2y ago

Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord

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.

201 comments

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
- 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.
  
  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
  
  I don't understand what one thing has to do with the other.
  No one should voice their concerns with the direction of the instance? Everyone should just be silent because the community is run by volunteers?
- 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.
- They tried to. It was down at the time though.
- How would they make a post about a lemmy.world outage on lemmy.world
  
  It wasn't about an outage.
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.
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.
- 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
  
  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 lol~~
  Edit 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
  
  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.
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.
- 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.
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?
  
  At this point they should just make a new instance for their announcements lol
  
  I believe Discord was something mostly for “as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down”.
  Um.... @mwadmin@mastodon.world
- 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.
  
  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.
- Where you need to have an account just to see the announcement, none the less.
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.
- I mean, I can see it if it was used as a backup, but yeah, using it as a primary way of communicating with people is kind of weird.
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...
- 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?
  
  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.
- 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?
- Coins incoming! :)
  Just kidding. So much drama, needs some comic relief and this is all I had.
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
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.
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.
Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It's everything that is against foss philosophy.
- They needed to post it on a site that can stay up for more than 24 hours at a time.
- And then be forced to shut it back down within a week once hosting costs bleed you dry lol
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.
- Personally I dislike discord as the conversations there are too fast for me.
  Same. I never really liked how it’s used for discussion purposes because the conversation format doesn’t work there, especially if tons of people are chatting at the same time.
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.
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/
- 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.
  
  Oh neat I didn't know that.
- 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.
  
  I don't know if it's their policy, but it's against the spirit of the organization. This is where I'm at: lemmy.sdf.org
  I actually saw it on this list: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances You can look at their list and find instances that show 0,0 for BI,BB (blocked instances, blocked by).
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...
I think Discord is great, as long as you account for its shortcomings:
It should be treated as ephemeral - up to the point of "the service could completely shut down tomorrow"
It should not be treated as fully private or secure
I love how snappy it is (I never have to wait minutes for messages to load, as I do in Matrix), and also how there are a ton of Lemmy users who have Discord open in the background anyway. While I wouldn't ever propose moving something like the main Lemmy communication channels to Discord, I do think it's much easier to have IMs with regular Lemmy users on Discord than it is to do so on Matrix (as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed).
By the way, lemm.ee also has a Discord server. It's only treated as a secondary channel, all announcements are posted in our meta community on Lemmy itself, and just linked to from Discord, but it's still nice to have IMO.
- as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed
  I understand your point, but by that logic, we should use Reddit rather than Lemmy, as most users are there. It's not only about ease of use, it's about being sure users won't be abused. Discord is still in its acquisition phase, but you can be sure enshitification will come next.
  
  I like discord as a communication platform (as long as you keep the spying in mind) as the devs truly believe in their product and as such have created something truly amazing. It will be a sad day when the enshitification phase begins. It somehow hasn't yet which is very shocking in all honesty. Guess that nitro revenue still more than makes up for the dev and hosting costs.
- The issue people are having is the announcement was made exclusively in lemmy.worlds discord server. Beehaw has a discord server as well, but they relay announcements to there, not from there usually
- The problem at hand is not about the usability (UI/UX, performance, etc.) of Discord but rather it’s private, closed source for-profit existence being used as a “support” channel for a free and open (source, platform, communication) environment.
  I agree with you in principle, but on a pragmatic level, it's very hard to disconnect UI/UX/performance from everything else. I think it's OK to acknowledge that Discord has a weakness when it comes to not being OSS, but a strength when it comes to UX, and I also think it's OK to take advantage of that strength for users that want to do so.
  Just to be fully clear, I am never planning to make Discord the main communication channel for lemm.ee announcements, nor to make users feel like it's in any way necessary for them to use Discord just for lemm.ee communications. I am also active on Matrix constantly, and read most of what happens in the Lemmy Matrix channels. Any user that wishes to reach me over Matrix can do so.
- And for those that don't know (most of you probably do), this (sunarus) is the main/head/founding admin of lemm.ee (and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).
  
  (and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).
  I think not a substantial contributor yet, but I hope to become one eventually 😃
Even assuming my ancient Discord login still works (didn’t they make everyone change their names or something? idk if that affects accounts) it doesn’t look like you can use it on a phone without downloading the app, and I’m not doing that just to check for Lemmy announcements. Discuss controversial decisions there if you have to, but announce them here first.
- You can use the web app on phone but it's a pain in the ass to get to without it redirecting you to the app/app store.
- There actually is a mobile web version, if you go to https://discord.com/app
  
  Ah, that's good to know. Thanks.
- Fuck discord, communicate on platform you fucks
  I agree with your opinion on Discord but dude, don't call volunteers who run a Lemmy instance that way. What's wrong with you?
  
