“I am legit probably going to close my servers and delete my account after all this,”
Oh by gods just fucking do it! All year I’ve had friends say shit like this, but then it turns out me and one friend of mine were the only ones with the balls to do it.
We set up a Matrix server for everyone, but then the excuses come rolling in, and they’re still going “I will close down my Discord account…! If it gets any worse…”
Edit: anyway, they’re not my friends anymore. I had hoped they were better people. They certainly talk like better people.
Many people are exhausted, lazy, do not actually have any real principles or discipline, and are unwilling to endure inconvenience.
Unreliable entitled self-centered hypocrites.
I am glad you realized your former friends were lacking in character. It sucks to lose friends, but in the long run, bad people will just drag you down to their own level of miserable mediocrity.
It’s hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It’s the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That’s part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There’s a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that’s where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It’s why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don’t think the people on Lemmy are inherently “better.” There are selection biases, and I’m sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
“If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam” is true, but that’s not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a sigint op; but I’d usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn’t support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it’s just disturbing.
And that’s just the technical things that I care about, that I don’t want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don’t even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it’s a fine substitute for discord if you’re willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
You shouldn’t get hate for it. Most people aren’t that deep into the weeds of their given apps to worry about this stuff, and honestly, that’s probably healthy 😅
The issue is many groups only have a presence on Discord, like community groups. I’m part of a couple local communities, and there’s no way you’re going to get hundreds of people to migrate over without something that affects functionality in a major way finally prompting people to make the switch.
This comic is referring to holding positions in political context where there is an active genocide being perpetrated by the US on 2 fronts both in Gaza and at home via ICE detention centers. Comparing it to people who are struggling to find a rellacement for a chat app because of age verification is either a gross misue of your ability to comprehend analogy, or you really see consumption on par with mass violence and terrorism.
Using Discord is giving your data to AI for its training and to the American government, which is enacting all these terrible things. Ergo, staying on Discord because going onto Matrix is mildly inconvenient is taking a privileged and complacent political stance.
Even if America wasn’t doing these things and Discord wasn’t feeding your data to them, using Discord with their they AI scanning all your messages and activities is still being tolerant towards authoritarian surveillance.
If you think this is limited to Discord then I have some real bad news man, our conversation right now is getting scraped, legally or otherwise. See my other reply.
Never said it was limited to Discord. But it’s the easiest thing to change. Getting rid of Discord and replacing it with something someone you’ve trusted for a long time has set up would be like “Baby’s first activism”.
Nobody is leaving Discord because they’re not feeling the consequences of staying. Those consequences are elsewhere, and a flaw in humanity that keeps consistently disappointing me is if the consequences are not literally happening in front of their eyes, or effecting their own lives, it’s somehow just not real enough. And because it’s not real enough being mildly inconvenienced by missing one or two mostly inconsequential comforts seems like the bigger problem.
Like how people weren’t taking COVID-19 seriously after it didn’t end civilisation over night.
Or like how people aren’t really taking climate change seriously.
A wonderful example of this was when Australia was on fire, and the Americans were calling them crybabies. But then later that year America was on fire and suddenly forest fires were just the worst!
If you can’t recognize the similarity, or how consumption and individualism enables mass violence and terrorism because someone remains unaffected, maybe you should reassess your worldview.
Everything exists in a context. And I don’t think anyone except for you thinks I’m equating consumerism and genocide. I am drawing a parallel. Scale and impact are entirely separate things.
Please don’t try and force a narrative onto me. Look up diffusion of responsibility and scope insensitivity to see what I’m pointing to here.
Jesus christ then yeah you really aren’t interested in any of the things you claim. You realize there is NO ethical consumption under capitalism right? That means there is NO right choice. You do what you can with ehat you have available. If you want to only consume the things that produce exactly zero or less net harm in society you’re gonna have to start drinking your own filtered piss. Now because I understand analogy I can say you are basically already doing that.
