this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Lemmy.world Support

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Can we please unpin the proprietary off-site/off-network promotion of discord (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

As a tech-ignorant person who uses Discord with multiple gaming groups, what is so bad about it?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JackbyDev 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's what surprised me the most.

Lemmy members using Discord feels like a vegetarian not eating chicken but enjoying beef.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People use different platforms for different reasons.

I personally use Lemmy because it's currently the best alternative to Reddit. I use Discord because it's the most popular instant messaging platform, and I haven't had issues with it. I'm currently looking for a replacement for Twitter/X as I'm not confident with the way that platform is headed.

[–] JackbyDev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mastodon

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yep, one of the platforms I'm looking at, and seems to be the second best contender for me. Tumblr of all places is where I'm feeling most at home

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Newsflash, not everyone joined lemmy because of FOSS philosophy.

Shocking, I know!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The original crop was probably here mostly because of "FOSS" ideology.

And the users from Reddit are here because a shitty company screwed them over using proprietary code that made it impossible for anybody to hold them accountableβ€” I.E. Because as annoying and toxic and oblivious as "FOSS" advocates can be a lot of the time, sometimes it turns out that they actually had a point.

So, who am I missing?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But then, why not stay on Reddit with a Revanced app?

Why go through the hoops of using an emerging platform for a link aggregator, but not a chatroom platform?

For me it's either both or none, which was what I expressed in the above comment.

I love Lemmy to death, I post here a lot, but I still know that objectively, Reddit using a Revanced 3rd party client is better: more content, more people, better mod tools.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After people left reddit as a statement against reddit's policies on 3rd party apps, Lemmy just so happened to be the next best solution.

A chatroom platform like Discord is not a reddit replacement, and I do find absurd that some subreddit communities decided to move over there instead of just going to Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing.

I'm not talking about subreddits moving to Discorde, I'm talking about Lemmy instances/communities using Discord as a complementary chatroom while it's as centralised as Reddit while decentralised alternatives such as Matrix exist