[HN Gopher] Welcome to Libera Chat
___________________________________________________________________
Welcome to Libera Chat
Author : smitop
Score : 1378 points
Date : 2021-05-19 12:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (libera.chat)
(TXT) w3m dump (libera.chat)
| jokoon wrote:
| Not enough users
| senbarryobama wrote:
| Most hobbies I'm into (3d printing/pen plotting) have moved to
| Discord.
| senbarryobama wrote:
| Interesting, but most hobbies I'm into (pen plotting/3d printing)
| have moved to Discord.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Honest/weird question.
|
| This is (at least) time number two, that OSS projects have used
| the "Libre/Libera" term in community reboot/rebrand efforts.
| Nothing against speakers of French which have given us so many
| beautiful words, but there is something off putting about
| libre/libera for me in "brand names". I like what they stand for
| even! They just don't roll off the tongue for me. Is this just a
| "me thing"? Maybe there's something inherit about the actual
| phonetics that makes it off putting for me?
| yosito wrote:
| It's just a you thing. Much of the world is not English
| speaking, and many languages (including English, by the way)
| use the libre root. It has a well established meaning as a
| specific meaning of "free". I'd even go so far as to say that
| "libre" itself is virtually an English word now. Sorry you
| don't like it. Maybe learning a second language will help.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Interesting, when I hear libre, I think Spanish. It comes from
| a common root word across all the Latin languages, and that has
| also given us "liberty" in English.
|
| Anyway, it doesn't bother me. It's better than "Free", which is
| mostly misunderstood, RMS's rebranding attempts
| notwithstanding.
| cout wrote:
| I agree that "libre" does not roll off the tongue well. It's a
| rare pattern in English, shared with words like cadre, timbre,
| and macabre. Those are nouns, so they're not followed by
| another word in the same way as e.g. "libre software". We have
| other words like theatre or acre or lustre that we pronounce as
| if the e and the r are switched. That could work for libre,
| pronouncing it like "mediocre" (the only other adjective I know
| of that is spelled that way).
|
| Libreoffice rubs me in a particularly wrong way, because until
| someone explained it, I did not know whether it was "libre
| office" or "lib re-office". Either one is strange (the former
| especially awkward because of the two vowel sounds back-to-
| back).
| hnjst wrote:
| French speaking people pronounce it "libroffice". Lots of
| final "e" are silent in french.
| t-writescode wrote:
| For what it's worth, I believe that it's usually typed either
| "libre office" or LibreOffice, and so the confusion there
| should be minimized.
|
| And a lot of English speakers at high-school or above level
| would probably be able to associate Libre with Free / Open.
|
| I will agree that OpenOffice was a better name.
| queuebert wrote:
| All things being equal, I would prefer fewer syllables to
| pronounce when possible. But I'm a lazy English speaker.
| jeltz wrote:
| Where are you from? I am Swedish and I feel these names work
| just fine both in Swedish and in English.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Amurhica. :) However, I do speak Norwegian (and can limp med
| Svenska). Even if I tenk pa det pa Norsk, det fremdeles er
| samme :D. GratisNet would have been kult I guess. Or ApneNet.
| mrweasel wrote:
| GratisDNS in Denmark is weird enough, let's not go that
| route. ApneNet, now that is something I want.
| galgalesh wrote:
| Works fine in Dutch too, imo.
| toxik wrote:
| I've already misspelled it is libra a couple of times.
| harikb wrote:
| Don't forget Libra coin/currency that was going to solve
| all the worlds problems :P
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It means 'free' without people instantly associating it with
| 'zero cost'. Or at least that was the argument back in the day.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Wow. Anglocentric much?
|
| Just wow.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah so Freenode went wrong and they created this.
|
| Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? How
| do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode?
|
| I know addressing a messy past on a new site is no fun / I saw
| the other articles on HN, but ... they should still address who
| is running the show and some level of assurances (as much as you
| can in text on the internet) that this is a good place.
| ilaksh wrote:
| They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit. The people
| running the show are associated with many of the greatest open
| source projects. Projects where literal geniuses have donated
| thousands of hours to make software and services available to
| you and I free of charge.
|
| You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new
| service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that,
| except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example,
| actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the
| guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in
| #nim.
|
| The people running the show are those people and friends of
| those people.
|
| The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got
| control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't
| interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started
| advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the
| networking etc.
|
| So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are
| problem solvers.
| void_mint wrote:
| Is this satire?
| ilaksh wrote:
| What on earth makes you think that?
| SamBam wrote:
| Because it's hyperbolic, most if it is just fawning about
| how great Freenode was which had nothing to do with the
| question, and it did not answer the question at all.
|
| Original question: "there is not a single name of a real
| person anywhere on the site that I can find. there is
| only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit
| association in Sweden." Is it normal for the staff of
| such a project to be secret?"
|
| Your answer: "They did address the ownership. It's a non-
| profit." Not named. And then you had a bunch of stuff
| about unnamed people who chose not to put their names or
| nicks anywhere on the site, when the question is "why
| wouldn't they associated their names/nicks with this?"
