On the side bar it lists the following:
- [Matrix/Element]Dead
- Discord
“Discord” is an active link, but the Matrix link is completely inactive. Not only is it inactive (which could have be excused as a broken link), but it is also manually labeled as “Dead”, as if there is no intention of making it work. How can a community that is focused on privacy willingly favor a service that is privacy non-respecting when a perfectly functional privacy-respecting alternative exists?
It’s the timeless debate between accessibility and exclusivity. Do you want more people in your community by compromising some values? Or would you rather be a hardliner but never reach those people?
Most of the time you have to pick somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a question of pragmatism and utilitarianism.
Does it do more good for lots of people to be slightly more privacy-aware, or is it better to have a very small portion of the population that are super privacy-aware?
You have to decide, and the debate rages on all the time.
If you compromise on the very topic you’re promoting, you don’t care enough.
Wait, really? So you think Matrix is the ultimate form of secure and private “chat” communities? Because if it is not then it is a compromise.
This Lemmy instance for sure as hell is not the most private and secure.
They said a “big” compromise? Why did you skip over their qualifier? Are all compromises equal?
(Test)
In addition to adoption, it takes time for the usability to catch up.
Right now Signal is just as good (IMO better) as Messenger usability wise, but that wasn’t always there.
Matrix needs some time to iron out those issues
I agree to an extent, but usability is not a sufficient condition for mass adoption. I think Lemmy for end users is just as usable as Reddit was, at least for me it is. But people don’t want to leave their communities.
That’s why personally I have a Discord still. There are too many communities I am an active part of on there to abandon Discord outright. Plus all of my friends and family are on there, and I’ve already approached some them about switching and they all have said the same thing I just did.
I wasn’t ever super invested in Reddit, so it was easy for me to abandon it for Lemmy, and I vastly prefer the communities here. Discord though is a different story for now, unfortunately.
Accessibility would be to let people have the choice: making a bridge between Discord, Matrix, Telegram, XMPP, IRC, etc… There are plenty of tools to do that today, it’s not complicated.
Are you able to at least bridge you matrix to the discord? You should, at the very least, be able to do that while also promoting matrix.
Ehh not really; at least if you care about your own anonymity. Sure the communication is as private as the weakest link (or less because now you have to trust the bot relaying it, too), but nobody from Discord would be able to easily look up your identity.
Yes there are bridge bots. But discord breaks them, and bands their accounts. Sometimes
The issue becomes moderation at that point, not a big problem for a larger community, but small communities tend to struggle with moderation with just one hub of communications.
Also, the hardliners wouldn’t be interested in co-existing, that’s against their ethics generally.
Because privacy communities are a joke.
Yeah it quickly becomes a dick measuring contest and shunning people for using different things. It becomes very black/white views, and have some crazy out of touch takes, like expecting your grandma to self host lol. They also confuse anonymity with privacy, like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.
I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.
For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.
This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.
Wow this is great I am surprised to see people talking about this (let alone even being aware of it).
Really refreshing to not have it to be a contest to follow random dogmas.
Lemmy is refreshingly smarter than I was used to seeing on Reddit.
Reminds me of what happened to the pipe tobacco sub after Reddit banned trading of tobacco.
What had been a thriving sub of trading, sharing, well written reviews and friendly discussion quickly became stagnant and started leaning towards people showing off their expensive pipes and tobacco orders. Without the people who came for the trading and stayed to chat, the sub became boring quickly.
like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.
Note that “secrecy” and “privacy” are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.
It’s possible to have one and not the other…
You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).
Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP… or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).
it quickly becomes a dick measuring contest and shunning people for using different things. It becomes very black/white views, and have some crazy out of touch takes
In other words, it’s just like literally every online community in the history of the Internet. When Sir TimBL created the first web page, people probably used it to bitch about how everyone else was doing it wrong.
Lol this is 100% the truth. Privacy communities are a fucking meme. 99% of posts are just people circlejerking about Firefox vs Brave.
I’ve never gotten why Brave got popular in the first place. I downloaded it once and uninstalled within 3 minutes.
Cromite and Waterfox are all I’ll ever need.
Most cryptocurrency communities use Discord or Telegram. It’s such an embarrasment.
I’ve never understood this either, given the whole notion and enthusiasm behind decentralization. I get the trade-offs regarding privacy, security, and convenience, but if you’re really tryna start a movement, and you really believe in the concept and principles of something like cryptocurrency, it seems like your communities and communication channels should also reflect similar values.
Crypto enthusiasts don’t really care or understand decentralization. If you talk to crypto bros you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are very very low IQ morons.
I was at an event and met a crypto bro. He tried to explain to a group of us that btc is like moss and the world is the forest. A couple people legitimately “got it” and began to get excited about crypto.
Omg fuck discord so much
I don’t understand why it’s so popular… It’s a fancy IRC that’s centralized by a single company
fancy IRC
IRC was already “caveman playing with sticks and pebbles” a decade before discord became a thing. It’s really not a good point of comparison and questioning.
Discord became popular for one simple reason: anyone could make a server, share it with a crossplatform link, and others could then try out that link without installing anything. In other words, it became popular because it literally copied Slack and because the Skype era was atrociously bad customization and ease of use-wise compared to the preceding.
Every time I see Slack/Discord et Al. described as such, I wonder if any of these people actually used any of those. By use, I mean actually try out its features, not just treating it as IRC (“just” channels, messages and DMs for text convos).
I hate Discord with a passion, but pretending like it’s just “fancy IRC” is IMHO pretty absurd.
- Better moderation tools
- Easier to do voice/video channels
- Easy to create your own server
- Huge amount of useful bots created by the community
- Features like replies, threads, onboarding screens, and custom emotes
Don’t get me wrong, I wish that we could use a FOSS platform instead of Discord, but 1: people are already using Discord and it’s hard to get everyone to switch platform, and 2: there is no comparable alternative right now
I use it because some of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS that has Wiimmfi support use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Too hard to regrow the, already tiny user base in those cases.
Lazyness and convenience, as always.