And leaning on upvotes are a great way to reveal that you were polling from the get go and only assuming what you said might hit. What if you got downvoted because you were in a different community that was getting a different point across? I now just don’t think you actually have a point you’re just agitating because it’s the popular move
The upvotes I couldn’t care less about lol. I just used it to show that others appear to recognize what I’m saying. It did open me up to being a “polling data farming agitator” I guess, on a niche platform to boot, but 🤷
But “no ethical consumption under capitalism” helps me more than it helps you. That phrase exists to say systemic complicity shouldn’t paralyze people into doing nothing, not that individual and collective choices carry zero weight. If choices genuinely didn’t matter, boycotts wouldn’t be a thing worth having opinions about, companies wouldn’t spend money on PR to avoid them, and states wouldn’t pass anti-BDS legislation to head them off. Discord rolled back their verification push after backlash. They added the credit card mechanism because of it too, their words, not mine. Public pressure, people being active, brought a material outcome that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. You and I wouldn’t be conversing if people didn’t give a shit because there’s no ethical consumption and, according to you, it therefore wouldn’t matter.
So which is it? Either collective consumer/user pressure can move outcomes, in which case individual participation isn’t irrelevant and the mechanism I described (aware, unaffected, therefore inactive) is worth naming when you see it. Or it can’t, in which case the Discord rollback you’d have to explain away didn’t happen for the reason it obviously did.
Naming the mechanism doesn’t mean every instance of it carries equal weight, and I take the point that reaching for the heaviest possible comparison isn’t necessary to make it. But dismissing the mechanism itself with “no ethical consumption, so nothing you do matters” is just a thought-terminating cliche being used exactly backwards.
Hey first and foremost I think you’re a reasonable person and you took a step back in a lot of those points to prove it and I appreciate it.
I want to take a look at the whole throughline here though, someone made a claim that the problem you’re going to run into is large communities that either don’t have the means or the organization to relocate platforms. You posted the comic in response and then immediately came out swinging about how complicit consumption enables terrorism. Does this not seem entirely inappropriate to you? Aunt Tracey’s knitting group got together and had all of their niece’s show them how to use Discord, no one can explain FOSS hosting to them, now Al-Qaeda wins. If I’m being dramatic yes, but only as much as you are in response here.
I stopped paying for Nitro the first time this news came out. I haven’t reupped it. Discord is a miserable experience for me now and is an ugly app without the Nitro options. Doesn’t chanve the fact that the few communities I do belong to are still central to and maintained within the Discord environment. If they move I’ll move but some left infigthing jerk off session isn’t going to be what changes their mind.
My real point is I find anything that leads to further alienation is going to be the wrong choice, and that’s including, for lack of a better term, libjacketing people who don’t have a dog in the race one way or another. We’re all looking for a way out man.
Appreciate that, genuinely, and right back at you. This has been a better exchange than most on the internet lol.
On timing and targeting, I think that’s fair. Leading with that comic in response to “some communities genuinely can’t relocate” was dramatic on purpose, partly to see if it’d draw more than a shrug, and it did exactly that. I don’t think that makes it a good rhetorical choice in that specific spot. The Aunt Tracey case you and described isn’t who I’m actually aiming for, of course, and answering it with the heaviest available comparison muddies a point I still think is real underneath it.
Because I’m not walking back the mechanism itself. Aware, unaffected, therefore inactive shows up identically whether the stakes are a chat app or a policy vote, that’s not me being dramatic, that’s just how scope insensitivity works. But you’re right that treating “won’t switch platforms” as one bucket is its own kind of flattening. Just like Jewish people shouldn’t be treated as a monolith on Israel (exactly as Netanyahu and many others want), not everyone still on Discord is doing it out of laziness or tacit support for what the platform enables. Some are Aunt Tracey. Some have cancelled Nitro and are stuck on network effects they didn’t choose. Those aren’t the people I was actually aiming at, and lumping them in with genuine complacency is my bad. A bit of that twitter short-form limitation coming through lol.
The people I’m actually talking about are the ones who know exactly what’s wrong, have the means to leave, and just won’t be bothered. That’s a much smaller and more specific group than “everyone still on Discord,” and I should’ve said that the first time instead of making you drag it out of me.
