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.
Think what you want about Discord, but it has a different purpose than Lemmy or Matrix. It’s mainly a real-time chat application (with voice on top if you want). Nobody chatting on Discord will create a Lemmy post instead, two totally different forms of communication. That’s like complaining back in the day why the forum you use has an IRC room pinned.
Does it? Look up Discord Nitro, they charge a lot of money for basic functionality (like being able to share your screen above 720p, use custom emojis on other servers, promote your own server, …). They rake in plenty of money, no need to sell your data for that (which they at least say don’t do based on the terms and conditions).
Currently there is no good alternative to Discord for actual chatting. Lemmy doesn’t offer a chat function (Though the chat on Reddit was crap too). Mastodon is not a chat, it’s a Twitter alternative. And IRC has always been crap where 9 out of 10 people just idle and you don’t have a chat history.
Matrix itself works fantastically for chat, we use it to coordinate conversations for kbin. It’s like a non shit version of discord (minus the video / audio support I guess)
Matrix?
Moderation?
As you’ve probably seen from another comment
https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir
And I know it’s self hosted and thus requires more work, which is why I suggested elsewhere to have a team of volunteers setting it up (the matrix room and draupnir server), presenting it to the LW admins, and letting they choose of they want to endorse it.
What do you think of that? It would give people supporting Matrix a way to constructively try to come up with a solution that can potentially make everyone happy.
Cool but what if i dont have access to the server? As this would 3x the managing effort of the LW team.
At all LW wants to server a reliable ( unddosable ) service where you can get an response 99% of the time. And not “silencable” with a ddos. That costs more and more money.
In this scenario, the newly formed Matrix would be in charge of those. They manage the servers, they moderate the chats, they even set up their own funding for recurring costs.
LW staff can have access, but most of the operations are performed by the Matrix team.
I am suggesting this as a way to have satisfying end to this discussion:
It’s a win win in any case, and probably a way to appease the resentment we can see in this thread
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Thanks for appreciating the idea.
It’s probably going to be my last message about this topic (I already phrased some of my concerns with Rooki in another comment), but I just would like to repeat that allowing other people to help you could be a good way to leverage help of the community.
IIRC, that’s what happened in the early days of LW, when LW admins and Lemmy devs would work together on fixing the Lemmy codebase, put to a real life workload for the first time.
People in this thread seem eager to push for Matrix, you can either try to canalize their efforts into something productive, and then include it to LW, or just push for a proprietary platform they seem to despise, which will probably make them look somewhere else to build an open source solution.
At the end of the day, the decision if yours, as always in the Fediverse, people are free to come and go.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion, and have a good one!
Yeah but tbh, the only users who complain are outside LW. That is what LW admins see and think hmmm not so many LW users complain, rather only those who cant even see its pinned.
It would add more effort and trust for LW again.
The usecase will be blocked by 3 factors:
We want it reliable, stable and not ddosable platform
Matrix is not userfriendly so much. It is hard to create custom bots for it.
And the new liability risk it would add to LW would be not great
They probably were LW at some point, and then left for one reason or another. It’s fair to ignore your former users, but I guess the reputation of LW might be impacted, and you might see more and more people advising others to move (you can already see it from time to time).
Is it that easy to DDoS? I had a quick look, it seems that if CF is used there is already some mitigation (https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/8691).
I’m aware that Lemmy is still vulnerable to DDoS even behind CF, but as Matrix is older, the codebase should be more mature.
Lemmy isn’t that friendly either, still we are all here. My core message is always that due to the emerging nature of Lemmy, I would except Lemmy users to be ready to use less polished software, in a Matrix vs Discord scenario. Otherwise, why bother with Lemmy and just not directly use Reddit with revanced apps?
Lemmy is more friendlier. Its a basic Reddit. Matrix you have to sync up your encryption etc… i ditched it because of the horrible user experience and programming experience.
I feel pretty confident OP would prefer an IRC instead of Discord because it is an open standard.
You just described Discord, lol.
No matter what niche Discord server I join, if I write something in the general channel I usually get a reply in seconds to a few minutes.
IRC? Has always been a dumpster where I might not get a single reply in an hour.
That’s just a product of sheer number of users. I was there in the IRC chats 20+ years ago. You also got replies in seconds. Sometimes chat rooms flew by so fast that admins had to force timeouts or the chat was unreadable. Less people use IRC now, but they tend to be far more tech knowledgeable people, with more experience and less toxic than Discord.
I’ve been on the internet for roughly the last 27 years and I’ve never had a good experience on IRC. It always felt like a black hole for me and near unusable. No chat history, no proper channels and too many idlers.
Discord is proprietary, which isn’t great, but it has the features down pat. I can join whatever niche community and have fully indexed chat channels. I can write something new, or just search through the public logs if someone already asked my question in the past. Each server has a single topic, for example a certain game, so there’s also a split in channels for general discussion, bug reports, new player help, change logs, …
It’s well organized and does exactly what I need. And if you find someone you want to play with on a server, one click and you’re in a voice chat with them.
Compare that to the crap we used in the past: ICQ (just text chat, you had to know the ICQ number of everyone), Teamspeak (Just voice chat pretty much, I hosted my own server for over a decade, but it was always crap), Mumble (Similar to Teamspeak), …
There is a damn good reason why Discord is the standard nowadays. You might not like it, but that’s just the way it is.
This is patently false. Your chat history is in your client AND in most cases put online somewhere by the admins or a bot they control. I can still go look at my IRC chats from 18 years ago today.
I’m talking about chat history for the entire channel, no matter if you’re online or not.
Maybe admins can put them up somewhere in another place, but they are never there when you join fresh in a channel.
It just sounds like you have very little actual experience with IRC. You can go ahead and downvote me all you want. I’ve been running IRC servers for a very long time. Any of the servers worth spending time on host their logs… Often with a link in the topic.
They are talking about when you join a channel with your client there is 0 chat history in the client
Sounds like you’re hanging out in the wrong places on IRC. As an open source contributor IRC is a place where I do a lot of my coordination.
Show me the numbers, against non paying users, infrastructure, and overhead. I don’t see this as valid. I also don’t agree with your tale on collecting and sharing data. What I read a couple of years ago was extremely vague and verbose. It also had the fuck you we can change this at any time without telling you clause. AKA, the points don’t matter so lube your butt plug because this is proprietary and you should know better clause. They are another company built on exploitation with no transparency or documentation. “Trust me” is garbage. Show me exactly what you are doing with full transparency, or you are a criminal. This is real world 21st century common sense. Discord is garbage.
They have 203 million dollars of revenue in a year from Nitro alone (the small subscription they sell): https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats
Then they have server boosts, which is another big pot of money on top.
And revenue share with content creators.
And Discord merch.
Tons of users too, evaluation is based on their platform + potential user base, not the actual money they pull in.
https://www.datasourse.com/how-discord-makes-money/
Maybe inform yourself first.