solomon?
Anyways, I think the more interesting tension is: What tag or flag would apply to the Bible that does not apply to the Wikipedia app? I have literally used Wikipedia to look up sex positions, which it covers in detail and with pictures.
Yeah, like, there's straight-up photos of penises and vaginas and naked people of all sorts on Wikipedia. It absolutely should be considered a NSFW app.
My understanding of NSFW is that it means "not safe for work" and in the contexts I was in, bible was safe for work. I have yet to see an angry atheist demanding that bibles cant be seen on account of Ezekiel chapter 23 like content. As funny as gotcha of "bible contains stories about sexuality" is, back in real world, I have yet to meet someone who would equate it with erotics.
And yes, you can talk about books and movies in which comparable scenes appear in work too.
NSFW should mean something akin to Not Safe for Work lol. If you're going to use that tag at all, the tag should exist on pretty much anything that exists purely for entertainment value. I would argue that religious texts (as well as sexually explicit scientific articles) are not NSFW, but pretty much every game is.
If you're sitting around reading the Bible when you should be working, why should your boss treat that as better than sitting around playing a game when you should be working?
But originally "NSFW" was meant for stuff you might not want to do on your break. It is true that if you use that kind of definition, these particular apps aren't going to get you in trouble in most workplaces. The official F-Droid definition that people have been quoting is mostly like that too. But the popular definition of "NSFW" has drifted, so users will be confused... which is yet another reason that it's not a category an app repository should be trying to maintain.
Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work. It doesn't strike me as categorically NSFW, but I think you and I agree that that's the issue: the definition of the NSFW category. Going further, I think it's not possible to define in a way that makes everyone happy; it's not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content, so we should just omit it altogether and let people make up their own minds as to what is safe in their workplace.
> Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work.
Well, sure, if you're a priest/rabbi/pastor/imam/whatever (why isn't there a generic word for this?), you're going to consult religious texts for work.
And if you're a game critic, you'll play games for work.
And if you work at Pornhub, you'll presumably watch porn for work.
Normal jobs don't involve any of them. Presumably we're talking about the norm.
> not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content
I will not take the easy bait. I will not take the easy bait. I will not take the easy bait...
> Normal jobs don't involve any of them. Presumably we're talking about the norm.
Agreed. It's context dependent. I don't like the term NSFW because I find it non-specific and subjective. F-Droid's definition seems to be the widely accepted definition which doesn't appear to include religious texts, or games, but does include porn, graphic violence, etc.
> I will not take the easy bait.
;). Presumably because you caught my gist that even commonly used, less ambiguous options are still inadequate.
F-Droid "Anti-Feature flags" are not block lists. They are for users to filter content. The content is still available.
>> When reviewing apps to accept, F-Droid takes the user’s point of view, first and foremost. We start with strict acceptance criteria based on the principles of free software and user control. There are some things about an app that might not block it from inclusion, but many users might not want to accept them. For these kinds of things, F-Droid has a defined set of Anti-Features. Apps can then be marked with these Anti-Features so users can clearly choose whether the app is still acceptable.
>> Anti-Features are organized into “flags” that packagers can use to mark apps, warning of possibly undesirable behaviour from the user’s perspective, often serving the interest of the developer or a third party. Free software packages do not exist in a bubble. For one piece of software to be useful, it usually has to integrate with some other software. Therefore, users that want free software also want to know if an app depends on or promotes any proprietary software. Sometimes, there are concepts in Anti-Features that overlap with tactics used by third parties against users. F-Droid always marks Anti-Features from the user’s point of view. For example, NSFW might be construed as similar to a censor’s blocklists, but in our case, the focus is on the user’s context and keeping the user in control.
F-Droid is no longer accepting "NSFW" apps (as they dubiously define them) and will eventually remove them from the repo. This tag is only a stopgap until they figure out how to move them out of the F-Droid repo.
Honestly, that feels like someone doing malicious compliance to jam up the nsfw ban. Of course by most standards that include written content the bible, quran etc. (and plenty of popular media series like a song of ice and fire) are nsfw, but the people pushing for age restriction/nsfw bans would usually strongly feel "except those ones" and by applying the label you force them to either explain or codify the double standard.
Oh that's disappointing. I have no issue with them flagging bible apps (it's just a flag and I welcome the ability to filter) but I do think nsfw content does belong in an open app ecosystem under the appropriate flagging. Including religion for those who subscribe to that.
This hides those apps from the search unless that user enables the NSFW filter. When seen through that lens, I can’t imagine the overlap of users who are searching for a Bible app and who also want to show NSFW apps with them. When seen through that lens, it doesn’t seem like this is a user-friendly decision or one that is taking the user in control or taking their context into account.
Clearly someone 'wants to do something controversial'.
Pathetic. Carte blanc on anything using the word Bible is a telltale sign. A 'I've read these verses' tracker also banned, having contained none of what they object to. Violent video game descriptions not banned. Do it right or don't do it. It's simple.
* "New Oklahoma schools superintendent rescinds mandate for Bible instruction in schools": https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-su... (apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-superintendent-630b2f706731224a070d7fef6a35b7d8)
> The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter.
Yes, I have read it, as have billions of others, and we don't agree with you. Your personal political sensibilities are not shared by all. For what it's worth I wouldn't flag any of your chosen religious texts either no matter what they were.
As a 12‐year‐old I encountered this passage during my first complete read of the Bible and wasn’t bothered by it. It’s a colorful metaphor that uses sexual promiscuity to symbolize Israel’s religious impiety, a common theme that occurs elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., Hosea whose commitment to his unfaithful wife was used as a symbol for the love of God to an unfaithful Israel). These are basic theological ideas that were not hidden from me at church even at that age.
