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 tried to. It was down at the time though.
How would they make a post about a lemmy.world outage on lemmy.world
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.
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.
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.
Including the parts you type out and don’t post.
Not even probably, there is.
Yeah I mean, LW using discord instead of a FOSS option is not a good look…
Got banned recently from their Discord server by assumingly me calling out their announcement/decision a clownery (which it actually is, because why make a announcement community when you’re not informing your userbase), ngl it’s mildly infuritating…
What even is not a good look is I didn’t really receive a notice that I got banned there…
I’m assuming the reason would’ve been trolling. Considering the bottom of this is all you did and didn’t put a statement like “I don’t agree with this channel, I think it’s uncalled for” etc etc. although even that I would put into !support@lemmy.world
Just tagged a channel and said clownery with no activity in the discord really. Just wanted to add the additional context here and figured a SS would help too.
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trolling
no activity in the discord really
Why would I be active in the DC when its supposedly purpose was announcements about the site and whenever this site is down? Why would you assume/expect people join in a DC server to interact?
Why would I be active in the DC when its supposedly purpose was announcements about the site and whenever this site is down?
Could you please clarify your source, the discord post as OP mentioned doesn’t read that. Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. And if you looked around the main purpose isn’t focused around announcements. It seems there was miscommunication and it wasn’t posted to lemmy, mistakes happen.
“Why would you assume/expect people join in a DC server to interact?”
That is sort of the point of Discord as a instant message community platform.
I joined the discord because:
- The internal lemmy direct messages sucks.
- I already use discord anyways.
- It’s a great way to not spam unrelated comments. etc
Why did you join?
Making announcements to somewhere you have to log in to see is the problem. You can’t see Discord chats unless You’re logged in.
There is a lot of FOSS stuff communicating over twitter… Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter account.
But lemmy.world should primarily communicate via lemmy imo…
That’s where I’m at. Discord isn’t the issue for me, it’s them not using their own platform to communicate major announcements. At that point it’s like you’ve given up on your own platform.
But lemmy.world should primarily communicate via lemmy imo…
I find the same attitude holds for developers who like to hang out in real-time Matrix chat and don’t seem to use Lemmy itself very much and things like code blocks ruining greater-than and less-than slip right into release without much concern.
Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter
Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.
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lemmy.world it’s not “lemmy”
The fact that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone make that false equivalence demonstrates pretty well the problem that comes when a small number of instances have the majority of Lemmy’s total users. I chose a small instance myself, partially to do my part in avoiding this issue, but the consolidation will likely continue to be a big problem until a good solution can be thought up and implemented.
The fact that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone make that false equivalence demonstrates pretty well the problem that comes when a small number of instances have the majority of Lemmy’s total users. I chose a small instance myself, partially to do my part in avoiding this issue, but the consolidation will likely continue to be a big problem until a good solution can be thought up and implemented.
Yeah, lemmy.world looks like it’s shit.
Where you need to have an account just to see the announcement, none the less.
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 luck 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.
Well, I doubt there must be a public chat in the first place, especially when it kind of serves as a competition to the *.World products. Some form of private chat between admins: sure. Public: IMO no.
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.
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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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…
They needed to post it on a site that can stay up for more than 24 hours at a time.
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And then be forced to shut it back down within a week once hosting costs bleed you dry lol
Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It’s everything that is against foss philosophy.
Very reddit of them?
Coins incoming! :)
Just kidding. So much drama, needs some comic relief and this is all I had.
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.
Going to yourinstance.whatever/instances should also take you to that page.
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 😃
Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord
I can’t even verify if this was posted on their site.
- Discord is currently up. It’s usually up.
- https://lemmy.world/ is currently down. (Cloudflare - bad gateway.) It’s often down.
I left lemmy.world because they were doing nonsense like this. I recommend to others doing the same.
