- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Good, stop using Discord to host your shit
Especially Open Source stuff.
I genuinely don’t understand why some open source communities rely so heavily on Discord.
Because you need people to build a community, and like it or not, most people are on discord
There are other reasons but I think this is the main one
Yes but it’s a small effort to sign up for somewhere else. Matrix is just as good and they do care about your privacy.
I find it really weird for a project like Home Assistant where the whole goal of the package is to wrestle control of your home from the big tech clouds. Only to put their own comms data in a big tech cloud… :X
Matrix is not as good. It’s getting there with spaces and matrix 2.0 on the horizon but it’s still a bit clunky.
most people are on discord
There’s a lot of people on Discord (around 200 million monthly active users) but it’s still the smallest out of all the major messaging services that support group chats. For example, Telegram has over double the number of users, and WhatsApp has 10x the users.
For open source projects in particular, something that integrates with Github and Gitlab login (like Gitter which is now powered by Matrix) is a better choice, as developers are practically guaranteed to have one of those accounts.
The article says the code was not hosted on discord. Even if it was, the code does not infringe on any Nintendo copyright. Having a grudge against discord doesn’t make it fair to victim blame
Discord hosted the community, not the code. And that community is now destroyed without even a chance to backup. And Discord can absolutely be blamed because people were warning that this would happen. This is as much a result of Discord’s centralized design as it is of Nintendo’s greed. Now the community has to be reestablished on a new platform from scratch.
They are saying comment OP is blaming the user for using Discord, not Discord.
I only said it wasn’t ok to victim blame, I’m not at all saying discord is the victim.
OK, I misunderstood it. However, this was something that people were warning about for a long time.
Walled garden platforms doing what walled garden platforms do I suppose…
This has nothing to do with being a walled platform. All these maintainers of all these lemmy servers would have to do the exact same thing if Nintendo came to them. And if they refused then Nintendo could go to the server host. And if that didn’t work you would end up in court. It has nothing to do with walled gardens and everything to do with Nintendo abusing dmca.
And also the maintainers being too trusting. They openly discussed pirate ROMs in the server and such.
It does have to do with being a walled platform though. You as the Discord server owner have zero control over whether or not you are taken down. If this was Lemmy or a Discourse server (to go with something a little closer to walled garden) that they ran, the hosting provider or a court would have to take them down. Even then the hosting provider wouldn’t be a huge deal since you could just restore backup to a new one Pirate Bay style. Hell, depending on whether or not the devs are anonymous (probably not if they used Discord), they could just move the server to a new jurisdiction that doesn’t care. The IW4 mod for MW2 2009 was forked and the moved to Tor when Activision came running for them so this isn’t even unprecedented.
I think their point was, all things being equal, a server on discord vs a community on a Lemmy instance doesn’t make a difference. In both cases, the people who ultimately own the platform have to decide whether to just delete them or go toe-to-toe with Nintendo in court.
Hosting everything themselves is a different story. Though…is it possible for a federated instance to exist inside the tor network? Maybe that’s already a huge thing and it never occurred to me.
Yes, or just register it anonymously from a country that doesn’t care
All these maintainers of all these lemmy servers would have to do the exact same thing if Nintendo came to them.
yes but then the community would move to another lemmy host and it would turn into a game of whack a mole for Nintendo. There is no other Discord host.
I mean, Suyu is already jumping to new locations on the internet, so whack a mole/hydra is still in effect
True but any other company with the size to do so would chuck the request in the trash until the court orders came.
Walled garden, more like walled room of 1m x 1m.
Shrinkflation strikes again
Discord sucks so much. I wish it wasn’t so popular.
Every alternative I have tried has a few “big” communities that were active for about four days before completely collapsing on themselves. It’s not that there isn’t a viable alternative, it’s that there is literally no alternative it seems like.
I’ve been tempted for the last year to begin work on designing an experience like IRC, but which includes voice chat and screen sharing capabilities. That’s my dream is a melding of a nostalgic chat protocol, with modern services.
So Matrix protocol?
From my understanding IRC’s biggest flaw is that it requires the recipient to be online in order to receive messages, and any software that includes voice, video, screen sharing, and proper servers would by necessity have very little resemblance to it.