I encountered actual prurient material on the shelves of the school library, and heard far worse obscenity in the locker room during gym class. The most erotic stuff in the Bible, Song of Songs, is quaint by the standards of a century ago, let alone today.
If F‐Droid is trying to drum up opposition to the UK’s extreme suppression of pornography, they've muddled it. They could have defied the unjust restrictions, or they could have leaned into it and marked Wikipedia apps, Reddit apps, Mastodon apps, and Project Gutenberg apps the same way.
That they did neither indicates that they have chosen to specifically target religious content, and not just by marking it. F-Droid developers openly state (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026) that (1) new NSFW apps will not be added, and (2) existing NSFW apps will be removed.
It's bad on principle: F-Droid is akin to a distribution package repo, and should not prohibit apps based solely on ideology (nor should Debian, Gentoo, BSD ports…); and it's also impractical: given the looming threat of government suppression of app stores, F‐Droid (already an underdog) should not be driving away supporters by taking up anti‐religious ideology.
unless I am misunderstanding, this would allow you to hide the app from sharing settings, so that others don't see you are e.g. reading the quran (where otherwise they may have not known) and has nothing to do with whether or not you have a job where you e.g. work.
Right, I wonder what else is under NSFW. Are they really forcing users to enable NSFW which includes actual smut, in order to get a bible app? This is malicious.
Before the topic is ironically flagged, I guess it is time to have "the talk".
Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.
The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.
Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.
Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.
The bible is a long introduction to the punchline, that the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone, and that it wants everyone to be like that.
> the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone
Well, after personally destroying some cities, cursing an entire civilization with plagues including the death of their firstborn, and ordering the "chosen people" to take over some land by slaughtering everybody living there. And the "getting killed" part didn't remove the threat of eternal fire for anybody who doesn't go along with the program. That's the big stuff I remember off the top of my head.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
> "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels". -- Matthew 25:41
That's supposed to be a quote from Jesus, personally. In fact he's talking about himself saying that in the future. See that word "everlasting"? Other translations use "eternal".
It's permanent Hell. It's really, really clear. He doesn't have to talk much about it, because he's made the point.
In my opinion this doesn't describe anything happening in this world, so it is not relevant, whether to label it NSFW, and it isn't encouraging you to be violent in this world.
I mean, yes, these are religious texts, but if we are to judge them on a level with other content, they absolutely warrant a warning.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
Apart from anything else, the Song of Solomon (which I actually like!) or Ezekiel 23:20 would probably trigger some kind of automated detection system. Not to mention the legitimately horrible parts like Deuteronomy 22:23.
From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
Any world history source, such as Wikipedia, yes. (If that’s not the reason you brought it up, I only saw your first two words in the discussion; perhaps your reply was truncated unexpectedly?)
This definitely ties into a weakness in the U.S. speech laws — we rarely view obscenity as relevant to non-erotic topics, so our social edifices are ill-equipped at considering this topic at all: by social assumption, a non-erotic text such as the old testament bible is unconsciously assumed exempt from obscenity concerns even though it is blatantly NSFW. (I can’t speak to how other countries handle this topic.)
If you see this as the innocent equivalent of a “content warning,” then I would expect more apps to be flagged. The commenters in that thread point out numerous apps or games that are obviously built around content that is not appropriate for children.
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s
Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
Again, distinguishing "advocacy" as your criteria for censorship is censoring on interpretation. I know you are sincere in your opinions about this, they won't change, and I even share them.
They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.
But it does, and explicitly - it isn’t a matter of interpretation. Repeatedly god commands his followers to slaughter men, women, children, and even the animals of their foes. Repeatedly god tells his followers to enslave people, and that it’s fine to treat them abysmally as long as it’s not so bad that they die.
This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.
But as a practical matter, I'll point out that trying to ban the interpretation held by the three billion or whatever practicing christians on the planet is a better way to end up as a sacrifice on that altar than to improve the world.
Look, this whole idea is dumb. No, F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of denying religion to make a bunch of intemperate nerds like us happy. Are we really having this fight?
The reality of what is in the bible is not, no. It is written, in black and white. Yes you could argue about gnostic gospels and shit but what people accept to be the Bible has been a static set of texts for centuries now.
Now, anyway, you need to stop talking smack about my mother, and I disliked the death threat you made just there, and I don’t need to know about what you do with fish in the bedroom.
Exactly, but if you say that you'll just be accused of yourself being a biased bigot, conveniently distracting from the original reason the discussion started at all! These psychological tactics don't work on people anymore.
So we should expect them to NSFW all manga/anime reading/browsing apps. Clearly many hypersexualise women, possibly minors, normalize sexual abuse, violence, both text and visuals
Probably all social client apps for their addictive characteristics, and unhealthy polarizing content, and generally mental health degrading. Including Facebook, Reddit, fediverse...
Let's be real no one is going to read the bible by accident. It is much easier for a young person to find explicit content in Lemmy/fediverse apps
What is the funniest is that this is the action of a social justice warrior on a crusade, exhibiting the exact same behaviour he purports to be against.
Consistency? How do you propose allowing smut and violence from some religions without allowing it from others? If there are existing rules, they should be applied consistently.
Oh well. To be honest I was pretty disappointed that Google was going after them, but the writing seems to be on the wall. With behavior like this, I do not even want to use their software at all.
Android has been going more and more to shit anyways. The best part was always that you could escape Google, but that option seems to be closing down.
I believe you that you didn't mean it as a generic religious flamestarter, but in that case your intent didn't come across in the comment. So it's predictable that people responded with flaming reactions of their own.
