Let me be clear, I support Tusky and other apps refusing to connect to Gab, and I think one of the best parts of the Fediverse is the potential for better moderation from accountable admins on your local instance. Free speech doesn’t mean that everyone has to give Nazis a platform, any more than it means that we need to let spammers spread phishing schemes. Hate speech drives out speech from the oppressed, and letting nazis spread unchecked makes it harder for anyone else to communicate, just as spam makes it hard to find real conversations. Alternately, I could compare it to ad-blocking and how it’s necessary to make the Web usable.

That is different from an app store banning every app whose moderation policies they dislike. This reminds me of when Tumblr had trouble keeping its app in app stores because of the porn on the platform, and Tumblr responded by banning porn and destroying an entire subculture, along with its own popularity. This is more like removing an open source email app from the app store because its spam filters aren’t as good as Google’s.

It’s also different if a monopolistic app store with almost complete control over a platform bans an app vs., say, F-droid banning an app. F-droid trivially supports adding your own repositories or sharing apps in person. Monopoly power and lock-in render even reasonable moderation policies very troubling, because there is no recourse if the monopolist gets it wrong.