I suppose I mean the resemblance to IRC would be mostly in the user experience. However, I personally don’t want to add persisted server-side messaging either. The novelty for me is that it’s a “here, now” social experience.
The problem with non-persistent messaging is that for most things people use Discord for it is a non-starter. Most people who are doing more than just socializing really don’t want to spend half their time repeating things to people who were at work, asleep, or in a different time zone when the discussion came it. Any serious Discord competitor would need to focus on practically and low barriers to entery, which tend to be directly opposed to novelty.
@sonori the problem is that Discord tried to mix social media with Instant Messaging. This is not something that’s working well. On one of them, you just talk to people, ask them about stuff and whatnot (this is why it is also called *direct* messaging). On other, you want to have stuff that is rather more easily accessible and has various other social functions - and it is also designed around it.
You also have a place where you can centralize all discussion (i.e. the feed) so you can at least get an idea of what is going on.
Discord (as a messaging app, primarily) is totally unfit for these tasks.
Or “How Signal is closer in functionality to WhatsApp by the day, because it turns out people like the functionality of WhatsApp.”
I don’t think my solution would satisfy users who are completely married to the Discord experience. The persisted social media experience isn’t what I’m interested in, personally. I want an old school chat experience, that still works for modern day LAN parties and movie nights.
The company sucks and it being closed source with shitty security and privacy policy sucks but the software is still the best messaging, gaming, video/streaming experience if we’re being honest. Nothing has all the features and convenience when it comes to watching shows and gaming with friends. Theres also never been such an easy way for anyone to run their own irc/etc server with as many features and convenience/price as discord.
They are fulfilling a lot of needs and people won’t leave until something 10x better comes out and nothing is even at 1:1 quality in terms of video, voice, streaming, gaming. Some have messaging and history yes but not even bots and different channels/forums setup. Maybe MAYBE telegram if you’re a super user but and thats only for bots and chats no gaming, watching shows, etc
What’s wrong with the privacy policy? Can’t they literally not see your messages unless you get reported?
the messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, so there’s nothing stopping them from viewing them at their leisure.
They’ve talked about the system, they can’t read your messages unless someone reports them.
Well, that’s one more small group of people learning not to trust Discord. I hope someone is on hand to show them how to set up a matrix server in a jurisdiction not affected by the DMCA.
We need to go back to pre-discord and bring back forums man. Don’t get me wrong, discord has its uses, all my friends use it, but discord killing forums and websites was really bad for the internet as a whole. Like look at dolphin, made before discord, it has its own website, its own forums. Hopefully if Nintendo does ever come after dolphin they’ll at least be able to keep the website and forums up.
or, you know, lemmy? it’s not that much different from forum software, is browsable and federated
I mean Nintendo would nuke the forums too.
Their lawyers don’t fuck around. They’re as bad as Disney.
Unless you’re a forum hosted in someplace like the Netherlands or Russia you’re in range for Nintendo’s nukes.
You’d at least get a chance to migrate if you do daily backups. Not so with Discord.
Thats not what happens with a nuke - they threaten the owner and take everything: backups included.
That’s why you don’t backup on the same provider. You can always backup to the local system with encryption. And they can’t attack the owner in every jurisdiction.
I mean, Suyu already seems to be jumping to a different medium, so it sounds like this situation wouldnt have gone any differently had Suyu had their main support hosted anywhere else. Nintendo would have nuked any of the support locations, and Suyu would then have to jump to a new safe haven
The Netherlands is extremely docile to big business interests.
Discord has no uses that isn’t already covered by other options, though. Their biggest feature is publicity.
You ppl dont remner how utterly tedious forums were. We hake karma-based systems nowadays, we cam move on
Karma is a net negative for actual community creation and meaningful discussion.
Karma+threaded is better than chronologic imo, why do you think it’s bad?
I’ve used forums that had these things 20 years ago. This isn’t new.
Idk, I wasnt around back then. But most forums I stumble upon have none of that
I should add that it wasn’t the norm back then either.