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's not hyperbolic, it was the literal truth, and all of
| it is relevant because the question implies they do not
| know what Freenode was.
|
| The staff are not secret. They have names on the network.
| Those nicks are published (at least on the old site, not
| sure if that has been transferred to new yet) and well-
| known.
|
| The one guy who's name everyone knows is undisputably
| trying to profit from a non-profit organization, which he
| previously lied and said he would not, and in so doing
| has caused the worst disruption possible. So that proves
| that names don't actually help us.
| void_mint wrote:
| It's definitely hyperbolic. You responded to "Who owns
| this" with "Look how smart/iconic these unverified people
| are".
|
| It reads like (good) satire. The perceived esteem of some
| of the users are unrelated to the validity/integrity of a
| company.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's not a company.
| void_mint wrote:
| > Our legal home is a non-profit association in Sweden,
| with all our staff holding equal stakes, and we will
| never accept corporate control.
|
| Go on.
| [deleted]
| Lammy wrote:
| We have the best geniuses -- the best! My father -- great
| man; very smart; raised me well -- my father told me
| computers are the most important. We do the software, and
| we do the best software, and we're WINNING!
| ryanlol wrote:
| Well yeah, apparently the people behind "Linux for Niggers"
| run #linux now. Literal geniuses.
|
| > people running the show are associated with many of the
| greatest open source projects
|
| That's the thing with open source. Anyone can associate
| themselves with the greatest open source projects.
|
| The people running the show are mostly not people playing
| significant roles in the greatest open source projects.
| void_mint wrote:
| > Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge?
| How do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode?
|
| It will almost certainly go the same way as its gone in the
| past.
| mlang23 wrote:
| RIP lilo
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| The _network policies_ , and _Guidelines, recommendations and
| best practices_ are already fraught with subjectivity and the
| unsolvable dichotomy of carrier v publisher (at least in the
| USA).
| Lammy wrote:
| "While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and
| freedom of expression, Libera.Chat does not operate on the
| basis of absolute freedom of speech". Ah I see:
| https://libera.chat/policies
|
| I would feel way more confident if they defined all the terms
| used in this document e.g. "various forms of antisocial
| behaviour are forbidden", "discrimination", "any other
| behaviour meant to deliberately put upon a person harassment,
| alarm or distress".
|
| The vagueness is rather alarming and distressing to me.
| deadbunny wrote:
| The problem with extremely well defined limits is that those
| who choose to be assholes will ride up to that line and push
| it constantly.
|
| Then use the defense "the rules don't say I can't call you a
| butthead", so the rules get updated then they push some more
| and the cycle repeats.
|
| With fuzzier boundaries if someone is being an ass you can
| kick them the first time. This does of course mean you need a
| decent set of moderators and an appeals process to prevent
| people power tripping.
| Lammy wrote:
| In my experience those kind of clauses are more often used
| to silence wrongthink than to rid communities of people who
| are truly disruptive. You can count me out. The chilling
| effect is real.
| nednar wrote:
| What is the purpose of this?
| p1mrx wrote:
| The logo reminds me of a DOS game called Aldo's Adventure:
| https://youtu.be/Ik2N4opZynQ?t=200
|
| I guess it's mainly due to the EGA-like magenta/blue/white color
| scheme.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| tl;dr: Ideologically everyone needs to do a
| s/freenode/libera.chat/g
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur)
|
| "In 2021, Lee took control of freenode, making some staff resign
| and move to Libera.chat."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera.chat
|
| Freenode's wikipedia entry also has been updated
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode
|
| Not sure how I feel about those lightning fast Wikipedia changes.
| mst wrote:
| Mr. Lee annoyed some wikipedia editors in the process of
| screwing up freenode.
|
| This has consequences.
| Lammy wrote:
| "making" lol
| dom96 wrote:
| I'm curious why Freenode staffers aren't instead moving to OFTC
| (https://www.oftc.net/). Seems like a well structured network
| with a lot of history.
| rockdoe wrote:
| For one the policies are quite different: non-open source
| channels need to be secret. This isn't a requirement on
| freenode.
| donatj wrote:
| Trying to register with NickServ with my gmail, which is by far
| my primary email address.
|
| > Sorry, we do not accept registrations with email addresses from
| that domain. Use another address.
|
| That's going to limit adoption.
| donatj wrote:
| FWIW I got in shortly after I posted this by capitalizing the G
| in Gmail.com
| lobocinza wrote:
| Nothing to do with Gmail, just overload. Try again later. I had
| the same problem this morning but succeed to register a few
| minutes later.
| sapphire_tomb wrote:
| Weird. It let me use my Gmail address.
| tych0 wrote:
| You might try it again later; my coworkers and I have been
| having problems registering all morning.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| This might have been a temporary antispam measure. They were
| having some issues.
| progval wrote:
| They are overloaded with registrations; they might have blocked
| gmail temporarily because gmail's spam filter.
| chx wrote:
| christel deleted her twitter.
|
| Google shows it as protected https://i.imgur.com/dVNMqZ2.png but
| it's gone.
