i think thats a little extreme, cant they just remove the content and block them? also why does discord have weapons of mass destruction in the first place?
I don't understand using Discord for documentation or official dev communications, it just doesn't sound reliable even if you aren't chancing running afoul of a billionaire corp or DMCA. Not to mention, there's now an extra barrier to entry to your project.
User communities and just chatting is fine, but it just makes way more sense to have a forum or other location for documentation and collaboration to happen that can be archived, backed up, and uploaded on other services as well.
If all else fails, just make a .onion site or forum for it
Just wait, they'll move to Matrix, get legally attacked if they're hosting in a copyright friendly jurisdiction, and say "fuck it, we're going to the darkweb", and Nintendo won't be able to do shit.
Guess what? This will make them stronger. Suyu's GitLab repo was already DMCA'd, after that they set up their own Forgejo instance. They also get their website running again (It was down for a few days, I don't know the reason) and they're now strong and independent. Moving away from Discord will only increase their independence.
Suyu died though. Right now the only actively maintained Yuzu fork is Sudachi, which is only maintained by a single person.
Apparently there was some drama about the Yuzu devs using code which came from a switch SDK as a basis for emulator code, which kind of poisons the whole codebase.
Apparently there was some drama about the Yuzu devs using code which came from a switch SDK as a basis for emulator code, which kind of poisons the whole codebase.
But if this was in Yuzu, it's also present in every other fork, right? Also, was this a leaked Nintendo SDK or something 3rd-party?
The devs said so. Check r/Suyu, that seems to be where a majority of the updates are being posted. I think there was a link to a pastebin post somewhere there as well.
The SDK mentioned was first party, presumably leaked but I'm not completely sure. And yes, that means it would be present in every other fork as well.
Edit: here are some of the links I'm talking about:
I don't know how much of this evidence is real but if any of it is they're going to have a much harder time finding devs willing to contribute to Suyu, even if development does continue.
What I find hilarious is that these are just minor hiccups. The emulation scene has existed for a long time and will continue to exist for a long time. None of these recent measures will do anything to stop it as long as the emulator devs aren’t trying to make money off Nintendo IP.
Everyone here is saying not to use Discord, but what are they expecting the server admins to do after moving off Discord when Nintendo's lawyers send them a letter? Like sure, hate Discord, but the problem here clearly lies with Nintendo.
@TehPers@Kichae It doesn't matter where a project is hosted, it matters which group you are targeting and where you personally are located. So even if you would host in Russia, you won't be safe from prosecution, when you live for example in the US.
Problem? These devs are exposing themselves to the corporate legal eye. Have whatever opinion you want, but they are playing in the bear enclosure at the zoo.
I obviously don't love corporate fuckery, but I acknowledge it is pretty clear. If you fuck with a company with a huge legal team, even tangentially, even if you believe you are not infringing on anything, you could be wrong in their eyes, and they might nuke your project.
but what are they expecting the server admins to do after moving off Discord when Nintendo’s lawyers send them a letter
...Not... kick them out? Discord doesn't kick out extremist groups. This seems comparatively mild. I think they had a reasonable expectation to be left alone. Nintendo got a court injunction but Discord didn't fight it.
Is the expectation that Discord will risk spending potentially millions in court with Nintendo to protect a single community? From their perspective, it's easy to see why they'd just bend over.
Discord's response was extreme, and that is inexcusable. I'm not trying to defend them here. The core problem here though is Nintendo harassing these developers to try to stop these projects. They could have easily been kicked out by any other platform, or sent a C&D if they tried to self-host one.
I agree there are probably better options out there, but scrolling through the comments, I had seen a lot of discussion about Discord and not nearly as much on Nintendo. I was hoping to stir up more discussion on Nintendo's involvement.
Discord's reaction may be unreasonable, but it isn't ridiculous to see them bend over for Nintendo when they're faced with hosting a smaller community (relatively speaking) or becoming a target of Nintendo's lawyers. Had they been on another platform (self-hosted or not), Nintendo would have likely persued them all the same. Also, as far as I'm aware, the developers themselves believe that they are within the law. The issue comes from Nintendo disregarding the law and harassing them anyway.
