This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users.
A week ago Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. This wasn’t very well received (about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements). The comments on that post were turned off, presumably to avoid backlash.
Before that, announcements about the instance used to be posted to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world. This time, the information was posted on the Discord server instead.
I don’t agree with this. Having to use a proprietary platform to participate in an open-source one goes against the very purpose for me, especially when the new solution isn’t really an improvement (as before the information about the platform was closer to it).
Edit: Corrected the announcements community name.
Update: Lemmy.world finally released an announcement and promised they would inform about similar actions and gather feedback in advance in future.
I agree 100%. If they are going to make an announcement about lemmy.world, they need to do it on lemmy.world. We’re not all on the Discord. I, for one, don’t want to be.
Discord is not something that is easily indexable or linkable. Which means you have to rely on other people if you aren’t part of it. This is a huge issue as anything can be faked
They absolutely should make announcements here, but I think it’s a matter of people attacking them all of the time. We have to give them a lot of credit for handling so many ddos attacks, someone really doesn’t want this place to exist. Imo, let’s give them a chance to talk about it and not make this a bigger deal than it is. This is a volunteer site and instance, not a billion dollar company so go easy.
Its so weird how aggressive people are against lemmy. People don’t want this entire platform to exist, not just lemmy.world. Like lemmynsfw has had people try to suspend pretty much all their payment processors and hosts repeatedly
I 100% agree. My conspiracy theory is that it isn’t reddit or the dude who was upset they banned him, but the people who paid reddit to handle narratives. Lemmy is breaking the PR system. Politics, technology, and also other big communities are taking off and that’s a no go. I could be wrong though, it could be one of the first two or a combo of all three.
I think you underestimate just how bored people can be and how just innately some people are driven to just start shit for seemingly no reason. If there’s a good thing and a new idea to spring up, there’s always at least one person to try and wreck it for everyone.
Granted though, if Reddit is paying someone to basically cause chaos here in some way it’s honestly kind of appreciated. Thank you kind strangers for stress testing the platform and making it more robust and encouraging other instance admins to coordinate with one another.
You may be right but I think you might be underestimating how much a threat Lemmy is to a lot of huge companies. Journalists and/or people who work for politicians would get a lot of info and spread info at reddit. I’m sure technology has people like that too.
Oh no, I do think it’s a huge threat. The fediverse in its entirety is horrifying to so many large companies. That’s why facebook is desperate to try and step into the fediverse and is getting more and more pissed off as people are going “nuh uh!”
Mastodon is good, but lemmy does have the most potential out of most fediverse projects to become truly really really big if done right. It’s like activitypub was made for this kind of platform. Having to just pull entire communities rather than specific users is a big step up from mastodon and reduces the complexity that bars a lot of people from joining mastodon
I don’t understand what one thing has to do with the other.
No one should voice their concerns with the direction of the instance? Everyone should just be silent because the community is run by volunteers?
They tried to. It was down at the time though.
How would they make a post about a lemmy.world outage on lemmy.world
It wasn’t about an outage.
One of the original intentions of posting somewhere else was about outages.
Something like “we are down so much come read about it live over at …”
It’s BS to not announce, on lemmy.world something that affects lemmy.world.
Be open and transparent.
I don’t like that you blocked the piracy communities but I recognise that you see a reason to do so.
I’ve already begun migrating my subs to another instance because that’s the great thing about the fediverse - I can.
If you want to be the big Lemmy instance with a lot of traffic then you’re going to have to protect yourself, I get it. But at least have the balls to announce your unpopular decisions.
I happened to catch a message on Matrix from @ruud@lemmy.world that he didn’t like the way mentions work when you’re offline and lots of messages build up, but I didn’t realize that meant discord was replacing matrix, especially for community notices.
Add me to the list of folks who won’t use discord.
Discord is pretty much against everything the open web is about. Closed source and proprietary protocols… Probably tons of data mining of users as well.
Not even probably, there is.
Probably? Nah, they legit advertise what their users do. Seemingly increasingly so.
Discord has “drops” (in beta for over a year now to be fair as it wasn’t super popular), aka the status snippet that shows when and what app you’re using gets shared with developers. Basically, what you do on your system gets logged. You can opt out of that, of course, but still they do collect it. Pretty sure they also stored calls and screen recordings at some point (for convenience reasons of course), but there are now too many users for that. At least, I think they no longer do that. But every single thing you type into discord is logged and can be traced back to you with perfect accuracy.
Including the parts you type out and don’t post.
