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.
Discord is horrible
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zoomers can’t deal without their embedded images. Clicking a link to view a meme is so 1990s.
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
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.
Fucking hell, this again.
Listen, you people need to realize a lot of people are here on Lemmy because Reddit screwed them over, not because Lemmy is open source or less of a privacy issue or whatever your reasons for using it are.
So you hate Discord. That’s fine, you’re allowed to! But pitching a fit because everyone else doesn’t hate it isn’t gonna convince anyone to stop using it.
I don’t hate Discord, but I do hate that they seem to require my phone number. I tried joining Discord over a year ago. Upon first log in they claimed that there was suspicious activity that required me to verify the account by giving them my phone number. This was from a computer, I never even visited the site on my phone let alone use the mobile app. I gave up and forgot about until a few months ago and decided to try again. They still wanted my phone number, email wasn’t good enough. I contacted their support email and was told that there was no other option but to provide a phone number and that they couldn’t override it. So I told them to delete my account and that I would never use their service. It took two weeks for them to do it.
There are very few situations in which an app needs my phone number in my eyes. And a chat application is not one of them. Just like I refused to use the official Reddit app because it wanted access to my contacts and location. I am not a super privacy nut, but the whole hog approach of gathering my info is not acceptable. I would rather pay for the service. I would have paid for Reddit if they had gone that route rather than dropping 3rd Party apps. Instead I’m on Lemmy.
So fucking hell yes, this again.
There are alternatives to Discord.
Everyone wants your phone number now because it’s a decent approach to combating spammers. Note that I said decent, not perfect. It’s relatively easy for a company to determine if a phone number is owned by a specific person vs. a voip company that enables spammers to use hundreds of new numbers, so now we’re asking everyone for theirs. SMS is also used for the lowest form of multi factor authentication, so they get to claim that it’s a security decision, not one for marketing, etc and because of network effects, we all have to choose to either go along or miss out.
Agree that it’s super annoying and certainly not privacy-centric, but Discord is owned by Microsoft, what can we expect? Innovation?
Discord being owned by Microsoft, now that’s news to me. I don’t think that’s a thing, at least not yet.
I understand the ease for choosing phone numbers. I would love it if they gave me another option to validate.
For a community like Lemmy, I would prefer that they choose a different chat system, one that doesn’t require me to validate with a phone number. Matrix is an option and doesn’t require phone numbers.
It also doesn’t work. I can’t use telegram because I have a number that I originally got from project fi, back when it was project fi. Eventually I moved cell providers and I migrated the phone number that I got with Project Fi. As such, a real number that I’ve had for over a decade looks like a voip range number, even though it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.
This is shitty, but not common.
Certain channels will require a phone verified account, but most won’t.
Did you ever try on a phone or a different computer in a different location? With a different email?
If discord ever decides that your account is “suspicious” (they won’t tell you why they decide it), you will be completely locked out of your account and you can not do anything on the website unless you provide your phone number for verification. I have one such accounts too that I created for joining the community of a certain game. These are the only two screens you can access on this account:
They also helpfully tell you that you can only verify a single account with your phone number, so if I wanted to verify this account for a gaming community, I would de-verify the account I use for work, so I’m not going to do that, lest it looks “suspicious” to discord and they delete my account - For example a while ago the person who created one of the discord community “servers” we use for work got their discord account deleted (discord wouldn’t tell us a reason).
The point isn’t to bash the discord company or service, I’m just stating things that happen if you choose discord.
Your requirement to use software is based around whether or not it requires your phone number for verification?
Man some people draw really weird lines.
Yeah I’m here because I like the alternative to Reddit’s bullshit.
I couldn’t care less about Foss. I mean it’s cool, but it’s not why I’m here.
Reddits bullshit is the end case for ANY product or service that is not FOSS.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
You should care, or else you will go through reddit all over again and again.
I think at the very least we could have an open source alternative along with the discord. No reason to completely shutdown the discord.
One already exists
Moderation tools are in progress, so probably not good for now: https://trello.com/b/4e2O7tge/revolt-roadmap
I’ve been using it for a very long time now. (Mostly) works really well.
Especially since this thread is about removing the pinned post. And a lot of the people downvoting are from other instances, they don’t even see it pinned it’s just ‘discord bad’. Which is literally the top comment in this thread.
If I may, we are all probably alt juggling at the moment, the fact that you see people interacting with account from other instances does not mean the people don’t have an account on LW
Mozilla uses matrix … so that might be a good idea
Can’t we just have an IRC room on somewhere like Libera, please?
Or if we really need images and stuff, a Matrix room would be sufficient. Or an XMPP room…
