Where is the sign up button?

vdbhb59:

not everyone can pay

Anyone can afford a one-off entry free of 1€/$/GBP/INR, or how can they afford a digital device and net access? Anyone who can’t afford that doesn’t have the luxury of spending time in web forums, they’re too busy figuring out where to sleep and what to eat. I know this, because I was in this situation for a big chunk of 2020.

vdbhb59:

not everyone has international cards

This is a good point, which connects to another one; most existing forms of digital payment require identifying oneself to the payee. As @Leonardo says, it would be anti-privacy to make people doxx themselves in the process of paying a nominal fee. This is the strongest argument against the ‘cover charge’ proposal. I would only support it if there was at least one confirmed way to easily pay while remaining anonymous.

Leonardo:

I .. suggested Bitcoin … because it … can be used to make private payments.

I’m not sure that’s true, unless other anonymising tools are added on top of the BitCoin ledger. For example, AFAIK GNU Taler can be used with crypto-tokens as well as fiat currencies (eg €/$/GBP/INR). So in theory, if F-Droid set up a Taler storefront to charge a one-off fee to join this forum, it could be paid using BitCoin, but also any other token people happened to have.

Full disclosure : I’ve never had the opportunity to test this, so I could be misunderstanding what I’ve read about how Taler works.

vdbhb59:

to speak in a forum, if one has to pay, even if say 1€/$/GBP/INR takes away the essence of free speech.

True. But the proposal is not for F-Droid to charge people to speak here, but to ask us for a nominal ‘cover charge’ to get in the door the first time. Ensuring either;

• we intend to contribute usefully

OR

• we have to put money towards the expenses of F-Droid for every opportunity to be nuisance here, with trolling spam, bots nonsense, etc, before the mods swing the banhammer

Once we’re in we can speak freely, at any time, at no charge.

As @Leonardo says;

Leonardo:

Compared to the current state, where new user’s can’t signup and therefore have 0 free speech (on this Forum) it would be a great improvement

I think this is an idea worth exploring, because it solves 2 problems at once (reducing forum abuse, getting people using F-Droid to help fund F-Droid).