I use Lemmy to talk to strangers, but I use discord to talk to specific people. Unless I can convince the vast majority of them to switch to matrix it doesn’t matter how much I prefer the foss service, it’s useless to me. I still have an account, sure, but I don’t use discord out of laziness. I use it because matrix literally can’t provide that service.
People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?
These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It’s like people that were mad at “any mods not privating their subreddits” during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it’s almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it’s also engaging with the people there
I use a discord bridge to connect to communities while using matrix. When new communities pop up, I try to convince people to switch to matrix. It’s not perfect because I still need to run discord to connect to video calls on the platform, but I don’t need it running on my phone or in the background on my computer all the time, which is really nice.
I use Lemmy to talk to strangers, but I use discord to talk to specific people. Unless I can convince the vast majority of them to switch to matrix it doesn’t matter how much I prefer the foss service, it’s useless to me. I still have an account, sure, but I don’t use discord out of laziness. I use it because matrix literally can’t provide that service.
People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?
These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It’s like people that were mad at “any mods not privating their subreddits” during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it’s almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it’s also engaging with the people there
I use a discord bridge to connect to communities while using matrix. When new communities pop up, I try to convince people to switch to matrix. It’s not perfect because I still need to run discord to connect to video calls on the platform, but I don’t need it running on my phone or in the background on my computer all the time, which is really nice.
Wouldn’t work for most of my use cases but a good point nonetheless