This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users.
A week ago Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. This wasn’t very well received (about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements). The comments on that post were turned off, presumably to avoid backlash.
Before that, announcements about the instance used to be posted to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world. This time, the information was posted on the Discord server instead.
I don’t agree with this. Having to use a proprietary platform to participate in an open-source one goes against the very purpose for me, especially when the new solution isn’t really an improvement (as before the information about the platform was closer to it).
Edit: Corrected the announcements community name.
Update: Lemmy.world finally released an announcement and promised they would inform about similar actions and gather feedback in advance in future.
This makes no sense to me. Did they provide a reason for choosing Discord of all things? What was wrong with making announcements on Lemmy? Why wouldn’t they choose to make announcements in another federated format in addition and not instead of lemmy? Like, I’m not super tech savvy but I’m sure they could set up an RSS-like feed to send out alerts? IDK
With my very limited understanding of it, I believe Discord was something mostly for “as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down”.
But still, why pick a proprietary platform?
I guess cause it is entirely separate from Lemmy, so can act as a different option.
Also it’s real time posting ( like a chat, not a post) and many people already have it.
As a secondary, it’s not a bad choice.
What would you recommend?
Another Lemmy instance would also get ddosed
Yeah, this is where I am. I’m a .world person, and I honestly think the admins have been doing a good job generally. I’m not a real Discord person, but I joined theirs after it was recommended a few times. Like you, I think using it as a backup because of the ddos attacks taking them down so much is reasonable, but they should use c/announcements as the primary communication venue. Note that there are a number of people on it who really seem to be enjoying the real time chat, and some even using the voice chat option, so it seems to be serving some people, at least.
I also think they made a potentially understandable mistake on blocking these communities, which I said at length in that thread. I’m inclined to think one issue with the overall Lemmy paradigm is that we have a lot of hobbiests as admins - people who may not have much experience with that, who don’t have legal teams, and who might be gun shy about any potential litigation. We can’t expect any person who decides to run a Lemmy instance on their laptop to have much feel for what content they’re liable for and what’s completely safe, so stuff in the grey area is going to make some people squeamish.
Matrix
At this point they should just make a new instance for their announcements lol
Maybe they wanted something off Lemmy so that the attackers can’t target both the main and the backup, with the same system.
Isn’t this where Mastodon.world kind of comes into play? Off Lemmy but still a federated service, can even pop whatever LemmyWorld status account there in to one’s RSS readers or whatever.
Um… @mwadmin@mastodon.world
@woelkchen Hi, I am on holiday so not sure what the question is about exactly, but announcements are done on Lemmy and when we’re down you could check the status page. Discord is not for that.