For what it’s worth, I cancelled Nitro the first time this news broke too, and that’s what got me actually researching this instead of just being mad about it. I started building a homelab finally, part of which is a Discord alternative. I know not everyone has the hardware, time, or funding to do that themselves, which is exactly why I’m trying to build a bridge between the two, a frontend fork plus a bridge so people can message across both while a community migrates, so nobody feels cut off or left behind in the transition. It’s also why I’m trying to learn Nix flakes and documenting my process and thoughts so I can more easily share it with others who can benefit from my time put in. That’s the actual lever for the Aunt Tracey case, not arguing with strangers about it. FOSS is one of the better arguments I’ve got against the “individual action doesn’t matter”, people building real alternatives because they saw a problem, not because there’s money in it. And that’s what gives me a lot of hope today when we all need it more than ever. All the better if it takes a swing at the bottom line of big corpos, even more so the ones that fund genocide 😉
Scale and impact are pretty damn relevant though. There’s a lot of things I’d boycott due to active genocides that I wouldn’t boycott because of quibbles over data protection and AI. When you draw an analogy between things, it only works if they’re of similar magnitudes, otherwise what makes one scenario in the analogy work doesn’t apply to the other one, and the analogy collapses.
Maybe, but I think it really boils down to convenience and ease of use. People will stick around until the pain of moving to a new platform is less than the pain of staying there.
I think you’re preaching to the choir though. Most people on Lemmy aren’t here because its got the best memes OE anything. It just sucks when it seems like almost everyone in your life shrugs at doing the right thing because it is inconvenient.
Yeah, I agree. Like I said with the first one though, I think it’s relevant to those people who choose not to support their friends, not so much us here.
“It’s one more app” was the answer I got with signal. “I don’t want one more app.” Not an hour later we talked about how they had just downloaded like 4 different airline apps. But one app for me was too much?
You ask someone to see or find some cool alternative thing you’ve been using, they’ll insist it’s either one more app or come up with excuses to stay with the corporate thing. It’s always the corporate thing.
Presumably they don’t have to open all those apps every time they want to chat to their friends, i.e. every day. Presumably they think friendship with you is a two-way street and that you’ll hear their needs and reach a compromise in a way that is impossible with a big corporation like an airline.
But more than any of that, people reference their behaviour to what everyone else is doing. You’re the outlier because you’re asking for something that none of their other friends ask for.
Literally this whenever I mention what Discord has been caught with.
My friend reached out to some people I used to know on Discord now that it’s AI and age verification is finally fully active, and the response he got was “I know, but, I didn’t notice any change”.
Just a random reminder that judging people SOLELY on their consumption practices under capitalism is actually an asshole move. Not everyoneone has the time, patience, or means to make all of the same choices you do, and it’s not their fault that availabilty is commanded by monopolies and consolidated power structures.
You can keep hating if you want but those people will not miss you and you will find that your options are rapidly shrinking at a time when you’re going to need people most.
Just a random reminder that your excuse making is laughable, especially with your inherently pretentious and entitled phrasing.
You either have principles you uphold or you don’t, and then you’re usually a hypocrite, or at least, openly self-centered. Often both.
Us non hypocrites won’t miss not knowing another insecure panicked self centered hypocrite, just as you evidently won’t miss knowing people who actually have standards they judge themselves and others by equally.
Its a very bad plan to rely on people with no principles, so your threat of exclusion from the group of people who despise being inconvenienced and can’t follow through on doing inconvenient things, is… laughable.
What does ‘availability is commanded by monopolies…’ even mean?
What, you don’t have the … mental capacity, brain ability to cancel or delete or stop using one piece of software and instead use another? Yet here you are writing your apologia on a uh, non socially standard message board, so obviously that isn’t true.
Yeah I’m gonna be the asshole and tell you if you can’t make responsible decisions for yourself, I don’t care about you and your inability to stop doing what is ultimately self destructive behavior.
Well I guess you won’t see it, but the block is mutual, you thin skinned, self righteous hypocrite.
If anyone else reads this, I didn’t and wasn’t saying they are stupid. You can be a smart self centered prick or hypocrite. Arguably, casting yourself as a powerless victim instead of ultimately responsible for yourself in a situation where you do actually have the power to make a meaningful choice, arguably, that is a rather intelligent, indirect tactic.
What I was saying was stupid was the reasoning they presented in support of their position.
As well as the notion that more or less, capitalism stole their attention span and/or executive function.
Even if that’s true, that’s an explanation for how an injury occured, not a plan for recovering from said injury.
Funny they call me a doomer as they write hysterical explanations for accepting their apparently unavoidable fate.
