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.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      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.