So... what's the big deal? Putting aside the various arguments whether religious texts should be marked as such, the wording of this policy, etc, etc... literally what difference does it make that these apps now have this flag? Do people think users will see this flag and be like, "Oh dear me I had no idea the Bible was NSFW; won't be reading that now!"?
But religions are only normal once they have numbers, theres no judgement on the content. These cults just have to survive and thrive long enough to become normalised.
You can see everything as a cult. Science, with its cultic belief that everything is a particle also just survived long enough to become normal. The question is, are members of one cult wise enough to accept other cults, or are they so insecure that they have to tag them with "NSFW"?
As much antipathy as I have for religion, I disagree wholeheartedly. Bias in any form just enables rationalizing a counter-bias. And frankly, the folks who do exactly that sort of counter-bias today are very good at it. We should be careful about giving them more ammo, this tit-for-tat is tearing us apart.
I understand what you're saying but just like "absolute freedom of speech", the ratchet only works one direction. In fact you identified it as really good counter bias. It's analogous to Overton Window always opening to the right.
You've hit on a good point, but I don't know what to do about it.
So true. There are entire libraries that only include books that have been made illegal by various states across the world. People are naturally attracted to taboos and this will only draw more attention to the bible.
This is a very problematic choice and as much as I want to think it wasn't malicious, at every turn it sure looks like it's meant to be inflammatory.
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
Most religious texts are NSFW in the most literal interpretation. They contain violence and rape in great detail.
Which is fine, but it is just NSFW.
The old testament has depiction of rape and violence. If the new testaments is also tagged nsfw though, I'll claim that their sensitivity is too high.
Obviously a man nailed to a cross is also pretty violent.
Revelations is pretty metal.
new testament scripture about slavery: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
new testament scripture about killing women and children: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
What was "Passion of the Christ" rated, and why?
> new testament scripture about slavery: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
Posting Google searches as references is pretty lame.
The New Testament clearly condones slavery, but I think all the stuff telling you to take slaves is in the old.
> new testament scripture about killing women and children: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
When I follow that link, every single thing on the page is from the Old Testament.
If I remember right, the worst you get in the New Testament is massive sexism, exhortations to obey authority in things you obviously shouldn't, and threats to throw people into Hell post-death. Oh, and a note from Jesus that the rather draconian laws of the Old Testament still apply, including the parts about stoning people to death for random silly offenses, although he doesn't list them and I think that's mostly been munchkined around.
... but both testaments are canonical and authoritative for most versions of Christianity... it doesn't make that much sense to carve up the book, and none of the apps actually exclude the Old Testament.
> label that accuses the text of being offensive
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
> They're more offensive than hardcore porn.
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
It's all about interpretation, which is the point where you mark something as not appropriate for children so that parents can actively make the choice on if their kids should be exposed to it. In this case there's very little argument about whether we want more people following the voice in their head to kill their son, which is from the bible, or having vanilla sex, which is the definition of hardcore porn (as opposed to softcore porn, not hardcore as in extreme at least that was the definition I'm used to perhaps the meaning has drifted).
People are comfortable with religious texts because they are bought up with them and know which pieces to ignore, just look at the moral panic around teenagers getting hold of a Qaran and going off to join ISIS after 9/11. Hell I find the prevalence and acceptance of genital mutilation encouraged by religious texts horrendous when I spend time considering it.
It's not a hardship to let parents decide whether kids should have access to this stuff. That being said what the tag does in context of the f-droid shop is not really helpful behavior. It's not what most people would expect for parental control and outside of countries where the texts may be proscribed it's not really helpful behavior to hide these apps.
> whether we want more people following the voice in their head to kill their son
Now, to be fair, the voice did walk that back once it was clear the guy was going to do it. It just needed to be reassured that it was special.
> r having vanilla sex, which is the definition of hardcore porn
Which is super weird definition of hardcore porn. No, a vanilla sex appearing in a book does not make it hard porn book.
> people following the voice in their head to kill their son, which is from the bible
A thing that appears in book and stories for kids. Including the ones the kids are taught about in school. And yes I have kids in school.
I always viewed it as It's more that it's distinct from softcore porn which if you look up is more nudity and maybe simulated sex acts vs actual explicit sex acts which was accepted as hardcore porn no matter how vanilla. I'm happy to concede the meaning may have drifted as access to explicit porn became more widespreasd and softcore porn lost cultural relevance but even in that case I expect a large chunk of parents would be happier with their kids thinking rough sex is fine rather than thinking self circumcision with a rock or following voices that tell them to kill is ok.
>A thing that appears in book and stories for kids
Sure but does it appear as a moral good thing to do? If it does is it because the voice in the head is telling them to kill evil doers rather than innocents? You can see why you'd want to have a discussion with your kids about it just like you'd hopefully have a discussion about what they may see in porn not being real/healthy for most relationships. This is obviously at age appropriate times, there's a good reason kids aren't being told about Sodom and Gomorrah in all it's detail in kindergarten, why cartoons of the story of the Ark don't focus on the babies drowning as mothers struggle to swim holding them above their heads before succumbing to exhaustion or the cold... only to continue to exist forever in eternal torment.
> Which is super weird definition of hardcore porn.
As far as I know, the definition of "hardcore porn" is and always has been explicit depiction of actual sexual activity (on edit: in a way intended to be sexually arousing to the reader/viewer). In pictures, that generally comes out to genitalia being shown in contact with genitalia or other body parts.
And that's how you do vanilla sex.
What is your super weird definition?
> No, a vanilla sex appearing in a book does not make it hard porn book.
"... and then they had sex" wouldn't. A relatively clinical or relatively expurgated sentence or two wouldn't.
