this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 359 points 1 year ago (19 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 160 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Not even probably, there is.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (18 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But still, why pick a proprietary platform?

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah I mean, LW using discord instead of a FOSS option is not a good look...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sh.itjust.works uses matrix like any normal lemmy instance would.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] zer0 33 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It's everything that is against foss philosophy.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

They could have gotten feedback if the comments were not turned off. I'll give the benefit of the doubt there's a good reason to not have comments on for that post but that and using Discord is two orange flags.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (38 children)

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.

https://fba.ryona.agency/

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

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...

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