IMHO the freedom arises out of knowing that the software is harmful and thus choosing to avoid it. assuming you'll get more freedom by progressively giving others control over your computing and thus over you is as foolish as assuming that selling at a loss will earn you profits out of volume.

the path to freedom, individual and collective, is to inform users so that they understand that others are trying to control them through the software they use, that the more they give up their freedom the harder it is to recover it and the easier it is for others to gain further control over their lives, and to avoid reinforcing the constant push that exploiters impose on users to go along the path that is most advantageous to them (the exploiters, not the users). only then, when these harmful pushes are canceled out, they (the users) can choose freely. before that, it's an illusion of choice, too distorted by harmful influences to be free.

but yeah, you're free to harm yourself by poor software choices, and nobody's telling you otherwise. informing you that, by doing certain foolish things, you're sacrificing your freedom does not amount to stopping you from harming yourself; not handing you the manuals or the programs that you could use to harm yourself, that we don't even have ourselves, doesn't either. we just know that self harm won't help you in the long run, and that exploiters take advantage of short-term thinking to progressively increase their control over their victims, so we warn against that and don't help you with that. but ultimately it's your choice, and if you're determined to pursue self-harm and hand others control over your life, we can't stop you: we have no power over you.

however, if you try to spread ideas of self-harm to others, we will try to counter that by attempting to inform and to influence them just the same. it's not like it's your spreading of these ideas that requires us to act: there are more than enough pushers of user-harmful software out there already, so we've got plenty of work to do already. but it would be definitely nicer if, instead of making our job hardware, you'd help us by inviting users gently to climb the freedom ladder at their own pace instead of teaching them to disparage us, to conform and to be controlled like most everyone else.

CC: @menherahair@eientei.org @phnt@fluffytail.org @Suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com @Cyrillic@lab.nyanide.com @SuperDicq@minidisc.tokyo