What’s kind of funny is that all of the debates around these systems are exactly the same today as back then, like for example that you should use the voting system to reward quality comments, not use it as an agree/disagree button.
- PoliticallyIncorrect ( @PoliticallyIncorrect@lemm.ee ) 68•1 month ago
Centralization = easy censorship.
Mass centralization. Old school forums like phpBB and SMF and vBulletin and new-school forums like self-hosted discourse are also centralized, but by one small user calling the shots, and it’s very clear immediately which forums are well-run. If a forum isn’t well-run with a good community, a ‘competitor’ will quickly pop up that is, and people will go to it. Sure, you have to have some tech skills but there are easy guides for all of it. Discourse is a simple docker image and it’s the best for features and engagement IMO.
Sure you have to sorry about DDoS attacks and staying patched, but you can use OVH or another host with a large infrastructure that had DDoS resistant servers. Or, god forbid, cloudflare.
Ooh! I would like to hear from all those who were fervently vouching for Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
Perhaps the same might happen to a web forum or matrix channel. But at least you get an opportunity to backup and migrate.
I mean, my response earlier probably still works for those who’d prefer discord as a support channel to other Foss channels: This is far more of a Nintendo bad moment than it is a Discord bad. I doubt foss alternatives would have the lawyers to fight Nintendo better than Discord can. And while my mind immediately thought of a hydra anology that Foss might have, hasnt the hydra already activated anyways? Suyu is already jumping into different hosting mediums
I understand that Lemmy hates Discord, but this is FAR more of Nintendo being an asshat than it is Discord. I’m so far done giving Nintendo my money at this point
edit: I just wanna point out that Corgana posted a response that was straight up false, I called him out on it with proof, he edited his response instead of replying to me to make my response to him look bad, and then when I called him out on that by putting what his original response was in my response, he deleted hos post to try and hide his shame. This user apparently has a history of doing this, and I find this HIGHLY manipulative and scummy, so I’m putting this edit here so that he cant hide his actions by deleting them because I called him out before any damage could be done
Yes it’s Nintendo. But it wouldn’t be this bad without Discord’s design that emphasizes centralization and corporate ownership of user data. Forums can at least be backed up and migrated elsewhere.
Not to mention Discord is not forced to take communities down. There’s lots of stuff like right wing nutjob communities that are still up no issues. Discord is just sucking Nintendo dick, just like the communities that host solely on Discord are sucking Discord cock.
Discord had the heat of litigation forced in their direction, thats the difference between Suyu and the nutjob communities. If some company threatened legal consequences if discord didnt nuke one of the nut job communities, I doubt they would be any less hesitant to nuke said communities than they were for Suyu
Tbf I think a lot of that is just the fault of people starting to use discord in ways it wasnt designed for. It works GREAT as a msn/skype/ventrillo type of program. Its just that people started using it for more than just that, and to my knowledge discord isnt super profitable yet, so I dont blame them for trying to accept any type of use people want to use discord for. Eventually it’ll need to at least break even profit wise.
But they’re not a business they just love making games for real gamers!
Not sure if your sarcasm is towards me or towards someone who’d defend Nintendo, but tbh I’m getting tired of Mega Corps in general (not that I ever really liked them in the first place), so asshats like Nintendo who go above and beyond being a dick because they have the legal team to do so I’m just done giving money to. Indie workers/companies of all fields I’ll try and get money to, but I kind of just want to see the current crop of mega corps sink and not come back
Definitely not directed at you. I’m just so tired of people in general excusing Nintendo for ridiculous behavior because of some romantic view they have of the company.
Like, they DO focus pretty well on making fun games. But that isnt enough anymore to overlook how fucking Cyberpunk they act in our modern boring dystopia
They also focus on making sure nobody can fucking afford them
Welp, at least their price isnt my problem anymore, because I’m done giving them any money
Stop basing your organization on Discord and hosting all your development work there. Don’t subject yourself to the whims of venture capital and enshittification.
Diversify your online presence, and find a local company that will host a matrix server for you.
A forum is perhaps the best support format for a project. Something like discourse. It can be easily migrated in an emergency and it can be searched from a search engine. You also don’t need an account to browse it.