Awaiting the fall of discord once it goes full anti consumer
I can’t believe some subreddits migrated to discord in protest over third party apps when discord will ban you if you try to use 3rd party apps.
Wait what? Why does it ban you if you use third party applications to use it?
I’m really not happy with using Discord at all for any organisation open to outside users. We got Lemmy for posts about, well, Lemmy. We got something like Mastodon for external updates.
Use what is there.
Also there is Matrix as a direct federated replacement for discord. No reason not to use it.
EDIT: After doing a bit more digging, it’s not running on activitypub so not compatible wit the fediverse, but it does run on a federated model.
Although given that both are open protocols, it should in theory be possible to write an adaptor or an update to make them compatible.
EDIT 2:
nope lolEdit 3: idk why I let myself be mislead and I don’t remember what I looked up, but Matrix specifically says it is federated: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
Matrix is not part of the fediverse. I don’t know where people got this idea, but I keep seeing it mentioned on Lemmy. It’s just a decentralized messaging software
After looking into it, it is federated but not activitypub, so it may not technically be part of the fediverse.
Edit: i did a bad job researching this, but this is true to the best of my knowledge.
It is federated though? It’s literally the first sentence in their specification: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
It’s decentralized, not federated. They are slightly different concepts
With Matrix (at least as far as I understand), if you aren’t logged in when the message is posted you can’t actually decrypt it. I think Matrix would actually be worse than Discord for an announcement like this.
This is wrong. I’m on matrix both on my computer and phone. If I’m not logged in, and conversations are made during that time I can log in and it decrypts all the messages letting you pick up where you left off.
Not sure what I did wrong then but that was my experience
It might have something to do with the channel admin, I’m not sure as I don’t run my own matrix channel, I only know that’s how it works for me. Also the only encrypted channel that I see on my matrix account is the dm’s. The regular channels I’m on are not encrypted and it states as much in the text bar where you type
That sounds broken to the point of absurdity. Where did you hear that?
I think OP is mixing up IRC and Matrix. IRC indeed does require you to be online to receive messages (but there are ways around that), but matrix loads your messages offline just fine.
Checked it now and I have 3k unread messages on the lemmy support chart.
That’s also how IRC works and most chat platforms are heavily inspired by IRC, unless you use a program (bouncer) that kept you online 24/7. I assume there must be something similar for Matrix
One of many reasons people left IRC for Discord.
I didn’t hear it, I experienced it. /shrug
This is not true at all. I’m using Element, a matrix client and I’m part of lots of communities. I check it a few times per week and of course i can see all messages.
Install Element and join a server and you will see. It’s actually pretty nice.
I mean, I do get it to some extent.
As an admin myself, every time I make a post on lemmy aimed at members of my instance, it gets drowned out by folk from other instances that want to offer their thoughts and opinions.
That being said, Discord is not the answer to that problem…
If the intention is to have an internal, instance-only post, I believe such a thing could be enforced with an automoderator bot. I had a lot of success throwing the Lemmy API into an AI and generating my own moderator bot from that. Could work for you.
That’s quite a good idea. Not the perfect solution, but better than anything I’m currently using
I had an idea about this today but I don’t know enough about Lemmy to confirm it. Thought I’d run it by you just in case.
Could you create a post and lock it normally, then directly edit the postgres row to unlock the post? I’m wondering if this would federate the lock but not federate your unlock causing all outside users to see a lock and all internal users see an unlocked post.
Possible edge case: users who subscribe to the community after the unlock will receive the initial data dump of posts and this will include the post in its current unlocked state.
However, this would be an easy way to block the majority commenting on a post while maintaining a seemless experience for your internal users.
Now that is an interesting idea! Will have to give that a try
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You mean just like a specific recent post on our main about defederating another instance being drowned out by members of said instance :)
“I said beetlejuice three times and now he’s here ruining my life!”
Sh.itjust.works uses matrix like any normal lemmy instance would.
Sh.itjust.works uses matrix like any normal lemmy instance would.
Why should announcements happen in a real time chat anyway? Lemmy is actually best suited for announcements.
Indeed. But if there must be a chat, it should be matrix. But I’ve read it sucks for moderation.
Matrix is a piece of hot garbage on the UX front. Maybe when Matrix stops sucking so hard it can take matter out of galactic core black holes it can be taken seriously as a platform.
