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 [email protected]. 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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
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Or secondarily I’d say Mastodon. They have an account but never post anything there.
Yeah seems like the mastodon account would make a lot of sense as a kind of quick and dirty feed of information, particularly when it comes to stuff that’s less “announcement” oriented. Like up down or performance issue statuses and the like.
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 …”
Okay, but that’s not what this is about.
“why did lemmy.world mods start posting things to a discord group?” Is the implied point of the thread we are in.
Acknowledged that THIS post by them was regarding defederating the piracy group.
No, that is not the implied point. This is specifically about announcing blocking communities and instances. No one expects lemmy.world to announce it’s down on itself.
Hence they created a discord to provide up to the moment updates on features/changes of lemmy.world.
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 @[email protected] 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.
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?
Including the parts you type out and don’t post.
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/
Okay that’s a better source than whatever I was reading. I should get off the internet for now. I am too tired.
It’s decentralized, not federated. They are slightly different concepts
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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
It’s possible that the Matrix server you were on was/is having issues then. I’ve been running my own instance for over two years now and have not experienced this. I can even login to a new device, verify my session, and then view the history for every channel I’ve ever been in (encrypted or not).
Just recently started using it. This is the way it has worked since I started. And that just in the last 2 months
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.
This makes no sense to me. Did they provide a reason for choosing Discord of all things? What was wrong with making announcements on Lemmy? Why wouldn’t they choose to make announcements in another federated format in addition and not instead of lemmy? Like, I’m not super tech savvy but I’m sure they could set up an RSS-like feed to send out alerts? IDK
With my very limited understanding of it, I believe Discord was something mostly for “as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down”.
But still, why pick a proprietary platform?
I guess cause it is entirely separate from Lemmy, so can act as a different option.
Also it’s real time posting ( like a chat, not a post) and many people already have it.
As a secondary, it’s not a bad choice.
What would you recommend?
Another Lemmy instance would also get ddosed
Yeah, this is where I am. I’m a .world person, and I honestly think the admins have been doing a good job generally. I’m not a real Discord person, but I joined theirs after it was recommended a few times. Like you, I think using it as a backup because of the ddos attacks taking them down so much is reasonable, but they should use c/announcements as the primary communication venue. Note that there are a number of people on it who really seem to be enjoying the real time chat, and some even using the voice chat option, so it seems to be serving some people, at least.
I also think they made a potentially understandable mistake on blocking these communities, which I said at length in that thread. I’m inclined to think one issue with the overall Lemmy paradigm is that we have a lot of hobbiests as admins - people who may not have much experience with that, who don’t have legal teams, and who might be gun shy about any potential litigation. We can’t expect any person who decides to run a Lemmy instance on their laptop to have much feel for what content they’re liable for and what’s completely safe, so stuff in the grey area is going to make some people squeamish.
Matrix
At this point they should just make a new instance for their announcements lol
Maybe they wanted something off Lemmy so that the attackers can’t target both the main and the backup, with the same system.
Isn’t this where Mastodon.world kind of comes into play? Off Lemmy but still a federated service, can even pop whatever LemmyWorld status account there in to one’s RSS readers or whatever.
I believe Discord was something mostly for “as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down”.
@woelkchen Hi, I am on holiday so not sure what the question is about exactly, but announcements are done on Lemmy and when we’re down you could check the status page. Discord is not for that.
Yeah I mean, LW using discord instead of a FOSS option is not a good look…
Got banned recently from their Discord server by [I’m assuming] 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…
Edit: phrasing
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 [email protected]
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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What makes you think it’s “just to read announcement”. The initial post didn’t even mention announcements, nor was it the purpose of the discord. Yet that’s all you can seem to hold on to. It’s already been stated there was miscommunication on one announcement and that was that.
Do you see the issue now or do you need help?
This doesn’t even make sense because it appears you didn’t even read the original discord post or even have an understanding about it.
A) It’s not a requirement to join discord, and never was made to be.
B) Discord is of itself a community communication platform for IM.
C) Millions of people actively use discord, it’s a popular platform and easier then others like Matrix. If it was something I didn’t already use, I would’ve never joined.
Your message is filled with incorrect assumptions and it appears your unwilling to go find the answers that are even on the same page as these comments. It’s very surprising with the internet nowadays and people can’t even seem to find information that is right in front of them, yet they act like they already have the facts.
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.
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.
I mean, I can see it if it was used as a backup, but yeah, using it as a primary way of communicating with people is kind of weird.
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
What is the problem with getting down votes ? Visibility? I thought Lemmy supported pinned posts.
I’m not sure I follow. Where do downvotes come in to it?
I misread drowned as downvoted. 🤣
They do. Personally, I think it makes the most sense, in regards to instance news like this, to put a pinned and locked post on the actual platform you’re talking about, and then put a discord or matrix or whatever off-site link in the body of the post for those who wish to discuss. That’s what a lemmy.zip admin did recently, and I think it worked well.
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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.
Why would any normal instance use a chat program when their instance is literally a chat forum in the first place?
We use it for reporting site outages mostly.
Very reddit of them?
Coins incoming! :)
Just kidding. So much drama, needs some comic relief and this is all I had.
It would definitely make more sense to post the announcements on Lemmy rather than another discord server.
IMHO, Rather than dividing the stream of new information it would be better to focus on one platform.
Personally I dislike discord as the conversations there are too fast for me.
Personally I dislike discord as the conversations there are too fast for me.
Same. I never really liked how it’s used for discussion purposes because the conversation format doesn’t work there, especially if tons of people are chatting at the same time.
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
By running a server on donations and barely breaking even? I’m not sure I’m following the logic here, this isn’t a corporate controlled website beholden to board members and advertisers
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So the guy that runs lemmy world for free without ads as a hobby with a group of volunteers are all narcissists because… they use discord? This sounds like a pretty incredible leap
Reddit mods also work for free as volunteers. Don’t underestimate internet popularity and power over communities, not so many days ago there were stories about mastodon instances admins getting invited for talks at meta. Lemmy is an open source and decentralized alternative to reddit, using discord for announcements misses the whole point
And what is the point of that? Providing you with free servers and labor for their hobby? I think you all really need to get a grip, its a website not a government.
I couldn’t agree more. We shouldn’t need to be somewhere else to receive announcements (especially such important ones).
Not to mention Discord’s horrible record of privacy and security. I don’t have an account and will never make one, and I’m sure many others in the fediverse will agree.
I actually just tested out the account making process, and I got asked for my phone number. No. Way.
We’re here because we care about a decentralized, open network. Aside from its confusing and busy UX, it’s not even indexable. Discord is literally a black hole for information and terrible for everyone except for Discord itself, who is doing who knows what with all of our data.
Discord is everything the fediverse stands against.
This whole situation is rubbing me the wrong way. I can understand the motives behind defederating even if I don’t agree but it’s been a day and the only announcement is still on Discord. Not ideal.