I loving all the discord hate here. I’ve never understood why people like it.
I mean, it’s great for audio and video chats. What I never understood is why people started using discord as a forum, as documentation or as some kind of program (like, why is Midjourney on a public discord chat? It’s probably the worst possible interface).
Discord is excellent for chatting with your friends while playing games, and that’s it.
Convenient, easy to use, large user base, one point registration for multiple communities, tends to simply just work.
But is it the best? Nah. And their increased monetisation drives are annoying.
one point registration for multiple communities,
Federation, or at least some form of single sign-on with arbitrary providers (like we used to do with OpenID), is a better way of solving this.
Everything here is basically text and maybe images if your lucky. In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
You could probably link account sign in, but any real-time stuff would likely be limited to within that single instance unless you create a whole alternative method of federation that would still only be available between thouse certain supported instances.
It’s also a whole lot more expensive to host, unless you go peer to peer in which case good luck, and vulnerable to bad actors massively running up hosting bills even if you can protect against denial of service attacks.
It would be nice to see, but there is a reason why Matrix is the closest anyone’s come and it’s still more a proof of concept then an actual platform you could direct family or random strangers to.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
A large number of Discord servers just use text.
For video, maybe integrate into something that already exists, like Jitsi? Instead of trying to build one single app that handles everything, maybe it would be nice to have a suite of apps that all work together and can all use the same login.
A lot of video conferencing systems are already mostly peer-to-peer, at least for enterprise apps. Skype was originally peer-to-peer too. NAT traversal is usually provided by STUN servers. There’s some issues like that (for example it reveals the user’s IP addresses) but you could proxy everything through a TURN server to solve that.
Peer to peer is the best way to implement end-to-end encrypted communication.
Having said that, very large groups can benefit from a client-server model, like what Zoom does.
One of the main reasons why I use Discord nowadays aside from the fact that my gaming community is there is for its extremely low latency video streaming.
I tried to use other meet softwares but the latency was 10+ seconds. Not useful when I need immediate feedback. Discord offers the quickest and most reliable way for me to get someone else looking at my stream in real-time.
I’ll be looking for alternatives because they’re, of course, not doing anything impossible for others to replicate, they just made it the default.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
That falls into the same two fallacies as the ones of complainers against Youtube alternatives:
- that in order to offer an alternative to a service you have to replicate all of it
- that you have to provide an alternative to only one service
Like, really, you don’t need to replace all of Discord, only the parts that matter. The alternative to build not to Discord but to “Discord is being used for documentation” already exists, it’s called web forums. Ditto, the alternative to “Discord is being used for communities” also exists, it’s called XMPP or IRC or Matrix depending on who you ask. The alternative to “Discord tracks user data” is simply called “you don’t do it”, etc.
Like, we are literally on Lemmy. Just about the first thing that we Get It from the internet is that centralization is bad, be it Products or Services.
Forgive me, but I fail to see how expecting video/voice conferencing software to actually be capable of carrying video/voice could be described as a fallacy. It seems to me like that is kind of a core functionality to any software trying to fulfill that role.
IRC has nothing to do with the subject, and while XMPP/Matrix are promising they are still a long way from being able to talk someone without significant tech expertise and who has never seen them before into jumping onto a call in five minutes or so without touching a single setting. That is the fundamental part of Discord, Teams, Skype, or Zoom that matters.
Lemmy isn’t exactly voice conferencing software, so I don’t know why you would want to collaborate on software development work with it as a forum. As for documentation, a static site is probably the best place for that, although in this case keeping it off the clearnet was presumably a core consideration.
See, it’s the entire premise that voice conferencing is needed to have a replacement for “Discord is used for documentation”. It’s not. Almost by definition. If anyone wants videoconferencing there’s Jitsi. That’s the thing I’m aiming to: you won’t ever to get anyone to “replace” Discord if they have to replace all of it. Capitalism doesn’t allow for that. We are trying to do better here. Splitting problems into their component and significative parts makes them much easier to solve.
The closest use case that in the case of these kinds of communities would even need videoconferencing would be something like “Discord is being used for live tech support for modchipping Switches” and for that case there’s also already established alternatives… and it would be wise to not implement for that anyway.
