On the side bar it lists the following:
- [Matrix/Element]Dead
- Discord
“Discord” is an active link, but the Matrix link is completely inactive. Not only is it inactive (which could have be excused as a broken link), but it is also manually labeled as “Dead”, as if there is no intention of making it work. How can a community that is focused on privacy willingly favor a service that is privacy non-respecting when a perfectly functional privacy-respecting alternative exists?
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
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- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
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- 2.43K Posts
- 57.3K Comments
- Modlog
It’s the same issue with a lot of open-source software projects. Many use proprietary/closed-source services to communicate with users or develop the software itself. It’s quite ironic, really. 🤦♂️
Because this community (along with all privacy subreddits/communities) are a fucking meme.
“discussing privacy on discord” that should be a joke anyways i created privacy@conference.jabbers.one so join if you want
Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.
There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.
Edit: all those people saying we can’t be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.
Yes, Google even read your mails, it’s sooo private. Its right that Google offers good services respect quality, but its a privacy nightmare and nowadays there are very good alternatives out there, even when they are also propietary. Eg, YT is maybe the best streaming platform, but full of ads, clickbaits, tracking and other crap, now even blocks videos if you use some adblockers. Because of this a lot of people translade subscriptions and playlists to Odysee, also privacy but way better respect privacy and few ads (online service of IMDB)
Discord is certainly not the best but also not the worse (see Reddit, X, Fakebook, WhatsCrap, etc), but offers a lot of features which other platforms don’t have.
Privacy in internet finish when you go online, the user can only patch the worst leaks more or less succesfull, beginning with the worst privacy and security hole, himself. Read the TOS and PP of an soft or service you want to use, check the sites with Blacklight, Webkoll, UrlVoid, Exodus Privacy, AV or similar, even if it is FOSS, which no neccesarly is a security or privacy feature, tracking APIs from Google, Amazon, Facebook and M$ are also FOSS and included in a lot of FOSS in this Microsoft site called GitHub.
You don’t need a tin foil hat, but common sense in the internet.
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Well they’re privacy “conscious” but still feel trapped. IMHO the first sentence is even more telling namely “privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites” as a justification. It’s not necessarily true, namely one can use… well pretty much anything BUT Google or Meta product and have a perfectly convenient experience. They are just used to it, so amalgamating what they are used to to what is objectively convenient for all.
Maybe some day in the near future they will decide to go from being conscious to active about it and I can tell in advance, they are going to feel a lot better, but it requires more than introspection, it requires action.
non-privacy services have more money=have more and probably better people to work on them=better quality
Please stop using questionable logic to promote large companies, they do not need your free help for more marketing. There is even research showing it’s false https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/when-31-4-the-effect-of-gift-salience-on-employee-effort-in-an-online-labor-market in many ways https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231159781
There is no correlation between pay and quality work. I’m genuinely shocked this is even an argument held on a platform running on FLOSS.
Some might be more “convenient” on having an easier on-boarding, and even that is questionable, but regardless that’s not the same as “better quality”.
i said more and probably better programmers
Matrix is pretty convenient. They’ve got a great mobile and web app experience.
What exactly does discord have that mateix doesn’t? They both have threading, replies, reacts, etc.
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Could you elaborate?
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Each matrix chat is it’s own channel. To admin multiple channels as you would on discord you just have to set up multiple matrix chats held by a common owner.
There is a mod role but you’re right that you can’t make custom ones though I honestly don’t see much need to for a simple privacy community.
And I think matrix has voice now.
But yah I get what you’re saying. Thank you for the elaboration.
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But that’s cyclic reasoning. Nothing that you need/want will be on matrix if you (and everyone else) does not think it’s worth to make what you need/want be in matrix…
I don’t need EVERYTHING to be in Matrix, just the things I’m interested in. So I’m happy when I see a push to have those specific things there. This is the same argument as to why I don’t use Reddit anymore, despite Lemmy/Kbin having only a fraction of the content.
It also helps the fact that Matrix is very flexible when it comes to mirroring/proxying other protocols. I can easily access IRC communities from Matrix, for example. The integration in that direction is nicer than requiring discord channels to add bots that parrot an IRC chat.
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Yes, but the question is: what does matrix need to establish itself as a solid alternative?