Even having the Discord server is kind of weird in and of itself I thought, you’re using one social media platform to talk about your own Social media platform. I use Discord, so it’s whatever, but wouldn’t it make sense to keep it within the Fediverse and put a “backup” communication channel on some other instance/service like Mastodon? I guess it helps in situations where lemmy.world goes down. I’ve just found myself liking Discord less and less when companies use it to make “official” announcements and end up leaving alot of people in the dark, since Discord doesn’t seem terribly user-friendly for storing long-term information.
You can find it if you know where to look and you have a dedicated announcements channel, I just don’t particularly like the format myself personally. I think my biggest problem with it is that the notification settings are so bad by default that it always feels like I’m getting inundated with notifications as soon as I join a server, so I just mute everything on a channel. I only want personal communications through Discord, I don’t particularly care to see “official” communications coming out of it.
Very reddit of them?
Coins incoming! :)
Just kidding. So much drama, needs some comic relief and this is all I had.
This gives out the impression they don’t care about lemmy being open source and decentralized but rather they are at it for a piece of the cake
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Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It’s everything that is against foss philosophy.
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And then be forced to shut it back down within a week once hosting costs bleed you dry lol
The moment I learned about defederation, I made an account on an instance that didn’t do that.
Here’s a website you can use to check what your instance is blocking.
Alternatively if you scroll to the bottom page of any individual lemmy instance there should be a link called Instances which will take you to a page of all the instances yours is federated and defederated with.
Oh neat I didn’t know that.
I think Discord is great, as long as you account for its shortcomings:
- It should be treated as ephemeral - up to the point of “the service could completely shut down tomorrow”
- It should not be treated as fully private or secure
I love how snappy it is (I never have to wait minutes for messages to load, as I do in Matrix), and also how there are a ton of Lemmy users who have Discord open in the background anyway. While I wouldn’t ever propose moving something like the main Lemmy communication channels to Discord, I do think it’s much easier to have IMs with regular Lemmy users on Discord than it is to do so on Matrix (as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed).
By the way, lemm.ee also has a Discord server. It’s only treated as a secondary channel, all announcements are posted in our meta community on Lemmy itself, and just linked to from Discord, but it’s still nice to have IMO.
as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed
I understand your point, but by that logic, we should use Reddit rather than Lemmy, as most users are there. It’s not only about ease of use, it’s about being sure users won’t be abused. Discord is still in its acquisition phase, but you can be sure enshitification will come next.
I like discord as a communication platform (as long as you keep the spying in mind) as the devs truly believe in their product and as such have created something truly amazing. It will be a sad day when the enshitification phase begins. It somehow hasn’t yet which is very shocking in all honesty. Guess that nitro revenue still more than makes up for the dev and hosting costs.
The issue people are having is the announcement was made exclusively in lemmy.worlds discord server. Beehaw has a discord server as well, but they relay announcements to there, not from there usually
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The problem at hand is not about the usability (UI/UX, performance, etc.) of Discord but rather it’s private, closed source for-profit existence being used as a “support” channel for a free and open (source, platform, communication) environment.
I agree with you in principle, but on a pragmatic level, it’s very hard to disconnect UI/UX/performance from everything else. I think it’s OK to acknowledge that Discord has a weakness when it comes to not being OSS, but a strength when it comes to UX, and I also think it’s OK to take advantage of that strength for users that want to do so.
Just to be fully clear, I am never planning to make Discord the main communication channel for lemm.ee announcements, nor to make users feel like it’s in any way necessary for them to use Discord just for lemm.ee communications. I am also active on Matrix constantly, and read most of what happens in the Lemmy Matrix channels. Any user that wishes to reach me over Matrix can do so.
Just to be fully clear, I am never planning to make Discord the main communication channel for lemm.ee announcements, nor to make users feel like it’s in any way necessary for them to use Discord just for lemm.ee communications.
Thank you! Not being a fan of discord aside, I believe announcements of a platform shoud be done on the platform itself, with the only exception being uptime/downtime status pages (obviously).
And for those that don’t know (most of you probably do), this (sunarus) is the main/head/founding admin of lemm.ee (and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).
(and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).
I think not a substantial contributor yet, but I hope to become one eventually 😃
I’ve found there is a culture within Lemmy developers and long-time operators to discuss in Discord or Matrix chat instead of “eating their own dogfood” and using Lemmy itself to openly discuss Lemmy technical and project issues. These chat services are legendary for keeping things away from search engines and newcomers getting up to speed. Lemmy itself isn’t nearly as search-engine friendly as Reddit was traditionally, it seems like feedback needs to be given as to how important it is to keep things about Lemmy in the eyes of those who actually use Lemmy…
There’s admin drama now. Oh boy Lemmy really is busy like reddit.