> A thing that appears in book and stories for kids.
What particular book or story do you have in mind here, and exactly what does it say, and how does it present it? Because the Bible presents it as praiseworthy to be prepared to kill your son if you hear God tell you to do it, and gives what it claims is an actual, factual, historical example.
> Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn".
I'm sorry, but I find books that say straight out that I should be killed to be a bit on the offensive side. I'm funny that way.
What about religious content of pornographic nature?
Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
> Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases?
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
Discussion of the merge request to mark it as nsfw https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/27861 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252
Edit - found more context: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
I still don't get it to be honest.
If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps and ignored things like reddit when doing this I would say its just an honest mistake, but they only seemingly marked Bible related apps. In one instance the developers app isn't even an app that contains the Bible, its a Bible reading tracker so you can keep track of which verses you have read thus far, still marked NSFW. There was not enough thought put into this ban and it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
They seem to disagree https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/27861#...
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
Again though, one of the apps has NONE of the Bible content, it is only "I've read Genesis 1:1" type of stuff, it is to track what you've read...
As pointed out in the PR... there's violent games with NSFW descriptions that were not flagged.
The fact they're ignoring so much is what makes me think this has nothing to do with NSFW content removal.
A Penthouse reading tracker might get flagged NSFW too without much fanfare, even without any content from Penthouse.
It seems like the point of this comment is to concoct an example for which anyone agreeing with the parent comment would supposedly hold an inconsistent opinion. I'll insert my own consistency: neither should be flagged NSFW.
Would a Bible reading tracking app be ok for a kids section if F-Droid had one?
> If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps. ［...］ it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
> still marked NSFW
"NSFW" is just the name of the F-Droid Anti-Feature, which is quite broad than what "not safe for work" implies:
It should read "...as defined by the small clique of politically-identical F-Droid contributors with authority."
"authoritarian regimes"
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
majority of voting population
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslid...
[flagged]
I have been told that Magats tend to not be able to accept information that disputes their previously held beliefs.
Thank you for providing such a crystal clear demonstration of that.
This should have been the end of it.
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
F-Droid are in the FA stage of FAFO. If they don't reverse this, they will find themselves in the FO stage. Anyone can hold the opinion that "religion or its texts are ruinous" but you can never apply it in practice in a liberal democracy (even in secular states) simply because religious and expression rights are legally protected.
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
Or this could be the FO itself. Both the threshold for NSFW as well as anti-puritanism sentiment has crept up so high that it has reached "religion is a cancer" stage.
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
[dead]
One interesting quote I found in [1]:
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
As a French person the decision seems abhorrent to me. Atheists in France are also in the minority by most measures.
I mean, unless you work at an organisation that deals with a specific religion, I would say that they're all NSFW, as there's no reason to be using them at work, and they're bound to cause controvosy at some point.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.
If they insist on flagging things as NSFW then this would be the correct action for those apps that contain the texts. It seems like apps that are bible related and don't contain the text are being flagged though which should be fixed.
This is my issue with it as well, but also, why did the PR only target Bible apps? Seemingly in a very lazy way at that. Had they taken time to understand how each app works and its purpose, they would have only flagged apps that contain the Bible itself. I would hope reddit and other apps that actually contain graphic NSFW content are next?
The only merge request you've seen targets bible apps. How do you know this isn't one part of a larger effort to correctly mark apps? Maybe they've tackled other categories previously, or had intended to tackle other categories going forward. The fact that bible apps is included in one wave of markings doesn't mean only bible apps are affected.
Other examples were provided in the PR, I see no other PRs. Why was the PR only focused on them? I doubt we'll see additional PRs for other apps.
Totally agree. They should be flagged 18+ and required ID verification if we want to play on a level field.
How about "a small, strapped project that can use all the friends it can get shouldn't be wasting time on maintaining irrelevant metadata"?
Not having categories like "NSFW" would be a nice level playing field.
I’m not saying I agree with the rules, but we do have these categories requiring age verification now. They also seem to be arbitrarily applied.
I’m just advocating that violent texts like this should also be included rather than treated specially.
Wait, F-Droid is doing/going to do age verification?
Guess I have to find another app store. To use and to donate to. Stupid wars over what's NSFW are ignorable, but knuckling under to the AV gestapo isn't.
I’m not sure about f-droid specifically, but I know in the USA, 18+ content online is now required by law to have age verification in many states.
Very few of those laws apply to services that only have "incidental" content, especially if they're small, and for those that actually do apply, the right answer is to refuse to serve the affected states.
They would definitely have to blacklist the UK as well. And other places if I remember right.
Seems legit. These topics should not form any part of work or government. What you do in your own time is of course completely up to you, as with any other NSFW content.
The US Constitution's First Amendment protects religion from government. There is no amendment protecting porn or gratuitous violence. Marking the religious apps as NSFW may be a violation of the First Amendment and could potentially be challenged in court, to a potentially huge sum of money and F-Droid's potential detriment.
The First Amendment does not apply to fucking app stores. It applies to the government and only to the government. That does include the government leaning on people, but it does not include editorial or curation decisions made by totally private organizations.
If you tried to take your position to a court in the US, even now, you'd be treated as a frivolous litigant... which, to be clear, means being told to fuck off and not come back.
Please stop posting this kind of ignorance. It burns.
The Soviet Union had freedom of speech too. It's just that you didn't have freedom after the speech was the problem.
I honestly cannot figure out what you are trying to say here. I don't think you can either.
Nobody is throwing anybody in prison, nor threatening to.
One of the reasons the First Amendment applies only to the government is that, unlike an app store, it can throw people in prison.
