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.
I want a nicely bridget matrix - discord channel, so that the individuals of the community can choose themselves
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
Shun!
Lol this is 100% the truth. Privacy communities are a fucking meme. 99% of posts are just people circlejerking about Firefox vs Brave.
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
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.
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.
If you legitimately don’t understand why it’s popular, you are seriously out of touch.
- 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
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 4•1 year ago
I don’t understand why it’s so popular…
It’s a fancy IRC
The answer is in the question. Even the centralization is not a bad thing for most people.
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.
Most cryptocurrency communities use Discord or Telegram. It’s such an embarrasment.
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.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
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.
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.
Lazyness and convenience, as always.
Thank you! It’s basically impossible to use discord anonymously
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
you can use webcord as a frontend qhich is better but it still is a shitshow
A majority stake of Discord is owned by Tencent, which is a Chinese data collection company required by law to pass personal user information to the CCP. Discord runs on an unencrypted network.
I’m just stating some facts. Make your own judgement call.
This, discord saying no to Microsoft’s offer to buy them out few years back shows they know what they got.
Because conversations about increasing privacy doesn’t need to be private. It’s usually about learning about other tools and that they exist.
This only makes sense if discord is a common entry point into the community which seems unlikely to me
It probably isn’t, but it’s probably a good place to get a quick answer about something.
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.
People who dislike discord and want a good alternative besides matrix should check out revolt.chat <3
I guess people just prefer and are more active on Discord
“I guess people just prefer and are more active on Facebook Messenger”
“I guess people just prefer and are more active on TikTok”
“discussing privacy on discord” that should be a joke anyways i created privacy@conference.jabbers.one so join if you want
Wanna go crazy? Use SimpleXchat
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) 4•1 year ago
why
Because this community (along with all privacy subreddits/communities) are a fucking meme.
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.
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.