You can’t answer that by saying “people don’t use it, change that” because that’s something only people can change, not matrix, that’d lead to a cyclic problem.
Specially when that’s given as a counterpoint to justify not wanting to do the change for “this community”. It’s contradictory to want its popularity to be changed but accept the lack of change alone as a valid reason to justify your communities not changing.
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I don’t think EVERYONE needs to understand / know about it. I mean, I remember when I was young most people had no idea how to use the internet (hell, they didn’t even know how to program a VHS), yet I was perfectly happy using that technology.
I only need a specific set of people and specific communities to be there for it to be worth it. Like I said: I no longer use reddit, even though the fediverse has only a small fraction of the content existing in reddit… I would have expected people in the fediverse would be more receptive to unpopular but technologically/ethically superior alternatives.
How and who is addressing this at large scale? I mean uptake of foss vs proprietary, privacy compliant vs not etc… It’s the same story for signal vs WhatsApp, when one sees the majority of relatives using WhatsApp, s/he would then drop signal altogether or keep it alongside for the one geek that uses it. I am in this situation and it defeats me that not much people care and chose convenience over concerns that I find legitimately vital, or in any case not trivial. I quit using Facebook/Instagram 2 years ago seeing what it does to society and am better off mentally, but the interactions I have through mastodon and pixelfed are zero, although my meta pages are still up with these links
i dont think anyone using google services is “privacy conscious”
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You people won’t lay off strcat jfc
Why is it always graphene os drama.
Also are you really expecting evidence for a cp/gore flood, like wtf? Not only are you asking for people to screen cap that (like they even have anything to prove), but you only have to be in there a few days to actually see it happen.
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Literally who gives a fuck
I do.
Anyone who uses sophist name calling like “neo nazi” can just fuck right off in my world.
That shows clearly their intent is a personal attack and not a search for understanding/knowledge/truth.
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This drama has never brought any good and just brings down everyone involved. He clearly has some issues and that doesn’t need advertising. And that includes me he’s also called an undercover agent or whatever that’s against graphene because I like Firefox. In fact these comments will probably find a way back to him somehow, it’s better to just not feed these things.
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Stop feeding the drama then
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Cringe
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Because conversations about increasing privacy doesn’t need to be private. It’s usually about learning about other tools and that they exist.
This only makes sense if discord is a common entry point into the community which seems unlikely to me
It probably isn’t, but it’s probably a good place to get a quick answer about something.
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Because privacy communities are a joke.
Lol this is 100% the truth. Privacy communities are a fucking meme. 99% of posts are just people circlejerking about Firefox vs Brave.
I’ve never gotten why Brave got popular in the first place. I downloaded it once and uninstalled within 3 minutes.
Cromite and Waterfox are all I’ll ever need.
Idk and I don’t care. Just tired of watching the Brave circlejerk. Like everyone knows that company is sketchy as absolute shit. If you still want to use the browser then that’s on you. But I’m tired of seeing people screaming about it in every one of these threads lol
Yeah it quickly becomes a dick measuring contest and shunning people for using different things. It becomes very black/white views, and have some crazy out of touch takes, like expecting your grandma to self host lol. They also confuse anonymity with privacy, like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.
In other words, it’s just like literally every online community in the history of the Internet. When Sir TimBL created the first web page, people probably used it to bitch about how everyone else was doing it wrong.
Note that “secrecy” and “privacy” are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.
It’s possible to have one and not the other…
You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).
Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP… or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).
Pfft. My gramgram self-hosts on her own LFS build with a hardened kernel and custom written SELinux policies. All your grandparents need to get on her level.
Disclaimer: Everything here is a lie.
I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.
For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.
This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.
Reminds me of what happened to the pipe tobacco sub after Reddit banned trading of tobacco.
What had been a thriving sub of trading, sharing, well written reviews and friendly discussion quickly became stagnant and started leaning towards people showing off their expensive pipes and tobacco orders. Without the people who came for the trading and stayed to chat, the sub became boring quickly.
Wow this is great I am surprised to see people talking about this (let alone even being aware of it).
Really refreshing to not have it to be a contest to follow random dogmas.
Lemmy is refreshingly smarter than I was used to seeing on Reddit.
Hahahaha
I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but either way this was hilarious!!