My point is that the letter of the First Amendment and the spirit of the First Amendment are at odds when faced with modern day reality. Between government and corporations, and being fined, vs being put in prison, it's all up for debate. We can look at the letter of the First Amendment and twist and turn it to come to a definition that the courts can agree on, but stepping back from that, the bigger picture is the people are trying to speak and that this entity that isn't the government, is restricting that, with downstream effects. You're right that the First Amendment doesn't apply to app stores run by a private corporation. It's still a restriction on speech by a large organization against an individual, and the freedom of speech gives people the right to complain about it.
Generally speaking, only images/videos are NSFW-taggable.
The argument can be made than an app which displays religious imagery is not suitable for the workplace, but if it's just a reader with texts, then not.
If someone wants to spy over your shoulder to read text on your screen, and it doesn't jibe with their religion, that is their problem.
And, if that's where the goalposts lie, then atheistic texts could be offensive in such a way. I.e. a Mastodon post claiming "there is no god" should be marked NSFW and blurred out until you click something.
There is a world outside the USA where most of what you wrote doesn’t apply.
Here I think the labelling doesn’t really make sense but it never does anyway and pretty much means "this content is part of a corpus American think is objectionable and wouldn’t want to be seen with in public”.
I enjoy the controversy for putting in light the usual imperial blindness however.
Funny you should mention that because some draft of my comment did specify "North American workplace" but it got lost in some edit.
This seems reasonable. The content includes themes (death, rape, violence, etc) that are generally considered NSFW by most modern day rating agencies. Just because cultures have historically seeded the texts for a long period of time doesn't make them SFW. If ESRB/MPAA had to rate a modern reboot, I don't think it would get a T/PG-13.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
Would you agree the Wikipedia app should be marked NSFW? It also contains a whole lot of objectionable stuff, often with pictures.
It's only reasonable if reason is applied, rather than one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities. Unfortunately, there is zero logical consistency in what is marked NSFW and what isn't. That's the entire problem. F-Droid's authoritarian moral-policing crew are coming up with any flimsy justification for censorship applied inconsistently rather than taking an objective look at the issue. Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending, not collaborative and "Hmm, I can see how maybe this line of policing is inconsistent." This is how this kind of political-bias-pretending-to-be-objectivity tends to unfold with religious adherents, which these F-Droid contributors seem to be.
Open source and stepping in to be a morality judge really seems like a difficult line to take.
It's a bit jarring how obtuse a lot of people are in that thread, since two things can be true:
- Religious books are not for kids
- They aren't primarily written to be violent
Instead it's more like a Mexican stand off, whoever first tries to be reasonable gets shot.
The justification makes perfect sense.
What Bible reader wants that fact hidden? That is the opposite sentiment of everyone I've actually seen. That honestly makes it seem even more illogical.
If you are in islamists run area, you want that hidden. For safety.
It's not just Islamists, either. Any religion can become extremist and support all sorts of internationally illegal crimes.
Evangelism is a danger to kids, and unfit for the workplace too. We should not encourage young Americans to indoctrinate themselves with nonsense propaganda that encourages killing.
I feel like you didn't read the discussion at all? One of the apps does not contain any Bible verses, it is used to track which books, chapters and verses you've read.
Does it matter? F-Droid is a distributor, they're allowed to reject apps they consider controversial or outside their wheelhouse. The person who spoke up was correct, the ruling is consistent and the definition of NSFW content makes sense to me. Evangelism isn't exempted from being called and labelled as slopware.
These people can perfectly well distribute their apps without F-Droid's help, they're not refusing to sign their app or somesuch.
It is not consistent, is the reddit app going to be removed next? It makes no sense. What about violent FPS games?
Consistency would be that they in fact are removing everything that's NSFW.
The consistency is that the presence of a Reddit app or a Youtube app per se doesn't reveal too much about the device owner.
A Bible reader/tracker app, a Quran learning app... now that's where you enter a more sensitive area, religious beliefs are among the higher protected classes of data under GDPR.
And now there's a few potential threat sources: family members snooping through their relative's phones, border control snooping through phones (remember, apostasy is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries), or the worst one, random ad SDKs pulling in and distributing lists of installed APKs and pushing these to the mothership, where the data can then be hoovered up by anyone willing to pay for it, with the same result [1].
I wish I didn't need to write this, but it's not just some random Middle East theocracy going for its citizens as usual for the crime of not believing into the god of choice, we're seeing people being threatened for their faith (or lack of it) right in the United States of America, right now.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-da...
Would you like to link to the reddit app or a violent FPS game not flagged as NSFW on F-droid? I don't believe either of those actually exists.
And again, nothing was removed from the store here, only marked as NSFW.
Gloomy Dungeons 2 is mentioned in the discussion as an FPS without the NSFW tag:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/27861#...
The NSFW tag seems unevenly enforced, especially for an organization that is supposed to oppose censorship.
That looks like an oversight that could be addressed with a PR targeting that game.
No, there are plenty of other examples (just in games alone) to write off as a mere one-off oversight. It certainly seems targeted since they've targeted religious apps that don't even have any explicit content. For an app store that is supposed to advocate for freedom this is disturbing and very off-putting. The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.
> It certainly seems targeted since they've
Who is "they" here? The person who opened the PR? The person who wrote the NSFW definition? The moderators correcting the mistakes?
> The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.
It's not censorship, you can still install the apps to your phone. You just cannot promote them to impressionable audiences like children, or pretend it is appropriate conduct for something like the workplace. Your same logic could be used to argue that porn apps shouldn't be labelled as NSFW, or that gore and shock content is free expression.