I judge people on consumption practices that are easy to change. Not me nor anyone can do anything about all the affordable things we need to survive coming from sweatshops or destroying the environment.
But Discord doesn’t come even close to approaching any such thing, and it costs literally nothing to collectively dump it. Especially if some technical friends have already done all the technical work for you.
Fuck anyone who tries to make that comparison.
You can keep hating if you want but those people will not miss you…
I won’t miss them either. Only what I thought they stood for.
I mean how are you interfacing here on Lemmy? You got an iPhone or are you using technology that wasn’t built by one of the 5 companies trying to actibely destroy the world?
I don’t think yoy need to be putting this much moral burden on Discord that it makes you actively shun people who are otherwise probably not monsters. When I say SOLELY I do mean are you making any other calculation here like whether they’ve been a good friend to you or are someone you might be able to cpnvince down the road? People who still go to Starbucks disgust me but if I have a friend who works for Non-Profit orgs or volunteers time and just doesn’t have the desire to focus on where they’re picking up their 2 dollar drip coffee I might sneer at them when they do it but hate doesn’t enter into it.
Since I already answered most of this in my previous comment, I’ll just copy pasta it:
I judge people on consumption practices that are easy to change. Not me nor anyone can do anything about all the affordable things we need to survive coming from sweatshops or destroying the environment. But Discord doesn’t come even close to approaching any such thing, and it costs literally nothing to collectively dump it. Especially if some technical friends have already done all the technical work _for you._ Fuck anyone who tries to make that comparison.
As for the new thing:
I don’t think yoy need to be putting this much moral burden on Discord that it makes you actively shun people who are otherwise probably not monsters.
I can, I should, and I will. So you can go fuck yourself.
Yeah starting to get the sense that people didn’t follow you to Matrix vecause you’ve gone out of your way to make yourself as insufferably sanctimonious as possible. Can’t blame them.
It sounds like being you is deeply unenviable. Good luck! Being a full on cunt will never convince anyone to be on your side!
Fluxer is still behind on Matrix with clients like Sable.
Sable used to be behind on Fluxer, but Sable made a lot of updates over the months, and Fluxer is more or less currently focusing entirely on the mobile app, while missing some rather important key features, like Federation and E2EE for private chats.
Fluxer is, however, far more easy to set up a self hosted server with. You cna get it done within an hour.
I do agree, but the thing is vendor lock-in is real. Indoctrination by the powerful capitalists does wonders for masses to never leave the app at all. It really takes a changed mindset to switch to alternatives or to quit it entirely.
Vendor loyalty, or letting yourself be in what is essentially an abusive relationship with a corporate product who doesn’t even care you exist, is something ill never understand.
For anyone else thinking about Matrix for public chat rooms, consider setting them up without encryption. This will remove friction for your less patient and less technical users, and may avoid frustrating glitches in some client apps.
There’s not really much point in encrypting a public room anyway, so you might as well keep it simple. The client-to-server connection will still be encrypted, which is the same level of privacy that Discord has. (And you can enable encryption on a room later if you want.)
And for the love of all the gods, don’t make an account on Matrix.org and complain that it’s slow and sluggish. You cannot and should not treat Matrix like a centralised service.
I am still waiting on the teamseak6 fixing the linux screen share or fluxer allowing the desktop app connect to my self hosted server. Then I will leave this ahit behind. Both features should release soonish
There is a q&a channel where it is stated that neither canary or stable desktop client can connect to self hosted instances. It is actively being worked on but it needs a complete architectural redesign so it takes a bit.
Oh by gods just fucking do it! All year I’ve had friends say shit like this, but then it turns out me and one friend of mine were the only ones with the balls to do it.
We set up a Matrix server for everyone, but then the excuses come rolling in, and they’re still going “I will close down my Discord account…! If it gets any worse…”
Edit: anyway, they’re not my friends anymore. I had hoped they were better people. They certainly talk like better people.
Many people are exhausted, lazy, do not actually have any real principles or discipline, and are unwilling to endure inconvenience.
Unreliable entitled self-centered hypocrites.
I am glad you realized your former friends were lacking in character. It sucks to lose friends, but in the long run, bad people will just drag you down to their own level of miserable mediocrity.
