Why does this community, which is privacy oriented, use Discord rather than Matrix?
Why does this community, which is privacy oriented, use Discord rather than Matrix?
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?
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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.
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If you compromise on the very topic you're promoting, you don't care enough.
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Not compromising at all would be not using the internet though. Probably live in a cottage somewhere in the middle of nowhere too.
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The people that need a topic to be promoted are the people outside of the topic. A place where privacy and non privacy focused individuals can meet is needed to atract and teach new users.
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Isn't Lemmy itself a big compromise?
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We all compromise somewhere, it's just a question of where the line is. Even Richard Stallman makes concessions for things like Firmware and hardware being closed source.
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I want a nicely bridget matrix - discord channel, so that the individuals of the community can choose themselves
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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
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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.
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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.
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How is this more accessible? Have you read the installation instructions? How would someone that has no IT background even manage to configure this? Even just grabbing a binary from the releases page is complicated for a lot of people.
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Because privacy communities are a joke.
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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.
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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.
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Pfft. My gramgram self-hosts on her own LFS build with a hardened kernel and custom written SELinux policies. All your grandparents need to get on her level.
Disclaimer: Everything here is a lie.
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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).
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Shun!
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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 removed about how everyone else was doing it wrong.
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Most cryptocurrency communities use Discord or Telegram. It's such an embarrasment.
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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.
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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.
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And that's where you realize that them defending decentralization is just trying to have a nice-sounding argument instead of assuming their dreams of getting rich with new tech
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you don't trade off your security, instead you increase it.
for Bitcoin you can increase your privacy with various tools like coinjoin and lightning network with convenience tradeoff
or you just use Monero.
If you have questions feel free to ask in Monero@monero.town
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You should check privacy coin Monero.
Matrix and XMPP is pretty much popular in XMR community
And often discord and telegram channels are bridged with other platforms.
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Oh I hate communities that use Telegram. I mean, sure, I guess there's better privacy, but Telegram was just not built for that. Messages always get lost, and there are no channels, which means no info channel, so they have to try and cram everything into the description.
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Should be telling the only two services they use is one infamous for fuck tons of child grooming and one infamous for fuck tons of terrorism.
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Omg fuck discord so much
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I don't understand why it's so popular... It's a fancy IRC that's centralized by a single company
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Because it has significantly more features than IRC and it's dead simple to spin up your own "server" where you aren't beholden much to "admins" or whatever.
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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.
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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.
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If you legitimately don't understand why it's popular, you are seriously out of touch.
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- 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
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Lazyness and convenience, as always.
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I've used the Discord bridge before; it works pretty well, and allows Matrix users to practice better (identity & tracking) privacy if they want. There is none, in Discord.
It does require (a) the Discord community admin to allow the bridge, and (b) some playing with configuration of the bridge to get banning working.
The biggest issue with Matrix is how privacy-respecting it is. Any public forum with anonymous account creation is subject to spam bots, and requires more work by admins. The biggest complaint about the bridge, and why so many Discord admins do not allow it, is because it greatly increases the spam they have to deal with. Kicking and blocking do work fine through the bridge, but it's still a distraction requiring constant vigilance.
Matrix needs better admin tools (where have we heard that before?) Mjolnir is good, but the freely hosted instance was shut down a year or so ago, so it's not available to casual users. And taking on running a service just for a community bridge is a silly requirement.
My points are, that it's not an either-or, but that it requires work. It's a question of commitment, not possibility. c/privacy could have a Matrix-first, privacy-friendly approach and still offer Discord for privacy casuals; it's just harder.
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People who dislike discord and want a good alternative besides matrix should check out revolt.chat <3
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Because conversations about increasing privacy doesn't need to be private. It's usually about learning about other tools and that they exist.
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This only makes sense if discord is a common entry point into the community which seems unlikely to me
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It probably isn't, but it's probably a good place to get a quick answer about something.
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Discord UX be like
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Funny, I feel the same way about Matrix clients, instead. They're not that bad, but they could use quite a bit of polish (and they also don't rake in millions a year, so it's not an exactly fair comparison).
I guess it just comes down to what you're used to
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"discussing privacy on discord" that should be a joke anyways i created privacy@conference.jabbers.one so join if you want
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I guess people just prefer and are more active on Discord
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"I guess people just prefer and are more active on Facebook Messenger"
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“I guess people just prefer and are more active on TikTok”
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Because this community (along with all privacy subreddits/communities) are a fucking meme.
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Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.
There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.
Edit: all those people saying we can't be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.
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i dont think anyone using google services is "privacy conscious"
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Yes, Google even read your mails, it's sooo private. Its right that Google offers good services respect quality, but its a privacy nightmare and nowadays there are very good alternatives out there, even when they are also propietary. Eg, YT is maybe the best streaming platform, but full of ads, clickbaits, tracking and other crap, now even blocks videos if you use some adblockers. Because of this a lot of people translade subscriptions and playlists to Odysee, also privacy but way better respect privacy and few ads (online service of IMDB)
Discord is certainly not the best but also not the worse (see Reddit, X, Fakebook, WhatsCrap, etc), but offers a lot of features which other platforms don't have.
