This is an unfortunate misunderstanding that I try to do my best to fight back against - but the people I'm talking about in this community are well aware they're in a free software community and disregard that fact because they personally don't care about software freedom. Which is their right, of course - but it's disrespectful for them to come into our spaces and push that.
Some of them are prominent members of privacy communities who come into here with a personal vendetta against imagined "FOSS zealots" so they become "anti-FOSS zealots" in our own spaces. Unfortunately I've seen this behavior from self-described privacy enthusiasts so often that I've started to automatically distrust said people.
If you want software that gives you the four freedoms (to use, share, modify, and share modified copies) then blocking network access is orthogonal to that.
The free software movement is often misunderstood as being about privacy or internet access but it's really about control over your computing, being able to make your computer do what you want, and sharing your improvements with the community.
Although, the FUTO app itself is already proprietary and the Heliboard uses a proprietary blob for swipe typing.
Note that there is not a requirement that they make their source code public, only that they provide source code to users who have received binaries. This means if this app is GPL licensed you can buy it and make a written request for the source code, and they are required by the GPL to provide it.
There is also not a requirement that the binary made available gratis. "Free" in free software or FOSS is about freedom, not price. This is a common misunderstanding of both terms.
"purple-discord" is the only free software Discord client I know about. It is a plugin for Pidgin and other libpurple based messengers such as Bitlbee.
"rdircd" the "reliable Discord client IRC daemon" might be an alternative but I've never used it.
Neither of these run out of the box on mobile but you can run them on a server you control, or maybe you could run them under Termux (have never tried this).
You can also use a Matrix or IRC bridge if you control the Discord "server."
I don't count client mods or web wrappers as they are fundamentally coupled to the proprietary client.
No one in this community cares about open source. It's been overrun by privacy redditors, some of whom seem to have a personal mission to campaign against the free software movement. There's a constant deluge of "it's not foss but it's private/not google" apologia in almost every thread here.
I suspect the community being unmoderated is part of the problem.
I do not believe privacy guides is a friend to the free software movement. I have criticized them (and adjacent projects in the privacy space) for this in the past, but I'll just try to summarize briefly why I believe so currently.
Their criteria prioritizes security over freedom and allows for recommending proprietary software if it has been sufficiently audited. They recommend at least two proprietary applications (a password manager and an email client) at the moment but I'm sure they've recommended others before.
They have made it part of their mission to debunk the misconception that free software is more secure than proprietary software. While this is indeed a common misconception, it is always associated with another misconception - that the purpose of the free software movement is to provide security and privacy. The free software movement has never promised security, only freedom. This message is unfortunately a casualty of the conflation of the free software and privacy communities.
They are complicit in spreading security FUD about F-Droid. Because it's common to conflate the free software movement and the privacy community in so many "FOSS" or "open source" spaces, this means any time Android or F-Droid is even mentioned you immediately get hordes of people recommending Obtainium or posting that well-known FUD article, with only someone like me even willing to push back.
To their credit, I do not believe they are evil, malicious, corrupt, sold-out, or even wrong a lot of the time. I just don't think they're aligned with this particular movement. In essence my complaint is that they prioritize security over freedom, to the degree they even mention freedom at all (it gets a brief mention in their GNU/Linux recommendation list I think) they make sure to remind us that proprietary software can be as good or better.
In a wider view, the fact that people conflate these two communities isn't really privacy guides' fault, so I can't really blame them alone for it.
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Privacyguides should always get a mention when talking about recommendations
I disagree - privacy guides isn't a software freedom organization and the privacy community is not the free software community (although there is significant overlap). Conflating the two harms both.
I'll offer a counterpoint to all the Obtainium fans here: F-Droid is good and "middlemen" aren't always pointless.
F-Droid enforces their own inclusion standards on every app they build. This mainly ensures that all apps are built from source and are 100% free (libre) software. When you "go outside the middleman" and "go directly to the source" you lose that assurance.
I don't think it's worth it for slightly faster updates. I enjoy knowing that I have the four freedoms with every app I install.
Strictly speaking if you can control what the proprietary application has access to and what data leaves it, you can make it respect your privacy. This doesn't make the proprietary application equivalent to true Free Software, which respects your freedom to use, share, modify, and share modified copies, but it does reduce the harm that the proprietary application can do to you.
You could say that the privacy community is about restricting what bad actors do, whereas the free software community is about good actors making tools that serve their users. The two concerns are confused so often, I see people come into free software communities suggesting that a firewall is a substitute to software freedom. Maybe that's why I came off as a little harsh there. If you want to learn more I would suggest reading the philosophy of the GNU project.
The reason why people say free software is privacy respecting is because it usually doesn't do all those harmful things that you need a firewall to block. If it did, the community can create a version that does not.
This is the open source community, not the privacy community. Privacy isn't the only reason to prefer free software. Some of us enjoy having the four freedoms.
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding that I try to do my best to fight back against - but the people I'm talking about in this community are well aware they're in a free software community and disregard that fact because they personally don't care about software freedom. Which is their right, of course - but it's disrespectful for them to come into our spaces and push that.
Some of them are prominent members of privacy communities who come into here with a personal vendetta against imagined "FOSS zealots" so they become "anti-FOSS zealots" in our own spaces. Unfortunately I've seen this behavior from self-described privacy enthusiasts so often that I've started to automatically distrust said people.