F-Droid is not (and will never be) compelled to host the tools of evangelism. You don't need F-Droid's help to reach your audience. I'm a proud F-Droid user and defend their stance wholeheartedly.
> Would you like to link to the reddit app or a violent FPS game not flagged as NSFW on F-droid? I don't believe either of those actually exists.
...all of them? (AFAICT)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.btmura.android.reddit/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/au.com.wallaceit.reddinator/
Actually, let's do it the other way: Can you point to a single reddit app that is marked NSFW?
You went from "the justification makes sense" to "actually they can do whatever they want neener neener" real fast.
Time for an f-droid competitor? The UI is outdated anyways.
Outdated maybe, but still quite functional. What is your issue with it?
if people find the UI so bad, wouldnt it be easier to try to push an updated UI than getting all the infrastructure and everything going?
Which UI? f-droid has many frontends, with wildly varying design sensibilities and approaches.
To all the people being performatively upset by this, please clarify your position. Do you believe:
1. F-Droid and other software managers should not have special labels or handling for NSFW content.
2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
3. F-Droid should not consider religious texts to be NSFW even if they contain NSFW contents.
> 2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
Why pick out a tiny bit of Ezekiel when you have the entire book of Song of Solomon?
Anyways, I think the more interesting tension is: What tag or flag would apply to the Bible that does not apply to the Wikipedia app? I have literally used Wikipedia to look up sex positions, which it covers in detail and with pictures.
Yeah, like, there's straight-up photos of penises and vaginas and naked people of all sorts on Wikipedia. It absolutely should be considered a NSFW app.
Performative ignorance is much more annoying
My understanding of NSFW is that it means "not safe for work" and in the contexts I was in, bible was safe for work. I have yet to see an angry atheist demanding that bibles cant be seen on account of Ezekiel chapter 23 like content. As funny as gotcha of "bible contains stories about sexuality" is, back in real world, I have yet to meet someone who would equate it with erotics.
And yes, you can talk about books and movies in which comparable scenes appear in work too.
NSFW should mean something akin to Not Safe for Work lol. If you're going to use that tag at all, the tag should exist on pretty much anything that exists purely for entertainment value. I would argue that religious texts (as well as sexually explicit scientific articles) are not NSFW, but pretty much every game is.
If you're sitting around reading the Bible when you should be working, why should your boss treat that as better than sitting around playing a game when you should be working?
But originally "NSFW" was meant for stuff you might not want to do on your break. It is true that if you use that kind of definition, these particular apps aren't going to get you in trouble in most workplaces. The official F-Droid definition that people have been quoting is mostly like that too. But the popular definition of "NSFW" has drifted, so users will be confused... which is yet another reason that it's not a category an app repository should be trying to maintain.
Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work. It doesn't strike me as categorically NSFW, but I think you and I agree that that's the issue: the definition of the NSFW category. Going further, I think it's not possible to define in a way that makes everyone happy; it's not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content, so we should just omit it altogether and let people make up their own minds as to what is safe in their workplace.
> Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work.
Well, sure, if you're a priest/rabbi/pastor/imam/whatever (why isn't there a generic word for this?), you're going to consult religious texts for work.
And if you're a game critic, you'll play games for work.
And if you work at Pornhub, you'll presumably watch porn for work.
Normal jobs don't involve any of them. Presumably we're talking about the norm.
> not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content
I will not take the easy bait. I will not take the easy bait. I will not take the easy bait...
> Normal jobs don't involve any of them. Presumably we're talking about the norm.
Agreed. It's context dependent. I don't like the term NSFW because I find it non-specific and subjective. F-Droid's definition seems to be the widely accepted definition which doesn't appear to include religious texts, or games, but does include porn, graphic violence, etc.
> I will not take the easy bait.
;). Presumably because you caught my gist that even commonly used, less ambiguous options are still inadequate.
F-Droid "Anti-Feature flags" are not block lists. They are for users to filter content. The content is still available.
>> When reviewing apps to accept, F-Droid takes the user’s point of view, first and foremost. We start with strict acceptance criteria based on the principles of free software and user control. There are some things about an app that might not block it from inclusion, but many users might not want to accept them. For these kinds of things, F-Droid has a defined set of Anti-Features. Apps can then be marked with these Anti-Features so users can clearly choose whether the app is still acceptable.
>> Anti-Features are organized into “flags” that packagers can use to mark apps, warning of possibly undesirable behaviour from the user’s perspective, often serving the interest of the developer or a third party. Free software packages do not exist in a bubble. For one piece of software to be useful, it usually has to integrate with some other software. Therefore, users that want free software also want to know if an app depends on or promotes any proprietary software. Sometimes, there are concepts in Anti-Features that overlap with tactics used by third parties against users. F-Droid always marks Anti-Features from the user’s point of view. For example, NSFW might be construed as similar to a censor’s blocklists, but in our case, the focus is on the user’s context and keeping the user in control.
Emphasis mine.
F-Droid is no longer accepting "NSFW" apps (as they dubiously define them) and will eventually remove them from the repo. This tag is only a stopgap until they figure out how to move them out of the F-Droid repo.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252
Was not aware of this and it does put the flagging in a different light.
Honestly, that feels like someone doing malicious compliance to jam up the nsfw ban. Of course by most standards that include written content the bible, quran etc. (and plenty of popular media series like a song of ice and fire) are nsfw, but the people pushing for age restriction/nsfw bans would usually strongly feel "except those ones" and by applying the label you force them to either explain or codify the double standard.
Oh that's disappointing. I have no issue with them flagging bible apps (it's just a flag and I welcome the ability to filter) but I do think nsfw content does belong in an open app ecosystem under the appropriate flagging. Including religion for those who subscribe to that.