You can blame both corporations, you don't need to suck any corpo cock. Nintendo sends the takedowns in the first place, which sure is Nintendon't, and Discord heeds them despite otherwise profiting from those communities and without allowing any sort of measure.
I don't remember saying otherwise. I just found it odd that everyone was talking about Discord (at the time of posting), and there was very little discussion around Nintendo's involvement in encouraging (and participating in) such toxic behavior.
without allowing any sort of measure.
This is what I find unacceptable in Discord's case. Options should have been given to the devs/server admins.
I mean, my response earlier probably still works for those who'd prefer discord as a support channel to other Foss channels: This is far more of a Nintendo bad moment than it is a Discord bad. I doubt foss alternatives would have the lawyers to fight Nintendo better than Discord can. And while my mind immediately thought of a hydra anology that Foss might have, hasnt the hydra already activated anyways? Suyu is already jumping into different hosting mediums
Mass centralization. Old school forums like phpBB and SMF and vBulletin and new-school forums like self-hosted discourse are also centralized, but by one small user calling the shots, and it's very clear immediately which forums are well-run. If a forum isn't well-run with a good community, a 'competitor' will quickly pop up that is, and people will go to it. Sure, you have to have some tech skills but there are easy guides for all of it. Discourse is a simple docker image and it's the best for features and engagement IMO.
Sure you have to sorry about DDoS attacks and staying patched, but you can use OVH or another host with a large infrastructure that had DDoS resistant servers. Or, god forbid, cloudflare.
We need to go back to pre-discord and bring back forums man. Don't get me wrong, discord has its uses, all my friends use it, but discord killing forums and websites was really bad for the internet as a whole. Like look at dolphin, made before discord, it has its own website, its own forums. Hopefully if Nintendo does ever come after dolphin they'll at least be able to keep the website and forums up.
That's why you don't backup on the same provider. You can always backup to the local system with encryption. And they can't attack the owner in every jurisdiction.
I mean, Suyu already seems to be jumping to a different medium, so it sounds like this situation wouldnt have gone any differently had Suyu had their main support hosted anywhere else. Nintendo would have nuked any of the support locations, and Suyu would then have to jump to a new safe haven
I should add that it wasn't the norm back then either.
What's kind of funny is that all of the debates around these systems are exactly the same today as back then, like for example that you should use the voting system to reward quality comments, not use it as an agree/disagree button.
I understand that Lemmy hates Discord, but this is FAR more of Nintendo being an asshat than it is Discord. I'm so far done giving Nintendo my money at this point
edit: I just wanna point out that Corgana posted a response that was straight up false, I called him out on it with proof, he edited his response instead of replying to me to make my response to him look bad, and then when I called him out on that by putting what his original response was in my response, he deleted hos post to try and hide his shame. This user apparently has a history of doing this, and I find this HIGHLY manipulative and scummy, so I'm putting this edit here so that he cant hide his actions by deleting them because I called him out before any damage could be done
Not sure if your sarcasm is towards me or towards someone who'd defend Nintendo, but tbh I'm getting tired of Mega Corps in general (not that I ever really liked them in the first place), so asshats like Nintendo who go above and beyond being a dick because they have the legal team to do so I'm just done giving money to. Indie workers/companies of all fields I'll try and get money to, but I kind of just want to see the current crop of mega corps sink and not come back
Definitely not directed at you. I’m just so tired of people in general excusing Nintendo for ridiculous behavior because of some romantic view they have of the company.
Like, they DO focus pretty well on making fun games. But that isnt enough anymore to overlook how fucking Cyberpunk they act in our modern boring dystopia
Yes it's Nintendo. But it wouldn't be this bad without Discord's design that emphasizes centralization and corporate ownership of user data. Forums can at least be backed up and migrated elsewhere.