It’s hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It’s the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That’s part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There’s a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that’s where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It’s why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don’t think the people on Lemmy are inherently “better.” There are selection biases, and I’m sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
“If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam” is true, but that’s not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
Edit: speech to text typos. Probably missed some.
For what it’s worth, I use it daily with no significant trouble.
I guess it depends on your usage patterns.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a sigint op; but I’d usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn’t support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it’s just disturbing.
And that’s just the technical things that I care about, that I don’t want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don’t even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it’s a fine substitute for discord if you’re willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
You shouldn’t get hate for it. Most people aren’t that deep into the weeds of their given apps to worry about this stuff, and honestly, that’s probably healthy 😅
Except when it involves the livelihood of other people.
The issue is many groups only have a presence on Discord, like community groups. I’m part of a couple local communities, and there’s no way you’re going to get hundreds of people to migrate over without something that affects functionality in a major way finally prompting people to make the switch.
This feels relevant for those people
This comic is referring to holding positions in political context where there is an active genocide being perpetrated by the US on 2 fronts both in Gaza and at home via ICE detention centers. Comparing it to people who are struggling to find a rellacement for a chat app because of age verification is either a gross misue of your ability to comprehend analogy, or you really see consumption on par with mass violence and terrorism.
Maybe you need to sit this out for a bit.
Using Discord is giving your data to AI for its training and to the American government, which is enacting all these terrible things. Ergo, staying on Discord because going onto Matrix is mildly inconvenient is taking a privileged and complacent political stance.
Even if America wasn’t doing these things and Discord wasn’t feeding your data to them, using Discord with their they AI scanning all your messages and activities is still being tolerant towards authoritarian surveillance.
If you think this is limited to Discord then I have some real bad news man, our conversation right now is getting scraped, legally or otherwise. See my other reply.
Never said it was limited to Discord. But it’s the easiest thing to change. Getting rid of Discord and replacing it with something someone you’ve trusted for a long time has set up would be like “Baby’s first activism”.
Nobody is leaving Discord because they’re not feeling the consequences of staying. Those consequences are elsewhere, and a flaw in humanity that keeps consistently disappointing me is if the consequences are not literally happening in front of their eyes, or effecting their own lives, it’s somehow just not real enough. And because it’s not real enough being mildly inconvenienced by missing one or two mostly inconsequential comforts seems like the bigger problem.
Like how people weren’t taking COVID-19 seriously after it didn’t end civilisation over night.
Or like how people aren’t really taking climate change seriously.
A wonderful example of this was when Australia was on fire, and the Americans were calling them crybabies. But then later that year America was on fire and suddenly forest fires were just the worst!
Upvotes say otherwise friend.
If you can’t recognize the similarity, or how consumption and individualism enables mass violence and terrorism because someone remains unaffected, maybe you should reassess your worldview.
Everything exists in a context. And I don’t think anyone except for you thinks I’m equating consumerism and genocide. I am drawing a parallel. Scale and impact are entirely separate things.
Please don’t try and force a narrative onto me. Look up diffusion of responsibility and scope insensitivity to see what I’m pointing to here.
Jesus christ then yeah you really aren’t interested in any of the things you claim. You realize there is NO ethical consumption under capitalism right? That means there is NO right choice. You do what you can with ehat you have available. If you want to only consume the things that produce exactly zero or less net harm in society you’re gonna have to start drinking your own filtered piss. Now because I understand analogy I can say you are basically already doing that.
And leaning on upvotes are a great way to reveal that you were polling from the get go and only assuming what you said might hit. What if you got downvoted because you were in a different community that was getting a different point across? I now just don’t think you actually have a point you’re just agitating because it’s the popular move
The upvotes I couldn’t care less about lol. I just used it to show that others appear to recognize what I’m saying. It did open me up to being a “polling data farming agitator” I guess, on a niche platform to boot, but 🤷
But “no ethical consumption under capitalism” helps me more than it helps you. That phrase exists to say systemic complicity shouldn’t paralyze people into doing nothing, not that individual and collective choices carry zero weight. If choices genuinely didn’t matter, boycotts wouldn’t be a thing worth having opinions about, companies wouldn’t spend money on PR to avoid them, and states wouldn’t pass anti-BDS legislation to head them off. Discord rolled back their verification push after backlash. They added the credit card mechanism because of it too, their words, not mine. Public pressure, people being active, brought a material outcome that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. You and I wouldn’t be conversing if people didn’t give a shit because there’s no ethical consumption and, according to you, it therefore wouldn’t matter.