This hides those apps from the search unless that user enables the NSFW filter. When seen through that lens, I can’t imagine the overlap of users who are searching for a Bible app and who also want to show NSFW apps with them. When seen through that lens, it doesn’t seem like this is a user-friendly decision or one that is taking the user in control or taking their context into account.
Clearly someone 'wants to do something controversial'.
Pathetic. Carte blanc on anything using the word Bible is a telltale sign. A 'I've read these verses' tracker also banned, having contained none of what they object to. Violent video game descriptions not banned. Do it right or don't do it. It's simple.
* "New Oklahoma schools superintendent rescinds mandate for Bible instruction in schools": https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-su... (apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-superintendent-630b2f706731224a070d7fef6a35b7d8)
* "Want the Bible in public school classrooms? There's an app for that": https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman... (www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman-wants-ryan-walters-to-considering-a-free-bible-app-instead-of-spending-millions-on-athe/75570802007/); https://archive.ph/14iDg
NSFW meaning "content that you may not want to view in public", is the Bible or Quran really that?
That's not what NSFW means in this context.
> The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter.
No, he was exactly right. That says "may" because it's just a comment, not F-Droid's actual definition, which you cut out:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#nsfw
That is clearly not applicable to the vast majority of these apps' users as evidenced by their outrage.
Have you read it? Yes they are
Yes, I have read it, as have billions of others, and we don't agree with you. Your personal political sensibilities are not shared by all. For what it's worth I wouldn't flag any of your chosen religious texts either no matter what they were.
Do you read Ezekiel chapter 23 at work and to your family?
As a 12‐year‐old I encountered this passage during my first complete read of the Bible and wasn’t bothered by it. It’s a colorful metaphor that uses sexual promiscuity to symbolize Israel’s religious impiety, a common theme that occurs elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., Hosea whose commitment to his unfaithful wife was used as a symbol for the love of God to an unfaithful Israel). These are basic theological ideas that were not hidden from me at church even at that age.
I encountered actual prurient material on the shelves of the school library, and heard far worse obscenity in the locker room during gym class. The most erotic stuff in the Bible, Song of Songs, is quaint by the standards of a century ago, let alone today.
If F‐Droid is trying to drum up opposition to the UK’s extreme suppression of pornography, they've muddled it. They could have defied the unjust restrictions, or they could have leaned into it and marked Wikipedia apps, Reddit apps, Mastodon apps, and Project Gutenberg apps the same way.
That they did neither indicates that they have chosen to specifically target religious content, and not just by marking it. F-Droid developers openly state (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026) that (1) new NSFW apps will not be added, and (2) existing NSFW apps will be removed.
It's bad on principle: F-Droid is akin to a distribution package repo, and should not prohibit apps based solely on ideology (nor should Debian, Gentoo, BSD ports…); and it's also impractical: given the looming threat of government suppression of app stores, F‐Droid (already an underdog) should not be driving away supporters by taking up anti‐religious ideology.
I wish I loved anything as much as atheists love gotchas
It's easy and fun, especially since so many defenders of the Bible show themselves to be unfamiliar with its contents.
Also, maybe don't assume I'm an atheist just because I pointed out some of the Bible's NSFW contents in a discussion about the Bible being NSFW.
unless I am misunderstanding, this would allow you to hide the app from sharing settings, so that others don't see you are e.g. reading the quran (where otherwise they may have not known) and has nothing to do with whether or not you have a job where you e.g. work.
It also hides these apps from the search by default unless you enable the NSFW filter.
Right, I wonder what else is under NSFW. Are they really forcing users to enable NSFW which includes actual smut, in order to get a bible app? This is malicious.
Because they are?
It is like red states in USA few years ago banning NSFW books from schools only to find out that Bible is NSFW too by every today metric.
Why would it be surprising for them? I guess the never read the book they are preaching.
Before the topic is ironically flagged, I guess it is time to have "the talk".
Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.
The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.
Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.
Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.
Totally agreed. Anecdotal, but actually reading the Bible, linear + cover to cover, was one of biggest reasons I became an atheist.
The bible is a long introduction to the punchline, that the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone, and that it wants everyone to be like that.
> is like pushing a camel through a needle hole
I see what you did there...
> the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone
Well, after personally destroying some cities, cursing an entire civilization with plagues including the death of their firstborn, and ordering the "chosen people" to take over some land by slaughtering everybody living there. And the "getting killed" part didn't remove the threat of eternal fire for anybody who doesn't go along with the program. That's the big stuff I remember off the top of my head.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
> the threat of eternal fire
Btw., the purificatorium is actually a bath (in Latin) and it's not eternal. Also Jesus isn't talking much about that.
> You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
Yes. But it's still introduction and references for the punchline.
> "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels". -- Matthew 25:41
That's supposed to be a quote from Jesus, personally. In fact he's talking about himself saying that in the future. See that word "everlasting"? Other translations use "eternal".
It's permanent Hell. It's really, really clear. He doesn't have to talk much about it, because he's made the point.
[Edited to fix the chapter and verse]
Yes, I don't disagree with you here.
In my opinion this doesn't describe anything happening in this world, so it is not relevant, whether to label it NSFW, and it isn't encouraging you to be violent in this world.
subjecting people to eternal punishment for a fleeting crime and dehumanising some people is okay?
The entity is not part of this world and is not affected by what information we distribute, so how would that matter? What dehumanising?
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I mean, yes, these are religious texts, but if we are to judge them on a level with other content, they absolutely warrant a warning.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
Exempting religious content makes no sense in any context to me. It's all human generated content.