  Don't just ban communities over a personal huff then?? And turning comments off? Come on.
I left lemmy.world because they were doing nonsense like this. I recommend to others doing the same.
There's admin drama now. Oh boy Lemmy really is busy like reddit.
This is disappointing because thus far, I have been really happy with the communication and transparency of lemmy.world. But with this change, I will unfortunately not see announcements anymore.
Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord
I can't even verify if this was posted on their site.
Discord is currently up. It's usually up.
https://lemmy.world/ is currently down. (Cloudflare - bad gateway.) It's often down.
Thanks for raising the issue.
Most probably, people who made that decision are not aware of the implications and made that choice in good faith, so it's worth giving reasons why you want them to avoid proprietary software, rather than just frowning at them.
To the admins of lemmy.world and anyone who feels confuse about why this is an issue : it is about freedom. You all know how Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are turning ugly, and you can't do anything about it. With FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), when it turns ugly, you can do something about it. You (or any technical person who agrees with you) can take the code and go your own way with it (we call that "forking"). No decision of the authors can be forced upon you. Similarly, if you think something is not working right, you can fix it yourself, and send the changes to the maintainers of the code, who usually are happy to get some help. So it's also about freedom of fixing your own problems, instead of waiting and praying the authors do something about it.
And this is the whole spirit of the Fediverse : taking matters in our own hands instead of being betrayed once more by a company which decides that their bottom line requires to be user hostile. One day, this will happen to Discord to, it always ends up there. That's why people using Lemmy who are aware of those problems are not happy with seeing lemmy.world use Discord.
Thanks to the admins of lemmy.world for all the work they provide to the Fediverse.
Wonder who bought them out. Behind the scene money is always an issue with sell outs.
- Why would someone buy a lemmy instance at this moment? Does anyone care?
Lemmy.world Admins should concentrate more on keeping their instance up and running. They could have used someone else instance to release announcement. Most of these people are IT support guys, not the brightest bunch. They do a hell stressful job for mere 100-150k. I personally know IT support guys who got stroke and was off from work for 9 months.
A single community was blocked due to a legal issue. It can be unblocked once the legal ramifications are resolved.
- Legal ramifications in what way? And do we know that there was a dialog about this with the community mods? The one I looked at has rules against directly linking to infringing content, so it seem-- at least from where I'm sitting-- that blocking would not be an appropriate first step, instead opening a dialog with the mods/admins to moderate any offending content.
  And, in case it needs saying-- US copyright law is not global copyright law, and discussing copyright infringement is not illegal.
  Though, more to the point, this kind of poor communication-- if not the actions themselves-- makes me wonder if I should move to a new instance. I don't want to, but I also don't want admins making decisions without communicating them to the userbase, whether I personally agree with the decision or not. It certainly doesn't give the impression of transparency.
  
  There wasn't any specific legal issue from what I know. This was triggered by a butthurt transphobic troll who got banned in lemmy.dbzer0.com and then opened the call to defed. Then lemmy.world preemptively blocked the pirate communities, just in case
  
  The image cache on the LW server is a likely reason for the legal issues.
- For me, it's not that the community was blocked. That is the prerogative of lemmy.world admins. My problem is it wasn't announced here, it was only announced on Discord. That feels like they don't respect us as users of their community unless we're that deeply invested.
  
  It wasn't announced anywhere. I'd wait and see what is announced. If the admins were served they might not legally be able to talk about it yet.
- Not all of us are simps for media conglomerates and publishers
  
  So you want servers shut down and admins arrested?
- That's not the issue op is discussing. At least read their post before commenting.
- Matrix is a federated alternative to Discord that is both open source and highly concerned with user privacy. It’s also very popular here on Lemmy, and a lot of communities here use it.
  
  I have not heard of matrix till now. How does one join?
  God I feel like an old person always asking the younguns how to fediverse…
  
  Ruud decided matrix was too ~~hard~~ unreliable to use for this purpose and bailed a few weeks ago
  ETA: wrong adjective
- Sure, for a server as large and accessible as LW, Discord is a super useful, accessible platform. However, the Discord server should not be the only place that such an update is posted.
  Realistically, you can't expect much of the LW userbase to see and engage with an announcement in a Discord server, compared to a post on lemmyworld@lemmy.world.
- I can tell you Governments are already investigating several federated servers including lemmy instances. I doubt LW wanted to deal with the European Union cracking down on copyright infringement. Users are going to see a lot of instances shut down or blocked in the near future due to legal violations.
  
  Are they really? Do you have any sources for that? That’s a very lofty claim. I know some mastodon instances are likely to be, but Lemmy? with how new it is feels kind of far fetched

201 comments