So which is it? Either collective consumer/user pressure can move outcomes, in which case individual participation isn’t irrelevant and the mechanism I described (aware, unaffected, therefore inactive) is worth naming when you see it. Or it can’t, in which case the Discord rollback you’d have to explain away didn’t happen for the reason it obviously did.
Naming the mechanism doesn’t mean every instance of it carries equal weight, and I take the point that reaching for the heaviest possible comparison isn’t necessary to make it. But dismissing the mechanism itself with “no ethical consumption, so nothing you do matters” is just a thought-terminating cliche being used exactly backwards.
Hey first and foremost I think you’re a reasonable person and you took a step back in a lot of those points to prove it and I appreciate it.
I want to take a look at the whole throughline here though, someone made a claim that the problem you’re going to run into is large communities that either don’t have the means or the organization to relocate platforms. You posted the comic in response and then immediately came out swinging about how complicit consumption enables terrorism. Does this not seem entirely inappropriate to you? Aunt Tracey’s knitting group got together and had all of their niece’s show them how to use Discord, no one can explain FOSS hosting to them, now Al-Qaeda wins. If I’m being dramatic yes, but only as much as you are in response here.
I stopped paying for Nitro the first time this news came out. I haven’t reupped it. Discord is a miserable experience for me now and is an ugly app without the Nitro options. Doesn’t chanve the fact that the few communities I do belong to are still central to and maintained within the Discord environment. If they move I’ll move but some left infigthing jerk off session isn’t going to be what changes their mind.
My real point is I find anything that leads to further alienation is going to be the wrong choice, and that’s including, for lack of a better term, libjacketing people who don’t have a dog in the race one way or another. We’re all looking for a way out man.
Appreciate that, genuinely, and right back at you. This has been a better exchange than most on the internet lol.
On timing and targeting, I think that’s fair. Leading with that comic in response to “some communities genuinely can’t relocate” was dramatic on purpose, partly to see if it’d draw more than a shrug, and it did exactly that. I don’t think that makes it a good rhetorical choice in that specific spot. The Aunt Tracey case you and described isn’t who I’m actually aiming for, of course, and answering it with the heaviest available comparison muddies a point I still think is real underneath it.
Because I’m not walking back the mechanism itself. Aware, unaffected, therefore inactive shows up identically whether the stakes are a chat app or a policy vote, that’s not me being dramatic, that’s just how scope insensitivity works. But you’re right that treating “won’t switch platforms” as one bucket is its own kind of flattening. Just like Jewish people shouldn’t be treated as a monolith on Israel (exactly as Netanyahu and many others want), not everyone still on Discord is doing it out of laziness or tacit support for what the platform enables. Some are Aunt Tracey. Some have cancelled Nitro and are stuck on network effects they didn’t choose. Those aren’t the people I was actually aiming at, and lumping them in with genuine complacency is my bad. A bit of that twitter short-form limitation coming through lol.
The people I’m actually talking about are the ones who know exactly what’s wrong, have the means to leave, and just won’t be bothered. That’s a much smaller and more specific group than “everyone still on Discord,” and I should’ve said that the first time instead of making you drag it out of me.
For what it’s worth, I cancelled Nitro the first time this news broke too, and that’s what got me actually researching this instead of just being mad about it. I started building a homelab finally, part of which is a Discord alternative. I know not everyone has the hardware, time, or funding to do that themselves, which is exactly why I’m trying to build a bridge between the two, a frontend fork plus a bridge so people can message across both while a community migrates, so nobody feels cut off or left behind in the transition. It’s also why I’m trying to learn Nix flakes and documenting my process and thoughts so I can more easily share it with others who can benefit from my time put in. That’s the actual lever for the Aunt Tracey case, not arguing with strangers about it. FOSS is one of the better arguments I’ve got against the “individual action doesn’t matter”, people building real alternatives because they saw a problem, not because there’s money in it. And that’s what gives me a lot of hope today when we all need it more than ever. All the better if it takes a swing at the bottom line of big corpos, even more so the ones that fund genocide 😉
Scale and impact are pretty damn relevant though. There’s a lot of things I’d boycott due to active genocides that I wouldn’t boycott because of quibbles over data protection and AI. When you draw an analogy between things, it only works if they’re of similar magnitudes, otherwise what makes one scenario in the analogy work doesn’t apply to the other one, and the analogy collapses.