Just a slightly higher barrier to entry really filters out the low-quality ignorant/belligerent/unconstructive posters, don’t you think? The relative absence of useless posts made either by bots or unhelpful users is refreshing too. It’s not perfect but it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Shun!
Wanna go crazy? Use SimpleXchat
why
SimpleX is great, better than all P2P messengers
why
Unlike P2P, messenges are sent over easily replacable relay servers so both parties don’t have to be online at the same time to exchange messenges.
SimpleX is special because it is the only messenger that has no permanent user identifiers whatsoever. Not even a randomly generated string of characters and numbers. This implies a LOT more privacy and security, especially for metadata-protection.
The server of Signal for example can’t read your messages, but they know who sent how many messages at what time to which people. They know your entire graph of social connections. SimpleX does not.
Here’s a comparison with other messengers: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/blob/stable/docs/SIMPLEX.md#comparison-with-other-protocols
That’s interesting. How do you connect to people you know then if there is no identity? Sounds a stupid question but I don’t get it. You send a link? A qr? Or a temporary id like I’m Mike999 for the next 30 minutes and you tell your friend?
Finally something that sounds like speaking to someone in real life without eavesdropping. How it should be.
Yes, to first connect to someone you share a qr code with them or send them a link. The medium in which you share the link does not have to be secure, it is only to make the first connection between the two of you.
Here’s a high-level overview explaining how it is possible that there are no user identifiers. Basically, with each contact you agree on different servers which relay your messages. You get separate communication tunnels for every contact. And these tunnels can be replaced by other tunnels at any time.
Thank you
You’re welcome.
It’s decentralized, which therefore makes it harder than even Session.
It tries its best to be user friendly tho, that’s a main concern of the dev. You should hear him talk in the main support group, he’s really good.
You can also connect to the dev directly to express any concerns or ask questions. He will actually listen to you and shift his focus if multiple people tell him the same thing.
However, the software is only a few years old (much younger than all the other established messengers) and may not be ready for public use yet, but surely in the future.
I’m interested in the day it hits the Linux Desktop, but being even on iOS is crazy imo.
A cross-platform desktop client recently got released. Synchronization with the mobile app is not yet supported tho.
Thank you! It’s basically impossible to use discord anonymously
you can use webcord as a frontend qhich is better but it still is a shitshow
Inb4 aNoNiMiTy iS nOt tHe sAmE aS pRiVaCy
This is not the way to talk to other users.
It literally isn’t.
What benefit is there to use Matrix for a public community? It’s not like there is extra privacy since anyone can see the messages.
You’re still feeding a proprietary platform your information (not just the messages) directly. In this case in particular, if some privacy conscious person wanted to discuss with others and didn’t have a Discord account for the same reason, they’d have to sign up and give up some of that privacy
I don’t disagree with that. Obviously for private messages it’s a different scenario.
Also, doesn’t matrix.org have almost all metadata on most users anyways? Unless you explicitly block everyone that uses it from ever reaching you.
Idk about all, I do know it’s a lot, but the argument for me there is how the privacy policies differ.
I admit that I haven’t really looked much into it, but just assumed that since Discord is so terrible to be borderline violating the GDPR in respects to user data deletion, matrix.org couldn’t ever be worse than that. Of course, mine is just an assumption, Matrix definitely aligns more with my values though, and some E2EE will always beat none, but everyone should do their research before trusting me.
Also note, there are other open registration Matrix hosts, so maybe you can find someone with even better policies.
Most cryptocurrency communities use Discord or Telegram. It’s such an embarrasment.
Oh I hate communities that use Telegram. I mean, sure, I guess there’s better privacy, but Telegram was just not built for that. Messages always get lost, and there are no channels, which means no info channel, so they have to try and cram everything into the description.
You should check privacy coin Monero.
Matrix and XMPP is pretty much popular in XMR community
And often discord and telegram channels are bridged with other platforms.
Should be telling the only two services they use is one infamous for fuck tons of child grooming and one infamous for fuck tons of terrorism.
I’ve never understood this either, given the whole notion and enthusiasm behind decentralization. I get the trade-offs regarding privacy, security, and convenience, but if you’re really tryna start a movement, and you really believe in the concept and principles of something like cryptocurrency, it seems like your communities and communication channels should also reflect similar values.
you don’t trade off your security, instead you increase it.
for Bitcoin you can increase your privacy with various tools like coinjoin and lightning network with convenience tradeoff
or you just use Monero.
