Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord [update]

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. 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.

marmo7ade,

about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements

HMMMM I wonder why they didn’t post it on Lemmy?

Probably because this post has negative 400 votes:

lemmy.world/post/3234363

Users are children.

rob_t_firefly,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

Image is a popular four-panel meme featuring Gru from “Despicable Me” showing off his evil plan on a large pad. In this version Gru is wearing a lapel pin of the Lemmy.world logo. Frame one: the pad says “The Fediverse is taking social media back from corporate control and proprietary walled gardens.” Gru looks proud. Frame 2: the pad says “Operate a big and successful Lemmy server, opening a path to the free and open Fediverse for everyone.” Gru looks happy. Frame 3: the pad says “Put the official moderator-organizing and admin-contact method on a proprietary walled-garden Discord server.” Gru looks sneaky. Frame 4: the pad is the same. Gru notices what it says and looks unpleasantly surprised. The logo pin on his jacket has rotated upside-down.

marmo7ade,

Good thing you can start your own instance!

justastranger,

And then be forced to shut it back down within a week once hosting costs bleed you dry lol

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

They needed to post it on a site that can stay up for more than 24 hours at a time.

BitOneZero,

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…

zer0,

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

hamid,

By running a server on donations and barely breaking even? I’m not sure I’m following the logic here, this isn’t a corporate controlled website beholden to board members and advertisers

marmo7ade,

You don’t need to be corporate owned to be a narcissist. How many former reddit mods came here and squatted on popular community names simply so they can be mods by being here “first”?

hamid,

So the guy that runs lemmy world for free without ads as a hobby with a group of volunteers are all narcissists because… they use discord? This sounds like a pretty incredible leap

zer0,

Reddit mods also work for free as volunteers. Don’t underestimate internet popularity and power over communities, not so many days ago there were stories about mastodon instances admins getting invited for talks at meta. Lemmy is an open source and decentralized alternative to reddit, using discord for announcements misses the whole point

hamid,

And what is the point of that? Providing you with free servers and labor for their hobby? I think you all really need to get a grip, its a website not a government.

kttnpunk,
@kttnpunk@lemmy.world avatar

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

asunaspersonalasst, (edited )
@asunaspersonalasst@lemmy.world avatar

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

KrisND,

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

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.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b3368f39-5101-4257-be71-80603891afac.png

asunaspersonalasst,
@asunaspersonalasst@lemmy.world avatar

trolling

no activity in the discord really

Why would I be active in the DC when its supposedly purpose was announcements about the site and whenever this site is down? Why would you assume/expect people join in a DC server to interact?

KrisND,

Why would I be active in the DC when its supposedly purpose was announcements about the site and whenever this site is down?

Could you please clarify your source, the discord post as OP mentioned doesn’t read that. Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. And if you looked around the main purpose isn’t focused around announcements. It seems there was miscommunication and it wasn’t posted to lemmy, mistakes happen.

“Why would you assume/expect people join in a DC server to interact?”

That is sort of the point of Discord as a instant message community platform.

I joined the discord because:

  • The internal lemmy direct messages sucks.
  • I already use discord anyways.
  • It’s a great way to not spam unrelated comments. etc

Why did you join?

SineNomineAnonymous,

deleted_by_author

    •
    KrisND,

    What makes you think it’s “just to read announcement”. The initial post didn’t even mention announcements, nor was it the purpose of the discord. Yet that’s all you can seem to hold on to. It’s already been stated there was miscommunication on one announcement and that was that.

    Do you see the issue now or do you need help?

    This doesn’t even make sense because it appears you didn’t even read the original discord post or even have an understanding about it.

    A) It’s not a requirement to join discord, and never was made to be.

    B) Discord is of itself a community communication platform for IM.

    C) Millions of people actively use discord, it’s a popular platform and easier then others like Matrix. If it was something I didn’t already use, I would’ve never joined.

    Your message is filled with incorrect assumptions and it appears your unwilling to go find the answers that are even on the same page as these comments. It’s very surprising with the internet nowadays and people can’t even seem to find information that is right in front of them, yet they act like they already have the facts.

    JackbyDev,

    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.

    menemen,

    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…

    SomeRandomWords,

    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.

    BitOneZero,

    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.

    Freesoftwareenjoyer,

    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.

    ada,
    @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    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…

    warmaster,

    What is the problem with getting down votes ? Visibility? I thought Lemmy supported pinned posts.

    ada,
    @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    I’m not sure I follow. Where do downvotes come in to it?

    warmaster,

    I misread drowned as downvoted. 🤣

    odigo2020,

    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.

    skullgiver,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    As an admin you can use your special admin powers to pin posts.

    I would like Lemmy to have a “don’t defederate” or “only internal votes” checkbox for server-only posts, though.