Maybe, but I think it really boils down to convenience and ease of use. People will stick around until the pain of moving to a new platform is less than the pain of staying there.
Yes. I agree. Lol.
Another one for you. Basically, it’s gas prices for the individualists:
I think you’re preaching to the choir though. Most people on Lemmy aren’t here because its got the best memes OE anything. It just sucks when it seems like almost everyone in your life shrugs at doing the right thing because it is inconvenient.
Yeah, I agree. Like I said with the first one though, I think it’s relevant to those people who choose not to support their friends, not so much us here.
“It’s one more app” was the answer I got with signal. “I don’t want one more app.” Not an hour later we talked about how they had just downloaded like 4 different airline apps. But one app for me was too much?
Checks out.
You ask someone to see or find some cool alternative thing you’ve been using, they’ll insist it’s either one more app or come up with excuses to stay with the corporate thing. It’s always the corporate thing.
Presumably they don’t have to open all those apps every time they want to chat to their friends, i.e. every day. Presumably they think friendship with you is a two-way street and that you’ll hear their needs and reach a compromise in a way that is impossible with a big corporation like an airline.
But more than any of that, people reference their behaviour to what everyone else is doing. You’re the outlier because you’re asking for something that none of their other friends ask for.
Literally this whenever I mention what Discord has been caught with.
My friend reached out to some people I used to know on Discord now that it’s AI and age verification is finally fully active, and the response he got was “I know, but, I didn’t notice any change”.
Not giving a shit is frequently the best option for the individual, and the individual is the only one that matters.
And I fucking hate those people. All of them will say “but I won’t move until other people move”, and so nobody will move.
Complacency is not a good excuse.
Just a random reminder that judging people SOLELY on their consumption practices under capitalism is actually an asshole move. Not everyoneone has the time, patience, or means to make all of the same choices you do, and it’s not their fault that availabilty is commanded by monopolies and consolidated power structures.
You can keep hating if you want but those people will not miss you and you will find that your options are rapidly shrinking at a time when you’re going to need people most.
Just a random reminder that your excuse making is laughable, especially with your inherently pretentious and entitled phrasing.
You either have principles you uphold or you don’t, and then you’re usually a hypocrite, or at least, openly self-centered. Often both.
Us non hypocrites won’t miss not knowing another insecure panicked self centered hypocrite, just as you evidently won’t miss knowing people who actually have standards they judge themselves and others by equally.
Its a very bad plan to rely on people with no principles, so your threat of exclusion from the group of people who despise being inconvenienced and can’t follow through on doing inconvenient things, is… laughable.
What does ‘availability is commanded by monopolies…’ even mean?
What, you don’t have the … mental capacity, brain ability to cancel or delete or stop using one piece of software and instead use another? Yet here you are writing your apologia on a uh, non socially standard message board, so obviously that isn’t true.
Yeah I’m gonna be the asshole and tell you if you can’t make responsible decisions for yourself, I don’t care about you and your inability to stop doing what is ultimately self destructive behavior.
Jesus christ you too, get a therapist. You sound like the psychotic techno-doomerist version of the ‘in this moment, I am euphoric’ guy.
Lotta words for trying to say I’m stupid, if you were smart you could have done it in at least two less yammering paragraphs.
Blocking you anyway because I don’t even want to know what you think continuing this convo looks like.
Well I guess you won’t see it, but the block is mutual, you thin skinned, self righteous hypocrite.
If anyone else reads this, I didn’t and wasn’t saying they are stupid. You can be a smart self centered prick or hypocrite. Arguably, casting yourself as a powerless victim instead of ultimately responsible for yourself in a situation where you do actually have the power to make a meaningful choice, arguably, that is a rather intelligent, indirect tactic.
What I was saying was stupid was the reasoning they presented in support of their position.
As well as the notion that more or less, capitalism stole their attention span and/or executive function.
