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Centralizing communications in the servers of a proprietary for-profit entity will end in unfair censorship every single time. If you advertise your community

by lrvick 3y ago

Centralizing communications in the servers of a proprietary for-profit entity will end in unfair censorship every single time. If you advertise your community on Discord, especially if you are working on something open source, you are part of the problem. Use Matrix, Jabber, or even IRC before giving companies like Discord money. The cute icons are not worth it.

idle_zealot 3y ago
It's not about the cute icons. It's about meeting users where they are. Discord is popular, and users are reticent to migrate or begin using other community-hosting software. That's not to say that I'm against using Free community software, quite the opposite, but the problem is real; if you exclusively host your own Matrix community you will have less participation than if you make a Discord space. That is simply the state of things. I don't know how we get to a better state here, but I'd love to hear ideas. Perhaps just boycotting Discord and encouraging other FOSS projects to do the same could eventually turn the tide?
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Matrix needs to improve the UX a lot. I’m a big supporter and I’ve donated a ton in the past, but I just don’t use it anymore because it mostly doesn’t work properly and a ton of features technically exist but are so painful to use that they may as well not.
  - abnercoimbre 3y ago
    Yeah I've been using them for my indie conferences since 2020. I recently argued [0] that it's not the Year for Matrix, even if Discord now has ads and is doing sketchy stuff typical of enshitification. Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap. [0] https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg [1] https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      It feels a lot like “the last 10% is 99% of the work”. On paper matrix seems like a pretty perfect discord replacement. I think we just don’t realise the incredible feat of engineering that makes discord just work all the time.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      fwiw, https://element.io/labs/element-x https://element.io/labs/element-x is Element’s attempt to spell out that we our priorities are absolutely going towards UX. Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.
  - toastal 3y ago
    Good thing there are alternatives to Matrix that use a lot less resources. It’s not just UX… Matrix by design is wasteful by requiring replication of all messages & attachments of all users in all chats across every server. Most can’t afford to host a multiuser server with the storage bills for this.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Discord is not the problem. Discord isn’t loved by its users, there is no particular loyalty to it. The users like the product, but not the company that makes it. The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord. There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
  - lrvick 3y ago
    Matrix chose to prioritize security, censorship resistance, privacy, and decentralization and be a bit slower with UX, and Discord chose UX over everything else. In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339#issuecomment-2052188082 https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339#issuec... is another facet, too.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Tim OReilly used to say follow the alpha geeks. There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are. I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself. I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
  - vsnf 3y ago
    > easy as fuck Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    This is just three paragraphs of saying the same sentiment: "I don't understand why Discord is appealing despite there being alternatives that I believe are better." People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
- miki123211 3y ago
  There are also moderation issues. This shouldn't surprise anybody by now, but it turns out that a decentralized platform that doesn't do captchas, phone number verification, advanced, closed-source abuse mitigation strategies etc is very much prone to abuse.
- lrvick 3y ago
  My team and I strive to create software dramatically better at security and privacy than anything else that exists, but we offer support exclusively on Matrix and bridged rooms to IRC. We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software. Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.
miki123211 3y ago
Matrix, Jabber and IRC all rely on DNS, domain registrars, registry operators, TLS certificate issuers and ultimately ICAN themselves, and it has been proven[1][2][3] time and time again that they're as trigger happy and as unreliable as any other centralized platform, which is in fact what they are. Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes. This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back. It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  p2p matrix (arewep2pyet.com) doesn’t depend on DNS. Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)
  - miki123211 3y ago
    Because you need some way to find communities/users. You can either do it the TOR way (AKA give everybody a keypair and treat base64-encoded public keys as addresses / handles), but those addresses aren't human-friendly and are hard to remember. You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized. You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices. The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain. The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.

by lrvick 3y ago

idle_zealot 3y ago

It's not about the cute icons. It's about meeting users where they are. Discord is popular, and users are reticent to migrate or begin using other community-hosting software. That's not to say that I'm against using Free community software, quite the opposite, but the problem is real; if you exclusively host your own Matrix community you will have less participation than if you make a Discord space. That is simply the state of things. I don't know how we get to a better state here, but I'd love to hear ideas. Perhaps just boycotting Discord and encouraging other FOSS projects to do the same could eventually turn the tide?

Gigachad 3y ago
Matrix needs to improve the UX a lot. I’m a big supporter and I’ve donated a ton in the past, but I just don’t use it anymore because it mostly doesn’t work properly and a ton of features technically exist but are so painful to use that they may as well not.
- abnercoimbre 3y ago
  Yeah I've been using them for my indie conferences since 2020. I recently argued [0] that it's not the Year for Matrix, even if Discord now has ads and is doing sketchy stuff typical of enshitification. Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap. [0] https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg [1] https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    It feels a lot like “the last 10% is 99% of the work”. On paper matrix seems like a pretty perfect discord replacement. I think we just don’t realise the incredible feat of engineering that makes discord just work all the time.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    fwiw, https://element.io/labs/element-x https://element.io/labs/element-x is Element’s attempt to spell out that we our priorities are absolutely going towards UX. Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.
- toastal 3y ago
  Good thing there are alternatives to Matrix that use a lot less resources. It’s not just UX… Matrix by design is wasteful by requiring replication of all messages & attachments of all users in all chats across every server. Most can’t afford to host a multiuser server with the storage bills for this.
zarzavat 3y ago
Discord is not the problem. Discord isn’t loved by its users, there is no particular loyalty to it. The users like the product, but not the company that makes it. The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord. There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
- lrvick 3y ago
  Matrix chose to prioritize security, censorship resistance, privacy, and decentralization and be a bit slower with UX, and Discord chose UX over everything else. In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339#issuecomment-2052188082 https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339#issuec... is another facet, too.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Tim OReilly used to say follow the alpha geeks. There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are. I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself. I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
- vsnf 3y ago
  > easy as fuck Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  This is just three paragraphs of saying the same sentiment: "I don't understand why Discord is appealing despite there being alternatives that I believe are better." People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
miki123211 3y ago
There are also moderation issues. This shouldn't surprise anybody by now, but it turns out that a decentralized platform that doesn't do captchas, phone number verification, advanced, closed-source abuse mitigation strategies etc is very much prone to abuse.
lrvick 3y ago
My team and I strive to create software dramatically better at security and privacy than anything else that exists, but we offer support exclusively on Matrix and bridged rooms to IRC. We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software. Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.

miki123211 3y ago

Matrix, Jabber and IRC all rely on DNS, domain registrars, registry operators, TLS certificate issuers and ultimately ICAN themselves, and it has been proven[1][2][3] time and time again that they're as trigger happy and as unreliable as any other centralized platform, which is in fact what they are. Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes. This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back. It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.

Arathorn 3y ago
p2p matrix (arewep2pyet.com) doesn’t depend on DNS. Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)
- miki123211 3y ago
  Because you need some way to find communities/users. You can either do it the TOR way (AKA give everybody a keypair and treat base64-encoded public keys as addresses / handles), but those addresses aren't human-friendly and are hard to remember. You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized. You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices. The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain. The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.