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Bridge set up between Matrix and Discord
(lemmy.world)
We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It's not perfect as emoji reactions aren't visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.
Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!
Discord should be abandoned as it's not in the fediverse and especially because it's not open source. This platform should never be used a an official place for one's own platform.
We are not a bastion of Open Source software. We use it yes, support it yes. There are plenty of things we use FOSS for but we have zero obligations to lock us down to only use FOSS. We use what is convenient and try to listen to the needs of our users.
There is lemmy.world, there is mastodon.world, there is a matrix space and synapse server. Then there is calckey.world a firefish server and I probably forget a few other things that are hosted by @ruud@lemmy.world.
And then yes, there is a discord server.
I think @ruud@lemmy.world and our infra team do PLENTY for the foss community by hosting all of these services, making them available and filing bug reports. They are even in touch with a lot of developers on different foss projects.
Don't forget your manpower is limited. No one is a lemmy.world employee and people need sleep. That leaves 8 hours in a day for literally everything else a person needs/wants to do. Having one service that just works is a load off an all volunteer team's back.
We have people working for Lemmy World around the clock. Most of those services do not require a lot of maintenance once they are set up and configured. Lemmy itself is the biggest PITA but that's why we have a big team. So besides that we try to listen to the community and what they want and if it's possible we will do our best to make it happen. And as I said in my other reply, we will choose what is convenient over what is FOSS.
When you’re constantly getting attacked and having issues, sometimes you need to do stuff you don’t want to do, just to be able to get stuff done.
In a perfect world I think devs wouldn’t want to use Discord, but it’s one of the only options that won’t be constantly taking down with attacks.
Plus Matrix is something that is still new to people and some users are more comfortable with Discord. Many users are still adjusting to the concept of Lemmy and how federation works. Fortunately this bridge will help the two groups connect to each other and maybe in the future we can move to only using Matrix.
Good points and appreciate the perspective!
What has Discord anything to do with any attacks, or preventing any of them?
If lemmy is being attacked, mods need a platform to coordinate.
Discord has DDOS protection through their hoster, which was the primary means of attacks on lemmy.
Did the Matrix servers get attacked?
I can’t answer that, but my rebuttal would be these are targeted attacks, I don’t doubt they would attack matrix if lemmy was using it to coordinate.
Matrix is federated, supports private channels, encryption, and cryptographic user signatures. It's basically un-attackable (unless you open a channel to everyone).
The average user will not give a damn about any of the things you mentioned.
And tell me how to set up a matrix server that is invite only with one link instead of having to invite them all one by one?
Yes for most of the stuff matrix is good and I like it. But pretending it's s complete replacement for discord is simply not true.
Even besides that, which one is more popular do you think? Which one has the most reach and people are most familiar with? Most people don't care if it's foss or not, they'll use what everyone is using.
Ok... let me start by saying that I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just that I don't think those arguments are all that solid.
The topic was to coordinate in case of an attack, so you'd probably want to verify identities and avoid imposters, which Discord "kind of" does through things like its integrations with other ID services... but there's nothing like a good cryptographic signature. Discord has a "report raid" option for a reason, it isn't bulletproof.
Maybe.
A whole server, can be done, but why? A private space, or private room... I guess you still need to use a bot to invite from a link.
There are some bots out there with other interesting features though, like a "knock" option to let admins/mods know of join requests and accept/reject, or a setup where they use two rooms: one public, for everyone to join, with a bot that you can ask nicely for an invite to the private one.
Strictly speaking, all Discord features and more are possible via Matrix bots... but probably not yet available through a user friendly GUI, if that's what you mean.
Nowadays, either is a click away; whether the web UI, or some app in an app store.
Why would you need to verify identity’s to avoid imposters when this is set up ahead of time?
I’m user x here and user y there….
How is this so hard for you to comprehend?
If you think any of that matters (they’ve been attacked before… so I really don’t know why you think it’s not possible) you are hella naive.
And most of those apply to lemmy, and other federated communities, and guess what, all been attacked!
Except the private, encrypted, and verified identities parts. So essentially nothing other than being federated.
Lots of registrations are private, it’s a choice and some require email verification, arguably the same and agin, it’s a choice on your instance.
That... only partially mitigates the identity issue, it doesn't address the others.
How are they supposed to make announcements if the site is down?.. That was the whole point when there were so many attacks/site outtages.
There is this thing called "a status web page". Here, check the one for Lemmy.world: https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
Those were not working properly at that time of the DDOS attacks. I'm not sure if that's been fixed now or not tho.