Even if that’s true, that’s an explanation for how an injury occured, not a plan for recovering from said injury.
Funny they call me a doomer as they write hysterical explanations for accepting their apparently unavoidable fate.
Or maybe you’re just “normal”, or to put it differently; exactly the kind of person why problems are allowed to continue to exist.
Yeah making all normal people your enemy isn’t healthy. Still recommending a therapist.
Being complacent like you isn’t healthy.
I judge people on consumption practices that are easy to change. Not me nor anyone can do anything about all the affordable things we need to survive coming from sweatshops or destroying the environment.
But Discord doesn’t come even close to approaching any such thing, and it costs literally nothing to collectively dump it. Especially if some technical friends have already done all the technical work for you.
Fuck anyone who tries to make that comparison.
I won’t miss them either. Only what I thought they stood for.
I mean how are you interfacing here on Lemmy? You got an iPhone or are you using technology that wasn’t built by one of the 5 companies trying to actibely destroy the world?
I don’t think yoy need to be putting this much moral burden on Discord that it makes you actively shun people who are otherwise probably not monsters. When I say SOLELY I do mean are you making any other calculation here like whether they’ve been a good friend to you or are someone you might be able to cpnvince down the road? People who still go to Starbucks disgust me but if I have a friend who works for Non-Profit orgs or volunteers time and just doesn’t have the desire to focus on where they’re picking up their 2 dollar drip coffee I might sneer at them when they do it but hate doesn’t enter into it.
Since I already answered most of this in my previous comment, I’ll just copy pasta it:
As for the new thing:
I can, I should, and I will. So you can go fuck yourself.
Yeah starting to get the sense that people didn’t follow you to Matrix vecause you’ve gone out of your way to make yourself as insufferably sanctimonious as possible. Can’t blame them.
It sounds like being you is deeply unenviable. Good luck! Being a full on cunt will never convince anyone to be on your side!
Yes, believe whatever is most comfortable for you to believe, because gods forbid a modicum of principle is demanded.
Only my bestest behaviour towards those most deserving.
And Matrix isn’t the only option out there
and good ole IRC
More fragmentation isn’t really a selling point of alternatives to a market player with a big critical mass and network effects.
Good list, didn’t know about armada yet. Will add one more: https://www.gamevox.com/
Fluxer is still behind on Matrix with clients like Sable.
Sable used to be behind on Fluxer, but Sable made a lot of updates over the months, and Fluxer is more or less currently focusing entirely on the mobile app, while missing some rather important key features, like Federation and E2EE for private chats.
Fluxer is, however, far more easy to set up a self hosted server with. You cna get it done within an hour.
Sable is POG
POG?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pog
I do agree, but the thing is vendor lock-in is real. Indoctrination by the powerful capitalists does wonders for masses to never leave the app at all. It really takes a changed mindset to switch to alternatives or to quit it entirely.
Vendor loyalty, or letting yourself be in what is essentially an abusive relationship with a corporate product who doesn’t even care you exist, is something ill never understand.
For anyone else thinking about Matrix for public chat rooms, consider setting them up without encryption. This will remove friction for your less patient and less technical users, and may avoid frustrating glitches in some client apps.
There’s not really much point in encrypting a public room anyway, so you might as well keep it simple. The client-to-server connection will still be encrypted, which is the same level of privacy that Discord has. (And you can enable encryption on a room later if you want.)
And for the love of all the gods, don’t make an account on Matrix.org and complain that it’s slow and sluggish. You cannot and should not treat Matrix like a centralised service.
I am still waiting on the teamseak6 fixing the linux screen share or fluxer allowing the desktop app connect to my self hosted server. Then I will leave this ahit behind. Both features should release soonish
Can’t Fluxer Canary already connect to self hosted servers?
Anyway, despite how easy it is to set up a Fluxer server, having E2EE is a hard requirement, and the team has been mostly focusing on the android app.
Canary can do it already? I need to check tomorrow when i’m on the pc again
It… should.
I just tested it. It still can’t. Or at least it is somewhere hidden where I can’t find it
Hmm… I’ll ask about it on the dev channel.
There is a q&a channel where it is stated that neither canary or stable desktop client can connect to self hosted instances. It is actively being worked on but it needs a complete architectural redesign so it takes a bit.