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.

  • zer0@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    82·
    1 year ago

    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

    • hamid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      83·
      1 year ago

      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

      • marmo7ade@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        1 year ago

        You don’t need to be corporate owned to be a narcissist. How many former reddit mods came here and squatted on popular community names simply so they can be mods by being here “first”?

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    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…

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      As an admin you can use your special admin powers to pin posts.

      I would like Lemmy to have a “don’t defederate” or “only internal votes” checkbox for server-only posts, though.

      In theory you could also drop external votes for an a community. Here’s an SQL query I quickly threw together to select all upvotes submitted to a community that don’t come from the server the community is hosted on:

      select post_like.id, community_id, community.actor_id, voter.actor_id 
    from post
    inner join community on community.id = post.community_id
    inner join post_like on post_like.post_id = post.id
    inner join person voter on (
        voter.instance_id != community.instance_id and voter.id = post_like.person_id)
    where community.id = ?

      You’ll need to change select...from to delete from to wipe the votes from the database. I imagine it’ll take a while to complete, but on smaller servers it should be feasible? You could also add something like and post_like.score = - 1 to only delete downvotes.

    • 𝙣𝙪𝙠𝙚@yah.lolEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • mog77a@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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

      • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • edric@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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).

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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).

      • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        (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 😃

  • Dandroid@dandroid.appEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is disappointing because thus far, I have been really happy with the communication and transparency of lemmy.world. But with this change, I will unfortunately not see announcements anymore.

  • SineNomineAnonymous@lemmy.mlEnglish
    02·
    1 year ago

    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).

    It’s not like you lot weren’t told who these people were and what was going to happen.

    You guys ever get tired of being wrong all the time or is it more of a sexual fetish?