This is completely counter productive to growing Lemmy. I absolutely despise discord. Look at the network traffic it generates and tell me wtf they are doing. They won’t tell you. Their business model will leave you completely dumbfounded as to how they exist. Everything shared on the platform is lost in a black hole unavailable to the outside world and everything shared is a privacy nightmare. Posting this, pinning it here, and locking it is one of the biggest trolls possible. It pisses me off every time I log in. “Everyone else does it” is the excuse of idiots. Discord makes absolutely no sense to anyone that actually cares to look into it, read the user agreement, and ask sane questions about what they are doing.
Even Discord issues aside, it just seems strange to have a proprietary software used for a platform as open source as Lemmy.
It would be as strange as having a Twitter account for the instance.
IMO that’s being too fanatic. I love FOSS, but you don’t have to use FOSS for absolutely everything. Making a FOSS product does not mean you need to use FOSS for everything. And sometimes the closed source options are simply the best. Eg, GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Also, at least before Twitter became such a shitty alt-right shit hole, many FOSS products did have twitter accounts! That’s just part of promoting your product and providing an alternative place to contact and discuss. Eg, when Reddit went down, I’d usually check their twitter to get updates on it.
GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Git, sure, I sold them here anybody complain about it, and get literally is the host for most FOSS, so supporting it isn’t exactly hurting the cause. But suggesting Discord is the best depends on how you’re judging that criteria. Best for who? Admins or users?
Moreover, if we’re going to start getting into the nitty gritty about what the “best” options are in any field, then FOSS dies in most cases. Volunteers simply cannot compete with a bunch of paid developers, but they will do their best.
Plex, for example, blows Jellyfin out of the water in terms of polish and simplicity. If you’re judging best on how easy it is, and how likely it is the average person’s going to run into issues, Plex beats its FOSS competition by a mile. But that’s not the whole story, is it? That doesn’t take the enshitification factor into account, or the fact that forces you to pay for certain things that your computer is effectively doing on its own.
But the other thing to remember is that what truly kills FOSS is people just simply not supporting it. The more you use these established, centralized, biggest names, the further you entrench them, and the harder it becomes for any serious alternative to justify its existence.
Eg, GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Librewolf moved to Codeberg a few weeks ago, so I guess there are still alternatives.
As said elsewhere, Mozilla uses Matrix.
Following that logic, why do we bother using Lemmy in the first place? We could just go back to Reddit, using revanced apps with personal API keys, and call it a day.
Also, at least before Twitter became such a shitty alt-right shit hole, many FOSS products did have twitter accounts!
They did, but then Twitter went to shit. Reddit was fine, until it went to shit. If the Piped project were to use a subreddit instead of !piped@feddit.rocks , wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity too? FOSS project should support each other, otherwise it questions their existence in the first place. Why would other organisations and companies bother with the FOSS alternatives if FOSS projects themselves don’t?
Following that logic, why do we bother using Lemmy in the first place?
I mean, I’m only here cause reddit sucks and I wanted to see if Lemmy has a different atmosphere. So far it does. Too bad its kinda dead around here.
It’s because Discord provides a functionality Lemmy does not yet offer. Forums having a connected chatroom is not a new thing at all, and that was true with subreddits and discords. Back when I moderated forums, the mod teams had a private mod forum, but also hung out in the IRC chat. Easy, instant communication for the community, particularly it’s management, is useful.
The problem isn’t the existence of a chatroom, it’s that they used Discord. But I don’t believe there’s a fediverse alternative for chat functionality like that, at least not yet. So it’s a matter of which centralized platform you choose: Discord, Matrix, etc
But Discord is also a useful reference point for new users who may need guidance on how to use lemmy, but already know how to use discord. It’s familiar, and popular. Call it onboarding if you like. It’s using Discord’s platform to help ease users into Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
No media support and closing the client and you DC from the channel, not ideal for modern use cases such as being on mobile devices or a laptop on a train and your connection drops while you go through a tunnel
Zoomers can’t deal without their embedded images. Clicking a link to view a meme is so 1990s.
I get the need to have a chat, we also setup one for the moderators of one of my community
Matrix is a pretty good alternative to Discord, with moderation possible via https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir.
It’s not a perfect one to one match, but Lemmy is not one for Reddit either, still we are all here.
Which is our main platform for announcements and the discord server is just to complement LW not to replace any of it.
Not hating, just was confused by the shift. I missed the piracy defed announcement because I didn’t realize there was the discord announcements too now.