Tbf I think a lot of that is just the fault of people starting to use discord in ways it wasnt designed for. It works GREAT as a msn/skype/ventrillo type of program. Its just that people started using it for more than just that, and to my knowledge discord isnt super profitable yet, so I dont blame them for trying to accept any type of use people want to use discord for. Eventually it'll need to at least break even profit wise.
Not to mention Discord is not forced to take communities down. There's lots of stuff like right wing nutjob communities that are still up no issues. Discord is just sucking Nintendo dick, just like the communities that host solely on Discord are sucking Discord cock.
Discord had the heat of litigation forced in their direction, thats the difference between Suyu and the nutjob communities. If some company threatened legal consequences if discord didnt nuke one of the nut job communities, I doubt they would be any less hesitant to nuke said communities than they were for Suyu
Nice edit bro. Your original comment said that Nintendo didnt make discord remove anyone, and you COULD have responded to this response instead of editing your original one, which tells me you're acting in EXTREMELY bad faith
2nd Edit: Lmao, buddy fuckin CRUMPLED when I pointed out his game playing
3rd edit: LMAO it's one of the mods that ran the startek fed so badly that tenforward was created, ok that makes sense, buddy has a history of editing comments instead of responding
I think it's like Windows and Reddit. People don't use it because they like or love it, but because most are there. Sometimes the only way to interact with the developers or find new people in an active community.
I would bet all the pieces to make a better communication suite than discord are there. They just need to be put together into a package and marketed well.
Everything here is basically text and maybe images if your lucky. In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
You could probably link account sign in, but any real-time stuff would likely be limited to within that single instance unless you create a whole alternative method of federation that would still only be available between thouse certain supported instances.
It’s also a whole lot more expensive to host, unless you go peer to peer in which case good luck, and vulnerable to bad actors massively running up hosting bills even if you can protect against denial of service attacks.
It would be nice to see, but there is a reason why Matrix is the closest anyone’s come and it’s still more a proof of concept then an actual platform you could direct family or random strangers to.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
A large number of Discord servers just use text.
For video, maybe integrate into something that already exists, like Jitsi? Instead of trying to build one single app that handles everything, maybe it would be nice to have a suite of apps that all work together and can all use the same login.
A lot of video conferencing systems are already mostly peer-to-peer, at least for enterprise apps. Skype was originally peer-to-peer too. NAT traversal is usually provided by STUN servers. There's some issues like that (for example it reveals the user's IP addresses) but you could proxy everything through a TURN server to solve that.
Peer to peer is the best way to implement end-to-end encrypted communication.
Having said that, very large groups can benefit from a client-server model, like what Zoom does.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
That falls into the same two fallacies as the ones of complainers against Youtube alternatives:
that in order to offer an alternative to a service you have to replicate all of it
that you have to provide an alternative to only one service
Like, really, you don't need to replace all of Discord, only the parts that matter. The alternative to build not to Discord but to "Discord is being used for documentation" already exists, it's called web forums. Ditto, the alternative to "Discord is being used for communities" also exists, it's called XMPP or IRC or Matrix depending on who you ask. The alternative to "Discord tracks user data" is simply called "you don't do it", etc.
Like, we are literally on Lemmy. Just about the first thing that we Get It from the internet is that centralization is bad, be it Products or Services.
Forgive me, but I fail to see how expecting video/voice conferencing software to actually be capable of carrying video/voice could be described as a fallacy. It seems to me like that is kind of a core functionality to any software trying to fulfill that role.
IRC has nothing to do with the subject, and while XMPP/Matrix are promising they are still a long way from being able to talk someone without significant tech expertise and who has never seen them before into jumping onto a call in five minutes or so without touching a single setting. That is the fundamental part of Discord, Teams, Skype, or Zoom that matters.
Lemmy isn’t exactly voice conferencing software, so I don’t know why you would want to collaborate on software development work with it as a forum. As for documentation, a static site is probably the best place for that, although in this case keeping it off the clearnet was presumably a core consideration.
