Well, their comment doesn't necessarily indicate if any of their projects would be affected, but rather that this change generally undermines their trust in SourceHut. I'm sorry to hear that this is the case.
Even if any of their projects (or the projects of anybody who's reading these comments) are affected, this is a sign of things to come - kicking projects out for political reasons and moving to the EU means that one never knows what may come next.
In a sense, you're correct: this is a political position. But hell, so is everything else, including doing nothing, which is a political position in support of the status quo. We have always prohibited malware and bigoted comments, for example, which is a political stance in the same sense. However, I think that we have justified the stance on cryptocurrency pretty well with objectivity rather than opinion, which to my sensibilities is the key distinction between "political" and "non-political" opinions to the layman, in so far as such a distinction can even exist.
But kicking out projects and kicking out people is not the same thing. We will not ban anyone who expresses support for cryptocurrency -- they can host any of their projects which are not cryptocurrency related and participate in the rest of the platform as always.
I would instead say that doing nothing is a political position in support of individual autonomy: users working on cryptocurrency projects if they think that's best, or working against cryptocurrency projects if they think that's best.
It sound like a business decision more than anything, although they do give some ethical rational my guess is that these projects are a legal liability and abusing the platform.
> The scope of this is intended to cover incidents where users harass other users or make bigoted, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, comments on our platform.
You say "harass other users OR make bigoted...etc, comments on our platform."
The fact that you said "or" means that you intend to kick users off who make comments that you judge to be that, even if it's not harassment. Doing so is admitting that you will ban people purely for political differences on those topics.
"Certain [gender|sexual|racial|etc] identities are not valid" is a political opinion held by those to whom I am quite comfortable telling, as the official policy of SourceHut, to go fuck themselves.
Just to be clear though: are you kicking them off, or telling them to go fuck themselves? Because your comment above indicates that you wouldn't kick people off for simply having different political opinions.
You most certainly are kicking people out for political choices. You gobbled up all the FUD and posted it on your ToS:
> These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment.
I honestly mean no offence but you are most definitely making choices for your users from a place that demonstrates lack of understanding.
Fiat currencies are the #1 tool criminals and corporations have used for ages to ruin the world and I don't see SourceHut banning projects using those (that would be ridiculous) but instead choose to ban a set of technologies that a minute percentage of the population uses like that's going to make any meaningful change.
Drew, fiat currencies are debased at the rate the old man chooses making everyone poorer and less well off every single day through inflation and that is what you choose to perpetuate.
The people will continue to innovate with or without Source Hut.
> These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found...
While presumably you're not kicking people out because they disagree with you on this political question, your motivation for kicking them out is deeply political. You're practicing a "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" approach to cryptocurrency projects, based on a flawed analysis of how those projects affect the structure of the global economic system — an analysis also reflected in your lack of understanding of how dramatically "piracy," largely funded through Bitcoin, has reduced barriers to access to knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33404025.
If you want to understand how cryptocurrencies affect people suffering from economic hardship and global wealth inequality, read my post from last year on the topic, based on direct personal experience, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.
The distinction you're drawing between being in favor of cryptocurrency and publishing code that implements cryptocurrency seems to suggest that you don't believe code is speech, because its distribution should be limited in ways that other kinds of speech are not. In turn, people who believe code is speech should be wary of using your service.
More generally, I don't think people who are setting up a software project to do good for the world should have to worry about the level of geopolitical savvy of their project hosting service. If the project hosting service misunderstands some aspect of development economics — maybe they're in favor of import-substitution industrialization or organic farming, and the project is instead supporting export-focused industrialization or industrial fertilizer production — its users shouldn't get their namespace revoked and perhaps then taken over by their political opposition. Not even if they're wrong.
It's a political fact that rich people in Holland only hear about Indonesian Nike factory conditions when they are terrible; they are consequently not in a good position to judge the balance of harms and benefits. Certainly the factory workers are being "taken advantage of" in a way which is possible because they are "suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality" — but in fact export-focused industrialization has lifted billions of people out of poverty in the last three decades despite the harms it has caused, harms measured in lost eyes and hands rather than just money. (The case against organic farming is much less clear — but still something that should be resolved by the people involved, not overseas infrastructure providers acting on a incomplete understanding founded in political agitprop.)
"fazfq" accused SourceHut of "kicking projects out for political reasons". Drew rebutted, "We do not kick people out for political differences." (Emphasis mine.) I was pointing out that these can both be true, the former is clearly true, the latter does not imply the negation of the former, and the former can still be bad even though it doesn't imply the latter.
Kicking projects out for political reasons can still be bad even if Drew is right that crypto is bad. BDS can still be bad even if settlements in the West Bank are also bad. Al-Qaeda can still be bad even if US foreign policy is also bad.
