It would be nice if everyone had a list of their preferred apps we could all see. Maybe Obtainium will develop that someday. Get the list from somebody you trust, no just one entity.
Discussion
It's not just opinionated lists, fdroid also makes their own builds and lead the effort in attesting build reproducibility (together with debian and archlinux).
I don't see how can that be done with less centralizacion.
And they are good in that. But, like you said, it's centralized. I am not debating they provide a good service to the community. But it is a platform that drives centralization on them. I wish they simply didn't have a master catalog of anything. Users would be forced to find other lists of apps to trust.
So your beef with them is that they provide a client that defaults to just their repo? That's fair
Yep, their defense of open source is awesome. But they do that by attaching the catalog to themselves, in a personal basis.
If you prioritize open source, they are your people. You want decentralization, they are on the opposing corner. Open source tech is not necessarily decentralizing tech.
And I smell pleasure in power from miles away.
Tbh their client is not even the best one. Droidify is much cleaner and actually defaults to the fdroid repo + izzyondroid.
I get your point but at the same time, if it's fully FOSS it's hard to stay centralized as there's always pressure for competing forks or clones (as was the case with the app client and repo).