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
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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
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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.
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It wasn’t about an outage.
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Okay, but that’s not what this is about.
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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.
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They tried to. It was down at the time though.
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.
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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’s decentralized, not federated. They are slightly different concepts
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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.
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.
I didn’t hear it, I experienced it. /shrug
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
Yeah, lemmy.world looks like it’s shit.
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.
Where you need to have an account just to see the announcement, none the less.
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 !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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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.
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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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.
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.
Very reddit of them?
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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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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
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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.
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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.
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can you recommend a good instance with a no defederation policy?
An instance with no defederation policy is going to end up exactly like an instance with no moderation policy. It’s going to become Voat or whatever the latest far-right website is these days.
You might be better served to seek out an instance with a transparent defederation policy, and admins that use it as a tool of last resort, instead of first resort. I was, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression that lemmy.world fit that bill, but maybe not so much.
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I know reading comprehension isn’t much valued in some political circles, but I didn’t say what you think I said, so I’m not sure you really mean “agreed”.
Some moderation is required because an honest dialog cannot happen if all parties don’t feel safe. This is not the same as “no moderation”, but it’s also not the same as what you pretended I said, which is “heavy moderation”. I don’t understand why you think this discussion in any way translates to a government, but generally speaking, the US government has less ability to “censor” than a non-government entity.
And, as I already alluded to, the result of lax moderation is bigotry and hate, every time. If I had to pick between heavy moderation or voat, and to be clear, I don’t have to make that choice because there is nuance allowed, then I’d pick heavy moderation over a site infested with redhats and the like.
This isn’t true, I think. You can have an instance that federates with nearly everyone but which still has a higher standard for behavior for its own users. This way, users on such an instance can see all the problematic instances but are not permitted to be problematic themselves. It’s an option.
(Even still, I think you’d find yourself de-federating from someone eventually for spam or other technical reasons if not due to objections over content.)
It’s a problem of scale. If you don’t defederate from a racist-focused instance (for example; hypothetically speaking), then you need to devote resources to moderating those users who make racist comments, as allowed by their instance, but directed at your users. Sure, you could do this, but it’s probably smarter to just defederate and save the resources for other uses. And no moderation team is going to be flawless, so racism will still creep in and be missed by the mod team.
It might be a different story if users are given the tools to block entire instances (like kbin has) but even then I think the ROI would be low.
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I think one of us doesn’t understand federation-- and to be clear, it might be me.
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I thought we were discussing defederation. You cannot block entire instances on lemmy, that I know of.
Blocking a community does not block the users of the instance. The type of people that would naturally gravitate to, for example, a far right instance of lemmy.
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I apologize; I don’t know what you mean in relation to what I said. Do you mind elaborating?
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Copyright (not “copywrite”, btw) law is batshit insane, but somehow people believe it to be even worse than it is.
Your browser makes copies of every image you see, but this doesn’t violate copyright law because it’s automatic and necessary for the browser to function. Does that sound familiar?
Also, for like 2 decades the standard action is just a takedown request that threatens legal action if ignored.
And to be clear, the admins had no actionable reason to block the piracy communities. They did it preemptively.
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It’s also likely to get into legal issue. I like sdf but the fact they aren’t defederating from the pedophile instance is really really bad.
Which instance is that?
Lemmy.sdf.org they are a very very very old internet tech focused community that’s been since the late 80s. They’ve been pretty much everywhere on the internet as it’s grown
I think they meant which instance is the pedophile one haha
I know what sdf is, what is the pedophile instance you’re referring to?
Ah my bad. I don’t really feel comfortable saying their name completely openly because they are very aggressive to any and all people who point that out, but they allow loli/shotacon and attract a lot of open pedophiles. Wont say the name outright, but if you go to https://lemmy.world/instances and scroll down to “blocked” and look at the first one, that’s it. Do not go to that instance. I’m serious, the content they host is illegal in many jurisdictions.
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Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It’s everything that is against foss philosophy.
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.
