You say open source, but you link to the Open Source Initiative. The OSI has their own standards and ideas of what open source is, they call their standard the Open Source Definition. And as I said, such discussion restrictions would make sense on an OSI/OSD community, but that is not an OSI/OSD community. And it is not THE definition of open source, which is a vague undefined term which simply refers to source that is available and possibly modifiable. This is how dictionaries, wikipedia, etc define it. It's very broad. There are a million "open source" licenses that don't fall within the OSI guidelines, which means there are many many different ideas of what open source means. It's the whole point of contention in the Free Software / Open Source debate that has been going on for decades.

The FSF has a list of licenses, but they specifically label the non-free ones and state they shouldn’t be called free software.

That's why I made the example. Because they have defined their idea of the terms Free Software and Non-Free. But they don't not call it open source. You can even see it in this post:

First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately.

Even they don't refuse to call it open source. They simply say the restrictions of the "open source license" don't meet their personal criteria for Free Software (which they define). Just like how OSI can say some open source license doesn't meet their criteria for their Open Source Definition. They simply list licenses that "comply with the Open Source Definition", so even they acknowledge not all "open source" licenses meet their criteria. (which, by the way, has to go through their review process to comply with and be listed under the Open Source Definition... so you could write a license that meets all their criteria, but it not be considered complying with the OSD because it didn't go through their review process - does that mean it's not open source?)

The OSD is different from open source. As I said, these restrictions would make sense in an OSI or OSD community, but it's an open source community. The sidebar says "Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology". If they want a more restrictive discussion they should use an OSD/OSI community, or strictly limit the rules to the OSD definition (which is silly).

When an admin/mod says:

i totally agree that it is often preferable to allow misinformed comments to remain so that they can be refuted.

in the case of futo, though, i feel like there are often actually some bad-faith actors who just want to keep the discussion going...

And then just goes around deleting whatever posts they want (which don't violate any of the rules) on a hunch, that's just conspiracy and paranoia. And an abuse of power.

Personally, I'm far on the FSF side of software ideology. But even I'd be happy for people to use a slightly restrictive open source program if the other option is a proprietary, closed source, Google cloud reporting program. I'd be happy if people used source-available "open source" over that. I'd be happier the more copyleft it got. But I wouldn't run around deleting every comment that doesn't meet my FSF preference of open source. People have different needs and ideas. If one keyboard has the features people need and is more free, private, but has some restrictions on its open source license, and you remove that option/discussion, they will just stick with Google keyboard. It's harmful. It could be their gateway to something better, an eventual change in philosophy. But by removing the option and discussion, you lessen those chances. You shrink the community, discussion, and the movement toward more freedom.

I think this would make sense in a Lemmy community that was OpenSourceInitiative who has a very specific set definition. But Open Source as a general idea is fairly open to interpretation. Some people think source-available is open source. I disagree, but that's just my personal opinion. Now if something was closed source, that's a very clear distinction.

I've seen communities die out over mods enforcing their personal definitions. The Linux subreddit and Lemmy Linux community had issues with this a few years ago where the mod was deleting comments of people talking about what fell outside of their idea that Linux discussion should be FLOSS-only (people discussing closed source apps that ran on Linux, etc).

I think deleting does more harm than good. It's better for people to discuss when things are a problem so they can understand them better. The Free Software Foundation is way more strict as to their licensing ideas, but even they still discuss and have a page full of alternative licenses where they discuss some are better than others (and even a bad open source license is better than a non-open source license). They don't ban the mention of conflicting ideas.

Deleting just leaves people confused (and in my case I would have appreciated knowing the issue instead of just seeing a thread full of deleted comments and remaining ignorant). And it does a greater harm because people casually searching on search engines or whatever won't find any sort of discussion or push back.

Earth is like a giant nut.

A lot of web software does this (Github and Gmail for example). I like it but always thought it could be abused.

Stealth is another really nice Android client that is account-free for those who don't want an account or to login but still want to subscribe and save posts locally.