This is my primary account. All content contributions should only be coming from this account.
Other accounts owned by me are strictly for moderation purposes, and they are:
The maintainer is going to use whatever platform they want.
Those who want support will use whatever platform the maintainer is available in.
If you’re an end user needing support but refuse to use the mechanism provided, you’re welcome to read the code yourself.
Where is this coming from?
There are far more people willing to criticize how open source projects are run than people willing to contribute and it’s just frustrating. Unwarranted criticism contributes a lot to why open source developers stop.
And just look at this whole post’s comments – it’s full of several people demanding/upvoting for comments saying that maintainers need to shift to another platform due to the posters’ personal convictions. Generally speaking, the discourse has been unkind and disrespectful of the time of project maintainers.
But the only big problem I had with you was pushing the “if you have nothing to hide” fallacy in any shape or form.
In >99.99% of cases, I would agree this is a terrible justification. One of extremely few exceptions, IMO, is a community support chat that’s intentionally trying to be open.
Project maintainers just want somewhere cheap/easy/low-effort/accessible to host stuff. Because Discord is the “in” thing right now, contributors are also more likely to lurk in Discord than installing another app.
You’re free to not use Discord for any reason you desire but don’t expect anyone to cater to you. Especially if you aren’t putting in work to support a project.
I don’t see how you intend to convince anyone to ditch Discord by deliberately misunderstanding a simple point.
Many support Discords expect people to chat in a channel, not DM. Many issues will be in the public, in a channel. There is simply no privacy issue here for the vast majority of problems.
Discoverability of past issues is another problem, but that’d still be problematic if you’re on Matrix.
I’m keeping my project’s community on Discord. People who use my stuff seem satisfied.
This thread shows that merely having a Discord acts as a good filter to inhibit users who aren’t going to be helpful.
I’ll simplify:
How is there is a practical privacy issue here when the purpose of the chat is public support?
There should be no expectation of privacy in a public support chat/forum to begin with.
Let’s not be unreasonable with dogmatism here.
Open source isn’t a religion. I put code out there because I made something useful and believe others will find it useful. I will answer questions if it takes little to no effort to do so.
I do not put code out there for the purpose of running infrastructure for end-users. This is an unreasonable waste of time. I do enough of that at work.
“Help, your library isn’t loading the Foobar files created in Bazfoo 2024” is not something that is sensitive data.
It is not my responsibility to manage random people’s baseless paranoia as a project maintainer.
What are you exchanging on Discord where this is an issue?
I’d hope your doctor isn’t joining your OSS project discord to conduct appointments or anything.
Running and managing a server takes a non-zero amount of work and is a commitment…if you’re actually serious about it.
That’s work wasted on sysadmining and not going into project development.
There’s just some really salty people who browse /All.
I’ve banned a couple of people who’ve been downvoting random things in my instance because they don’t even live near where my region targets (based on their post history).
For fun, look at the Tesla communities, it’s littered of random downvotes from salty people.
I’d eventually like to see a feature to limit voting to communities someone is subscribed to. Sure it can be worked around but it would take a smidge of effort. But there are probably a trillion more important things in the backlog.
FWIW there are adapters to go from Canon RF to EF. I haven’t personally used them, nor am I experienced enough to weigh in on if they are worth it, but it might be something to look into.
I literally just moved to mirrorless because I saw the writing on the wall and also had to decide whether to invest in lenses on the format going away or the new format. I figured I would be futureproofing myself for a bit.
Not paid by them but I use it. I enjoy it because it lets me filter out bullshit sites and prioritize others. I’m not aware of another engine that does it to the degree of Kagi.
Basically everything I need to look up for work is now always on the top half of the first page just by pinning documentation sites and general reference like Wikipedia.
Completely disagree on the scalability argument and I find it silly.
Most instances are small. Not everyone is going to run a 20,000 person instance where all 20,000 show up on the same day.
If you’re a big instance like lemmy.world, then sure, I can buy the scalability argument, but once you’re at that point you’ve likely established that there is an active and engaged admin team.
As a bonus, it even serves as a great asshole filter. If someone gets upset they had to wait a day for an approval, imagine how they’d act once they’re in.
People need to understand there are risks if they’re going to host an open server and are ultimately responsible for how it interacts in the network.
Keeping defederation minimal requires a high degree of trust with all instances, regardless of size.
If the instance has open reg, hosted spam for multiple days, has no activity from the admins for ever, and might be several versions behind, that’s entering “I simply don’t trust your ability to host” territory.
I run a small instance. I turn on registration applications, spot-check new accounts to make sure there isn’t spam, keep an alert active so I get notified when updates are available, and occasionally post from an admin account to indicate it’s an active instance. I even check reports at least once a day. This all takes very little effort to do. If you’re a small instance, the burden of proof is on you to show that it’s being maintained.
Some of the spam instances have had spam up for several days now. Sure, maybe one or two people may be on vacation and aren’t aware, but I doubt that’s the case for every host.
We’re fortunate the spam (at least what I’ve seen) didn’t blatantly display malicious content.
Not all of the ones involved in the spam attack….
IMO by default everyone should put up a barrier to registration, be it manual approvals or email verification.
Both have their own set of flaws and can establish a sense of false security, but it’s the bare minimum to slow down spam registrations.
I’m working on an instance-level spam filter that acts on all federated content to take this into consideration for the instance I run…
Obligatory I think X is a shithole etc etc etc
That out of the way, Yulia’s account seems to be back now.
Having a lot of spam won’t help adoption either.
Nothing.
It’s perfectly fine for the class of Linux user that only has a slight-to-none Vitamin D deficiency.
The downvote button already gets used as a “I disagree” button. Distributed moderation gives more teeth to a “I disagree” button that isn’t particularly helpful.
Practically speaking, go to the Technology community on LW. A lot of perfectly sane and rational takes get downvoted because a bunch of people simply disagree or it isn’t on the right side of the fanboyism everyone’s expected to have on some topic.