See, it's the entire premise that voice conferencing is needed to have a replacement for "Discord is used for documentation". It's not. Almost by definition. If anyone wants videoconferencing there's Jitsi. That's the thing I'm aiming to: you won't ever to get anyone to "replace" Discord if they have to replace all of it. Capitalism doesn't allow for that. We are trying to do better here. Splitting problems into their component and significative parts makes them much easier to solve.
The closest use case that in the case of these kinds of communities would even need videoconferencing would be something like "Discord is being used for live tech support for modchipping Switches" and for that case there's also already established alternatives... and it would be wise to not implement for that anyway.
Except this preticular discussion thread isn’t about Discord used as documentation, but Discord use in general as a videoconferencing tool. I also imagine the project started using Discord for conferencing, and documentation grew up around it because everyone was already there, emulation is very finicky, and it wasn’t out in the open for Nintendo to find indexed by Google. They could have used Jitsi, and the same thing would have happened.
A video conferencing program like Discord is hardly the first or best place to put software documentation, but in this case it being hard to find was presumably the point.
It also seems odd to insist that Capitalism doesn’t allow Jitsi, Matrix, or XMPP to exist, when they and many other open source projects do. Jitsi is owned by a major cooperation, but Matrix and XMPP arn’t to my knowledge. Rough around the edges and in need of significant work, yes, but not prevented from ever exsisting.
Video, voice, and text messaging are together the signifiant part of Discord as you put it, it doesn’t make sense in order to split them apart any further.
It's not as snazzy as Discord but it's fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don't care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It's free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many "bridges" to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There's a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I'll have to see if there's Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I'll stick it on the same server I'm running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Yeah for sure. I run the server + a bunch of bridges (whatsapp, signal, telegram, chatgpt) on an old atom NUC with 8GB RAM and it only actually uses 2 GB.
I can really recommend it. It takes some reading to set it up because it's insanely configurable. But in the end I have a config file with like 20 statements in it and that sets it all up and keeps it up to date.
Just tried out that playbook to set up a staging server, and it works pretty well.
I feel like it's a bit too magical though. I like knowing how all the software I'm using is installed and configured, and introducing another layer of abstraction makes that harder. I have particular ways things like my web server (Nginx), database servers, Let's Encrypt (certbot), etc are configured and want to keep things that way. I think I'll just use the Ansible playbook for the staging server, and set up the real server using the Docker containers directly, based on documentation from the upstream projects (Synapse, etc)
It looks like they have both Docker containers and Debian packages avaliable, so I'll have to see if it's worth using the Debian packages instead.
That's true. They actually stopped supporting Nginx recently which really bothered me too because I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn't really have that option. So right now I'm locked out from updating until I fix that.
And yes it is totally feasible to use upstream! Not a problem at all.
I would recommend to use the dockers though, as the whole debian thing becomes a bit of a mess with different python requirements for some of the bridges. I tried that in a long forgotten past and there is a reason I'm trying to forget that 🤭
Like you I know the ansible playbook has its limits (for example one other thing I run into is that I want to run several instances of the same bridge to bridge eg. 2 whatsapp accounts!) but I do think docker is the way to go. I'm interested to hear how you're faring though as it's a long time ago since I tried that.
I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn't really have that option.
If you have your own domain name, you can get Let's Encrypt certificates for internal servers by using DNS challenges instead of HTTP challenges. I use subdomains like whatever.int.example.com for my internal systems.
Of course, it's possible that the Ansible playbook doesn't support that...
Thanks for the note about Python and the Debian packages. That's a good point. I'll definitely use the Docker containers.
I mean, it's great for audio and video chats. What I never understood is why people started using discord as a forum, as documentation or as some kind of program (like, why is Midjourney on a public discord chat? It's probably the worst possible interface).
Discord is excellent for chatting with your friends while playing games, and that's it.
Yeah me either. It spies on your computer, they ban third-party clients. It's owned by bytedance. When I use the web version it kicks me out every day and I have to log in again.
I don't mind it being around but I really hate the way open source projects (e.g. Home Assistant) use it as their only platform for collaboration. The make me give up my data just to collaborate with them on a privacy tool.