Apart from anything else, the Song of Solomon (which I actually like!) or Ezekiel 23:20 would probably trigger some kind of automated detection system. Not to mention the legitimately horrible parts like Deuteronomy 22:23.
From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
> Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
>> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
Like wikipedia?
Any world history source, such as Wikipedia, yes. (If that’s not the reason you brought it up, I only saw your first two words in the discussion; perhaps your reply was truncated unexpectedly?)
This definitely ties into a weakness in the U.S. speech laws — we rarely view obscenity as relevant to non-erotic topics, so our social edifices are ill-equipped at considering this topic at all: by social assumption, a non-erotic text such as the old testament bible is unconsciously assumed exempt from obscenity concerns even though it is blatantly NSFW. (I can’t speak to how other countries handle this topic.)
wikipedia provides a factual description of those, bible shows it as actions of a perfect god
If you see this as the innocent equivalent of a “content warning,” then I would expect more apps to be flagged. The commenters in that thread point out numerous apps or games that are obviously built around content that is not appropriate for children.
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
Again, distinguishing "advocacy" as your criteria for censorship is censoring on interpretation. I know you are sincere in your opinions about this, they won't change, and I even share them.
They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.
But it does, and explicitly - it isn’t a matter of interpretation. Repeatedly god commands his followers to slaughter men, women, children, and even the animals of their foes. Repeatedly god tells his followers to enslave people, and that it’s fine to treat them abysmally as long as it’s not so bad that they die.
This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.
Not all facts are subjective.
"The bible is not a matter of interpretation" is literally, literally how you end up in religious wars. Seriously?
"I want to kill people and eat their firstborns", what interpretations can you come up for me?
First, I'm an atheist. I'm on your side.
But as a practical matter, I'll point out that trying to ban the interpretation held by the three billion or whatever practicing christians on the planet is a better way to end up as a sacrifice on that altar than to improve the world.
Look, this whole idea is dumb. No, F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of denying religion to make a bunch of intemperate nerds like us happy. Are we really having this fight?
The reality of what is in the bible is not, no. It is written, in black and white. Yes you could argue about gnostic gospels and shit but what people accept to be the Bible has been a static set of texts for centuries now.
Now, anyway, you need to stop talking smack about my mother, and I disliked the death threat you made just there, and I don’t need to know about what you do with fish in the bedroom.
There is no reasonable reading of the bible which fits your narrative.
Insufferable r/atheism-tier behavior. I'm glad I don't rely on F-Droid for anything critical.
Exactly, but if you say that you'll just be accused of yourself being a biased bigot, conveniently distracting from the original reason the discussion started at all! These psychological tactics don't work on people anymore.
So we should expect them to NSFW all manga/anime reading/browsing apps. Clearly many hypersexualise women, possibly minors, normalize sexual abuse, violence, both text and visuals
Probably all social client apps for their addictive characteristics, and unhealthy polarizing content, and generally mental health degrading. Including Facebook, Reddit, fediverse...
Let's be real no one is going to read the bible by accident. It is much easier for a young person to find explicit content in Lemmy/fediverse apps
What is the funniest is that this is the action of a social justice warrior on a crusade, exhibiting the exact same behaviour he purports to be against.
Consistency? How do you propose allowing smut and violence from some religions without allowing it from others? If there are existing rules, they should be applied consistently.
And after exhibiting said behavior, when you doth protest, they will call you the bigot (eventually).
Oh well. To be honest I was pretty disappointed that Google was going after them, but the writing seems to be on the wall. With behavior like this, I do not even want to use their software at all.
Android has been going more and more to shit anyways. The best part was always that you could escape Google, but that option seems to be closing down.
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Don't take HN threads into religious flamewar please. Last thing we need here.
I honestly meant this in a "no religion in the office" sense, but people started responding with bible quotes.
I believe you that you didn't mean it as a generic religious flamestarter, but in that case your intent didn't come across in the comment. So it's predictable that people responded with flaming reactions of their own.
This may be helpful for avoiding this sort of outcome in the future: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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So... what's the big deal? Putting aside the various arguments whether religious texts should be marked as such, the wording of this policy, etc, etc... literally what difference does it make that these apps now have this flag? Do people think users will see this flag and be like, "Oh dear me I had no idea the Bible was NSFW; won't be reading that now!"?
Just confused about the outrage.
You have to enable a setting to see apps marked with that anti-feature when searching
Freedom of religion is a fundamental right.
Tagging a religious book or a reader of such as "NSFW" means, declaring it as "not normal".
Declaring something, which is a fundamental right, as not normal, is discrimination.
But religions are only normal once they have numbers, theres no judgement on the content. These cults just have to survive and thrive long enough to become normalised.
You can see everything as a cult. Science, with its cultic belief that everything is a particle also just survived long enough to become normal. The question is, are members of one cult wise enough to accept other cults, or are they so insecure that they have to tag them with "NSFW"?
Religion is not normal and I don't want it, so well done.
I know it’s not the stated reason for the flag, but maybe it’s ok to see a little bias towards atheism here and there.
"It's ok when it is my bias" doesn't make it ok.
As much antipathy as I have for religion, I disagree wholeheartedly. Bias in any form just enables rationalizing a counter-bias. And frankly, the folks who do exactly that sort of counter-bias today are very good at it. We should be careful about giving them more ammo, this tit-for-tat is tearing us apart.
I understand what you're saying but just like "absolute freedom of speech", the ratchet only works one direction. In fact you identified it as really good counter bias. It's analogous to Overton Window always opening to the right.
You've hit on a good point, but I don't know what to do about it.
So true. There are entire libraries that only include books that have been made illegal by various states across the world. People are naturally attracted to taboos and this will only draw more attention to the bible.
Amen, brother