We did fix it. We also updated the text at the top to clarify. It's only will post announcements if one of us is actively working on a outage. This keeps the noise down for small bilps in monitoring. We have https://dash.lemmy.world if you would like up to the second info.
Nice! Appreciate it.
Bullshit. You should use the platform where most of your users are. And the users are on discord and do not give a single shit about open source.
This is the truth. Do people not have friends that mainly use mainstream services or are people just elitist about open source? This just sucks, because this kind of toxicity really drives normal users away from open source when more people should be driven to it.
For us it's about a community where we take care of our users and provide a environment to foster interesting and respectful conversation. Software is just a means to a end.
Why not just use Reddit then? Its simple and all users are there.
Use it for what ?
Not the same thing, I would use both anyway.
Especially for a company or a public project, you want your content indexed and keep the control. If you don't open a subreddit or sublemmy someone would do it.
For a chat, not the same thing. You want a discord to speak to your users, and a selfhosted matrix to manage your employees and private stuff
The reason people use Lemmy is because Reddit has a monopoly and does stupid things. How confident can we be that Discord won't do this? I'm sure they will because they are a for-profit company. So why don't we start from a platform that power belongs to the user? It is also tragicomic that a platform like Lemmy.world does this.
For your argument; I don't agree. I think Matrix has sufficient features for this job.
It has the features (not sure about that), but it has not the users...
I agree with you but it's just not how it works. Or else nobody would be using mac os or google products.
Also currently, almost nobody want/can/care about selfhosting.
There are definitely pros/cons. I'm not a FOSS monster. I would just expect a platform whose reason for existence is big corps to be more devoted in this regard.
How are we not devoted? We are devoted to our users, not to the FOSS only mantra. I see you run your own instance, I suggest you run that one the way you want it and we'll do our thing here.
You're right, manage it however you want.
He said confidently, without any real experience to back this up
I've been using it for 2 months for both private and group chats.
As a user or as an admin ?
Why should a random admin be more trusted than discord ? (malicious, security, data leaks etc)
Matrix has E2E encrypted chats with user controlled keys and open clients.
Discord doesn't, at all, any of that.
Why should a random admin who can't read your chats, be more trusted than a corporation which logs them all?... well, for starters they can't read, modify, datamine, profile, or leak, what they don't have 🤷
They could use a corrupted version...
Also the risk of data loss, system failure, lack of maintenance...
If you host your own shit then yes go matrix why not.
If not discord is still better. Maybe one day they'il do shit, at this time this is not the case
This is why I asked "why don't just use Reddit" in the first place.
While Reddit worked seamlessly for more than 15 years, it turned to shit within 1 year. The worst part is that we cannot easily switch to a different platform because Reddit is mainstream, and the alternatives are not appealing enough because there are not enough people. Isn't it possible that we will experience the same thing with Discord?
Also, I really respect Lemmy.world's decision. It's not my job to interfere in internal affairs because I'm not a user or admin here. I just wanted to express my opinion, after all, that's what the comment field is for, right? But not again, I will not comment on instance meta communities, as it supposed to be :)
Discord already "shares" data with third parties (has been doing it for years), has full control over your client, and doesn't need to "corrupt" anything to already have access to read, erase, and modify everything.
Matrix servers can't access encrypted content, no matter how "corrupted" they are. Data loss is on the user, you can keep a backup of anything... or not, your choice. System failure and lack of maintenance, are mitigated by identity servers being separate from the chat relay servers.
If you want to trade privacy, message integrity, and user non-supplantation, for some more system stability, then sure, go ahead and use Discord, WhatsApp, Messenger, or whatever (...actually, WhatsApp is slightly more secure than Discord).
It really depends of your activity.
If your country is dangerous or there is any kind of risk with what you do (journalist etc...) then I totally agree with you.
If it's for a gaming community that just need to spam memes and a vocal channel, then you won't convince anyone with these arguments because most people simply don't care.
In this case there seem to be three activities: general chat, official announcements, and attack coordination.
The first makes sense to use the most popular option, the second benefits from source confirmed identities and decentralization, the third benefits from everyone's confirmed identitites and decentralized encrypted chats.
In either case, no technical aspect makes Discord "better" (who cares if the "spam memes and vocal channel" fails and burns), at most the ability to send invite links to private channels without having to set up a bot, makes Discord a "calculated risk".
How kind of you to speak for everyone!
I'm not speaking for everyone. I'm just expressing myself.
Isn't that a fact?