    In theory you could also drop external votes for an a community. Here’s an SQL query I quickly threw together to select all upvotes submitted to a community that don’t come from the server the community is hosted on:

    
<span style="color:#323232;">select post_like.id, community_id, community.actor_id, voter.actor_id 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    from post
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    inner join community on community.id = post.community_id
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    inner join post_like on post_like.post_id = post.id
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    inner join person voter on (
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        voter.instance_id != community.instance_id and voter.id = post_like.person_id)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    where community.id = ?
</span>

    You’ll need to change select…from to delete from to wipe the votes from the database. I imagine it’ll take a while to complete, but on smaller servers it should be feasible? You could also add something like and post_like.score = - 1 to only delete downvotes.

    nuke,

    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.

    ada,
    @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    That’s quite a good idea. Not the perfect solution, but better than anything I’m currently using

    nuke,

    I had an idea about this today but I don’t know enough about Lemmy to confirm it. Thought I’d run it by you just in case.

    Could you create a post and lock it normally, then directly edit the postgres row to unlock the post? I’m wondering if this would federate the lock but not federate your unlock causing all outside users to see a lock and all internal users see an unlocked post.

    Possible edge case: users who subscribe to the community after the unlock will receive the initial data dump of posts and this will include the post in its current unlocked state.

    However, this would be an easy way to block the majority commenting on a post while maintaining a seemless experience for your internal users.

    ada,
    @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Now that is an interesting idea! Will have to give that a try

    SolomonTheMagnificent,

    You mean just like a specific recent post on our main about defederating another instance being drowned out by members of said instance :)

    gayhitler420,

    “I said beetlejuice three times and now he’s here ruining my life!”

    ryannathans,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    woelkchen,
    @woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

    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?

    ryannathans,

    Don’t just ban communities over a personal huff then?? And turning comments off? Come on.

    woelkchen,
    @woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

    Don’t just ban communities over a personal huff then?? And turning comments off? Come on.

    I did not ban any community. Why are replying to me? I don’t understand.

    yoz, (edited )

    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.

    McNasty,

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

    woelkchen,
    @woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    warmaster,

    Indeed. But if there must be a chat, it should be matrix. But I’ve read it sucks for moderation.

    woelkchen,
    @woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

    Well, I doubt there must be a public chat in the first place, especially when it kind of serves as a competition to the *.World products. Some form of private chat between admins: sure. Public: IMO no.

    ttmrichter,
    @ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    infyrin,
    @infyrin@lemmy.world avatar

    A decentralized platform making an announcement on a centralized, more or less, platform? Doesn’t that sound contradicting?

    Like, Lemmy, are you losing faith in even yourself?

    zer0,

    lemmy.world it’s not “lemmy”

    mihor,
    @mihor@lemmy.ml avatar

    Yeah, lemmy.world looks like it’s shit.

    true_blue, (edited )
    @true_blue@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

    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.

    MonkderZweite,

    Where you need to have an account just to see the announcement, none the less.

    paddirn,

    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.

    HRDS_654,

    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.

    tabular,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    malcriada_lala,
    @malcriada_lala@lemmy.world avatar

    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

    SgtAStrawberry,

    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”.

    Deiv, (edited )

    At this point they should just make a new instance for their announcements lol

    SgtAStrawberry,

    Maybe they wanted something off Lemmy so that the attackers can’t target both the main and the backup, with the same system.

    ALostInquirer,

    Isn’t this where Mastodon.world kind of comes into play? Off Lemmy but still a federated service, can even pop whatever LemmyWorld status account there in to one’s RSS readers or whatever.

    xigoi,
    @xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

    But still, why pick a proprietary platform?

    GBU_28,

    I guess cause it is entirely separate from Lemmy, so can act as a different option.

    Also it’s real time posting ( like a chat, not a post) and many people already have it.

    As a secondary, it’s not a bad choice.

    What would you recommend?

    Another Lemmy instance would also get ddosed

    McNasty,

    Matrix

    AFKBRBChocolate,

    Yeah, this is where I am. I’m a .world person, and I honestly think the admins have been doing a good job generally. I’m not a real Discord person, but I joined theirs after it was recommended a few times. Like you, I think using it as a backup because of the ddos attacks taking them down so much is reasonable, but they should use c/announcements as the primary communication venue. Note that there are a number of people on it who really seem to be enjoying the real time chat, and some even using the voice chat option, so it seems to be serving some people, at least.

    I also think they made a potentially understandable mistake on blocking these communities, which I said at length in that thread. I’m inclined to think one issue with the overall Lemmy paradigm is that we have a lot of hobbiests as admins - people who may not have much experience with that, who don’t have legal teams, and who might be gun shy about any potential litigation. We can’t expect any person who decides to run a Lemmy instance on their laptop to have much feel for what content they’re liable for and what’s completely safe, so stuff in the grey area is going to make some people squeamish.

    woelkchen,
    @woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

    I believe Discord was something mostly for “as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down”.

    Um… @mwadmin

    mwadmin,
    @mwadmin@mastodon.world avatar

    @woelkchen Hi, I am on holiday so not sure what the question is about exactly, but announcements are done on Lemmy and when we're down you could check the status page. Discord is not for that.

    mojo,

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

    ineedaunion,

    Wonder who bought them out. Behind the scene money is always an issue with sell outs.

    whataboutshutup,

    Why would someone buy a lemmy instance at this moment? Does anyone care?

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