If you have questions feel free to ask in Monero@monero.town
And that’s where you realize that them defending decentralization is just trying to have a nice-sounding argument instead of assuming their dreams of getting rich with new tech
Crypto enthusiasts don’t really care or understand decentralization. If you talk to crypto bros you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are very very low IQ morons.
I was at an event and met a crypto bro. He tried to explain to a group of us that btc is like moss and the world is the forest. A couple people legitimately “got it” and began to get excited about crypto.
I wouldn’t criticize others for their low IQ while making such a dumb generalization.
I’ve used the Discord bridge before; it works pretty well, and allows Matrix users to practice better (identity & tracking) privacy if they want. There is none, in Discord.
It does require (a) the Discord community admin to allow the bridge, and (b) some playing with configuration of the bridge to get banning working.
The biggest issue with Matrix is how privacy-respecting it is. Any public forum with anonymous account creation is subject to spam bots, and requires more work by admins. The biggest complaint about the bridge, and why so many Discord admins do not allow it, is because it greatly increases the spam they have to deal with. Kicking and blocking do work fine through the bridge, but it’s still a distraction requiring constant vigilance.
Matrix needs better admin tools (where have we heard that before?) Mjolnir is good, but the freely hosted instance was shut down a year or so ago, so it’s not available to casual users. And taking on running a service just for a community bridge is a silly requirement.
My points are, that it’s not an either-or, but that it requires work. It’s a question of commitment, not possibility. c/privacy could have a Matrix-first, privacy-friendly approach and still offer Discord for privacy casuals; it’s just harder.
People who dislike discord and want a good alternative besides matrix should check out revolt.chat <3
Omg fuck discord so much
I don’t understand why it’s so popular… It’s a fancy IRC that’s centralized by a single company
Don’t get me wrong, I wish that we could use a FOSS platform instead of Discord, but 1: people are already using Discord and it’s hard to get everyone to switch platform, and 2: there is no comparable alternative right now
I think most of those points you said aren’t the reason, there are many ways to manage stuff on platforms more private that has also all of those points you said (Matrix has all of them), and I think the only reason they use discord is that they can show “gaming now”, put a GIF as a user picture and things like this. If for you Discord is easy to use it’s because you have been using it already, for me, it’s confusing.
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Mod tools or tools like play music on an audio room? Because seems like it’s more about features like this than moderation tools (or that’s my feeling).
Matrix has moderation tools (https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/), but the bot needs to be hosted by yourself, or you need to pay. So from the 5 points @rbits@lemm.ee has written, I only agree with “Huge amount of useful bots created by the community” as discord is the most used.
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But they are
Dude, Matrix mod tools are pretty much universally complained about, and I say that as a person who uses Matrix as a mod.
I use it because some of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS that has Wiimmfi support use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Too hard to regrow the, already tiny user base in those cases.
Just got whiplash from hearing Wiimmfi outside the mkwii community
Yeah, seems like it is only for MK for Wii, as it shows in the always decent active users count, but it supports many games, and I use it mainly for Metroid Prime Hunters and Jump Ultimate Stars.
If you legitimately don’t understand why it’s popular, you are seriously out of touch.
Every time I see Slack/Discord et Al. described as such, I wonder if any of these people actually used any of those. By use, I mean actually try out its features, not just treating it as IRC (“just” channels, messages and DMs for text convos).
I hate Discord with a passion, but pretending like it’s just “fancy IRC” is IMHO pretty absurd.
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IRC was already “caveman playing with sticks and pebbles” a decade before discord became a thing. It’s really not a good point of comparison and questioning.
Discord became popular for one simple reason: anyone could make a server, share it with a crossplatform link, and others could then try out that link without installing anything. In other words, it became popular because it literally copied Slack and because the Skype era was atrociously bad customization and ease of use-wise compared to the preceding.
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It’s the emojis for me tbh. I’m not sorry
Because it has significantly more features than IRC and it’s dead simple to spin up your own “server” where you aren’t beholden much to “admins” or whatever.
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This thread begs to differ. Lots of Matrix users here who can’t use Discord for privacy reasons.
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The Matrix link is marked as ‘dead’ in the side bar. The people who wrote the side bar are actively discouraging people from using Matrix.