Privacy in internet finish when you go online, the user can only patch the worst leaks more or less succesfull, beginning with the worst privacy and security hole, himself. Read the TOS and PP of an soft or service you want to use, check the sites with Blacklight, Webkoll, UrlVoid, Exodus Privacy, AV or similar, even if it is FOSS, which no neccesarly is a security or privacy feature, tracking APIs from Google, Amazon, Facebook and M$ are also FOSS and included in a lot of FOSS in this Microsoft site called GitHub.
You don't need a tin foil hat, but common sense in the internet.
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Some shocking answers here 🤷♂️
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It's the same issue with a lot of open-source software projects. Many use proprietary/closed-source services to communicate with users or develop the software itself. It's quite ironic, really. 🤦♂️
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Same reason why people use Google products when they could use something else (and note very often that they can't): it's more convenient because Google products are better. Because Google has the clout to make them better and bury the competition even more. which is the very definition of monopolistic anti-competitiveness.
Element is garbage in my experience. It's just not very user friendly, it's slow, it's bloated (and no wonder, it's a React application) and it's not very stable on the desktop. I tried my best to like it but I just can't: it's awful. And unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that's the best Matrix client out there.
I'm sure the Element people are trying their hardest and I don't fault them. But I'm pretty sure they don't have the resources to make it better, unlike Discord. So people staying on Discord is a self-perpetuating prophecy, until someone commits the resources to make Matrix an easy, fast and attractive proposition.
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I use element for work and don't have many complaints. I miss the gifs because I'm a dork but don't find it bloated, garbage, or unstable. I have more complaints about discord to be honest.
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When leading a chunk of the privacy community you could really use cryptpad (for online documents) and such alternatives.
Good alternatives do exist, and they're perfectly fine. Unless huge rounded corners and empty spaces on the UI are a requirement, though..In some cases it's fine, though, like youtube has pretty good proxy services (for now...) that are basically effortless to use for viewing videos. Until a usable alternative emerges.
About Element: yes it's garbage because the backend's API design was.. not good. End of the year they are finalizing an API that works much better, and let's clients not to waste resources. There's a new element app for android that takes advantage of it, and I can tell from experience, it's usable now even on a throttled mobile connection when you have not opened it in a long time (weeks). They will also fix the web client.
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What benefit is there to use Matrix for a public community? It's not like there is extra privacy since anyone can see the messages.
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You're still feeding a proprietary platform your information (not just the messages) directly. In this case in particular, if some privacy conscious person wanted to discuss with others and didn't have a Discord account for the same reason, they'd have to sign up and give up some of that privacy
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I don't disagree with that. Obviously for private messages it's a different scenario.
Also, doesn't matrix.org have almost all metadata on most users anyways? Unless you explicitly block everyone that uses it from ever reaching you.
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Discord is just the preferred platform for that sort of group-based text comms. It's better both in a technical sense (more feature-rich and more reliable), and a UX sense, for a majority of users. It's also free to set up a server, which gives it a huge boost to usability. Matrix has a long way to go if they want to compete.
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It's not free to set up a server on discord. It's not possible at all.
I know what you actually mean, the word server means that the mods and admins have control over it and they have control over how data stored on the server gets used. The discord definition is misleading in this regard.
On discord, neither of these are true: if the admin's account is banned (or "suspended" until a phone number is given) they don't have any control anymore, and regardless of this they don't have any control over how the data is used (which includes private date like messages of users, how much and when are they online, etc).-
Yes, I'm using Discord's terminology for a discussion about Discord. What they call a "server" is not actually a server, but that's the term they went with.
I could've used the Discord dev term "guild", since that's how "servers" are referred to internally and in the code, but I don't think as many people would understand what I meant by that.
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This is total bullshit. You should start at the fact that Discord is owned by a chinese company. Then discuss everything else. To me Discord looks and acts like a spoiled child: too many things going on, too many flashy stuff, too manny obnoxious "features".
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You should start at the fact that Discord is owned by a chinese company.
Discord Inc is a privately-owned American company. If you're referring to Tencent, they are investors, and not owners. And they're only one of several foreign investors. As for ownership, two dudes share majority ownership of the company.
Then discuss everything else.
Maybe you should do ten seconds of Googling before discussing anything.
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Another person who thinks Discord is the equivalent of PRISM for China because Tencent helped with funding them? You're welcome to go work for them. They mostly live in Sanfranciso and got a whoping ~5% of their startup money from Tencent.
As a light reminder, Discord has been blocked in China since... 2018?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord
https://discord.com/open-source
https://venturebeat.com/games/hammer-chisel-pivots-to-voice-comm-app-for-multiplayer-mobile-games/
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Nowhere in the post does OP claim that Discord's privacy issues are China related...
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Right, he's just super concerned about privacy while speaking in hushed tones without naming anything because... Of privacy gnomes.
None of the other people talking about China owning Discord are here either lol.
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Light remind me why china banned it?
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China bad USA good because USA got all those data protection and privacy laws right??
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Exactly lol. It's such a silly sentiment.
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