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.
I wonder whether matrix and/or matrix bridge has been mentioned before. Maybe discord + matrix bridge is a good enough compromise for reachability.
I have never hosted a bridge before so I may get things wrong. Please correct me where I do.
I assume this channel may be public, so any privacy concern needs to take that into account.
In terms of implementation, I was thinking that there would be 1 channel hosted on discord and 1 room on matrix being bridged together.
The benefit is that users of matrix and users of discord can participate in the same conversation without having to create an account on the other service. That way, matrix users don’t have to create a discord account or download discord app, which would be a good outcome in terms of privacy.
Edit: I have a faint memory that this is possible if the owners of the channel set it up on both ends. But I can’t find what the bridge is called, maybe it’s a different service from discord? Or I may have misunderstood things,
I have matterbridge set-up on a private chatroom with few people between IRC, Discord and Matrix, because some of the ones I chat with don’t really care much about these issues, and are not moving. On matterbridge the delay is significant in some cases and I encounter a few bugs as well. Plus, by having a Discord chatroom in the first place, most people are probably not going to join the other side. We shouldn’t even promote Discord usage.
Yeah never consider public rooms to be private, who knows whether there is a bit logging every message sent or whatnot
Discord is horrible
As a tech-ignorant person who uses Discord with multiple gaming groups, what is so bad about it?
How they monetize is unknown, but they are big and well funded.
I keep my workstation behind a whitelist firewall. It is a pain, but this means I have a device that filters all network traffic and only lets websites I have added to the list to transmit and receive messages. So like, if I download something sketchy or accidentally write some buggy code, it won’t have internet access to unapproved locations.
All legitimate commercial websites have their human readable web address. So on my whitelist, I can add Lemmy.world:443 and it will allow connections to Lemmy over port 443 aka https.
Discord doesn’t do anything conventional like this. If you try to connect to discord with a whitelist firewall, and look at the blocked connection logs, all you will see are random raw IP addresses. This alone is super weird. Then you will find these addresses are trying to connect to odd ports with no documentation about what they are used for or the protocol. Discord does not provide any details whatsoever that I could find.
Okay so a few super weird connections on super sketchy ports, with no idea what they are doing, and no documentation. Hmmm. But it gets worse. I can jot down some notes for a couple of random raw IP addresses. At this point I really don’t like it, but might just grumble past it like just before reddit died. But no, trying to connect to discord after punching these holes, lead to two more random raw IP addresses and different ports, and after that it happened again. Now I’m at 6 random undocumented holes in a firewall, and it still doesn’t work and is trying for more. Fuck that bullshit. Reading their terms agreement is basically legalese for you have no rights to anything. It is totally insane that people just run this shit and don’t take 5 minutes to ask where is the money exchanging hands to fund this. Who knows, maybe it is legitimate. I fully expect to hear about it in the news one day, and I expect this one to be a giant nuclear bombshell when it happens. I keep popcorn reserves on standby.
They monetize using nitro. Discord servers use multiple different servers based on location to host the actual chat services. I’m not an expert on the inner workings but it’s actually rather complex and fascinating. If you don’t like using discords clients then maybe try an open source alternative discord client, if nothing else it will give you insight into the back end and help you better understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Technically using alternative discord clients goes against their TOS but considering your feelings on discord I doubt that will matter to you.
try a different client
technically it is against their TOS
You can’t be seriously suggesting this while also knowing it’s against their TOS. It feels especially ironic giving the massive surge in Lemmy’s popularity was over a proprietary backend blocking third party clients.
Nothing. But it’s not free and someone owns the code so they are the devil.
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…
You sound very angry at a piece of software. You don’t have to use it, and you can block the community/user that posted the thing you don’t like.
Take a breath and don’t worry about it, for real. Not everything in life is for you, and you won’t like everything you see, and that’s fine. It doesn’t make your feelings invalid, but you can’t let it get to you < 3