Except this preticular discussion thread isn’t about Discord used as documentation, but Discord use in general as a videoconferencing tool. I also imagine the project started using Discord for conferencing, and documentation grew up around it because everyone was already there, emulation is very finicky, and it wasn’t out in the open for Nintendo to find indexed by Google. They could have used Jitsi, and the same thing would have happened.
A video conferencing program like Discord is hardly the first or best place to put software documentation, but in this case it being hard to find was presumably the point.
It also seems odd to insist that Capitalism doesn’t allow Jitsi, Matrix, or XMPP to exist, when they and many other open source projects do. Jitsi is owned by a major cooperation, but Matrix and XMPP arn’t to my knowledge. Rough around the edges and in need of significant work, yes, but not prevented from ever exsisting.
Video, voice, and text messaging are together the signifiant part of Discord as you put it, it doesn’t make sense in order to split them apart any further.
I would bet all the pieces to make a better communication suite than discord are there. They just need to be put together into a package and marketed well.
In other words: Matrix.
I’ve never tried Matrix but I’ve heard good things about it.
It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It’s free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Actually the ansible playbook creates a bundle of docker containers so you get the best of both :)
It’s good enough and everyone has it and knows it
I’m not about to even attempt to ask someone in a game if they’ve got matrix because the answer is going to be no
I think it’s like Windows and Reddit. People don’t use it because they like or love it, but because most are there. Sometimes the only way to interact with the developers or find new people in an active community.
Yeah me either. It spies on your computer, they ban third-party clients. It’s owned by bytedance. When I use the web version it kicks me out every day and I have to log in again.
I don’t mind it being around but I really hate the way open source projects (e.g. Home Assistant) use it as their only platform for collaboration. The make me give up my data just to collaborate with them on a privacy tool.
sad. but SO predictable that not having a plan B for this situation is laughable
Guess what? This will make them stronger. Suyu’s GitLab repo was already DMCA’d, after that they set up their own Forgejo instance. They also get their website running again (It was down for a few days, I don’t know the reason) and they’re now strong and independent. Moving away from Discord will only increase their independence.
I wonder if the codeberg site is vulnerable to such laws. I think they operate from the EU.
They’re based in Germany, so it should be fine. But I think they said at some point that they don’t want any trouble with DMCA code.
Germany specifically
Suyu died though. Right now the only actively maintained Yuzu fork is Sudachi, which is only maintained by a single person.
Apparently there was some drama about the Yuzu devs using code which came from a switch SDK as a basis for emulator code, which kind of poisons the whole codebase.
Suyu died though.
What makes you think so?
Apparently there was some drama about the Yuzu devs using code which came from a switch SDK as a basis for emulator code, which kind of poisons the whole codebase.
But if this was in Yuzu, it’s also present in every other fork, right? Also, was this a leaked Nintendo SDK or something 3rd-party?
What makes you think so?
The devs said so. Check r/Suyu, that seems to be where a majority of the updates are being posted. I think there was a link to a pastebin post somewhere there as well.
The SDK mentioned was first party, presumably leaked but I’m not completely sure. And yes, that means it would be present in every other fork as well.
Edit: here are some of the links I’m talking about:
https://www.reddit.com/r/suyu/s/TqSWDlnsGs
Edit 2: worth noting that the “founder” (as they call themself) still wants to continue on the project but I believe a majority of the devs left.
Edit 3: I found the archive link from someone on the Yuzu team showing they had access to a leaked switch SDK: https://web.archive.org/web/20210114104638/https://twitter.com/Slashiee_/status/1349557173970341890
I don’t know how much of this evidence is real but if any of it is they’re going to have a much harder time finding devs willing to contribute to Suyu, even if development does continue.
That happens if a single company controls the community (Reddit, Discord) and its closed source on top of it…
Maybe they should have picked any of the available chat options that aren’t totally proprietary?
What I find hilarious is that these are just minor hiccups. The emulation scene has existed for a long time and will continue to exist for a long time. None of these recent measures will do anything to stop it as long as the emulator devs aren’t trying to make money off Nintendo IP.