| varispeed wrote:
| Do we know why there has been no update to IRC protocol to ensure
| end to end encryption? I understand that doing e2e for public
| chats is extremely complex - so these could remain public, but
| private messages could easily be encrypted.
| andrewzah wrote:
| It's a huge pain in Matrix with even a small amount of users in
| a chat. At least for me, I've never used IRC where I cared
| about e2e. There are other services for that, including just
| encrypting with the other party's public pgp key.
| kdragon wrote:
| I think group e2ee is overblown and self-defeating in
| principle. Good luck auditing a ratcheting e2ee algo. Plus it
| breaks often, and group encryption is defeated by any user in
| the chat.
|
| Direct e2ee is far simpler and can be expanded to small groups
| without the need for complex ratcheting trees. Anything larger
| and you may as well fall-back to client-server with e2e
| communications.
| progval wrote:
| There is OTR: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
|
| but as far as I know there is only one implementation, and it's
| underdocumented. The protocol itself seems well specified, but
| it doesn't use "standard" primitives
| https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.1.1.html And UIs are
| usually not great (you have to check a shared secret via a
| trusted channel).
|
| There are also talks of an OTRv4, shared by XMPP and IRC:
| https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-ideas/issues/67 but the protocol
| is even more complex, I even have a hard time following the
| introductory sections of its specification.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I think this actually happened before with Freenode staff
| breaking off into another network. Around 2006 staff got pissed
| at lilo (I forget the exact reasons) and started the Atheme
| network. Later that year lilo was run over and killed. After this
| staff returned and Atheme became the testing grounds for their
| new services and is today what Freenode runs as their services
| suite.
| kragen wrote:
| This is different; this is a hostile takeover.
| ryanlol wrote:
| Is it though? It seems that this was all initiated by
| freenode staff trying to walk back on the deal Christel made
| with rasengan, forcing his hand.
| kragen wrote:
| Christel was selling something she didn't own.
| ryanlol wrote:
| Who owns it then?
| Macha wrote:
| After the legal dispute, it appears that Andrew Lee owns
| the domains, website and any trademarks. This is about as
| much as Freenode "owned" for christel to sell.
|
| The server donors own their servers and can take them
| elsewhere if they wish.
|
| The channel operators own their channels and can take
| them elsewhere if they wish.
|
| The staff own their volunteer labor and can take them
| elsewhere if they wish.
|
| The users own their choice of platform, and can support
| whichever they wish.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The side with the resources to pay the lawyers,
| apparently.
| kragen wrote:
| Who owns the United States?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| That's a matter of perspective. Lilo's dead so it's not like
| we'll hear his side of the story. For other examples of forks
| which may or may not be considered hostile by some, see the
| ffmpeg/libav split from some years back (that just like
| Freenode, eventually reconverged).
| Arnavion wrote:
| ffmpeg and libav didn't "eventually reconverge." ffmpeg was
| always copying anything new that libav added when it made
| sense, and libav was eventually abandoned.
| iratewizard wrote:
| There is an entire interesting rabbit hole dedicated to how
| much people hate Rob Levin (lilo). They talk about how he was a
| scammer, collected disability with his wife for ADHD, regularly
| misused his position in freenode to grift for money...
| pen2l wrote:
| I've heard this before, but I've gotta add: about a decade
| ago, when I was a newbie in the FOSS world, I remember a pm
| interaction with lilo. He was kind, unassuming, and helped me
| with some basic nickserv commands. I only came to know who he
| was much much later. That stands in stark contrast to most
| ircops there who seem pretty unapproachable.
|
| And the quibble about a couple of K's really grates on me.
| The guy founded freenode and kept it going. Let the donations
| fund his groceries.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| FWIW, I was an annoying teenager and lilo didn't K-Line me
| when I went through that phase (flooding channels with
| nonsense and generally causing some trouble). He was
| patient and I grew out of it.
|
| I never knew of the hate until I befriended a few of the
| atheme people and they told me some of their side. I do
| think he misappropriated funds to survive which is
| unethical but I'm not mad at the spirit of it. I used to
| troll the staff a bit that netsplits were caused by the
| /shakedown command lilo put in to collect donations.
|
| Unrelated, but freenode is weird among IRC networks. Other
| networks I went on would sometimes just ban people because
| they felt like it, not for any particular reason. The
| server donors were not allowed to give themselves O-Lines
| (IRC staff privs), this was an important distinction as
| well as it kept servers neutral, and later on was the
| reason they did not require a foundation with overhead.
| There was an incident that I believe they deleted off their
| blog where I think the Newark, NJ server was punted from
| the network for giving themselves an O-line without
| permission. So yes, the sale is weird because the assets
| should have only been the domain name and website. My guess
| on PIA wanting more was recommendations from their lawyers
| over GDPR crap but I don't really know or care.
| nullc wrote:
| Unfortunately grifters have all the more incentive to be
| saccharine-- they want something from you.
|
| Many OSS projects moved off freenode (including some I was
| involved in) specifically because Lilo was pulling donors
| into chant and trying to convince them to fund freenode
| instead of the oss project they were on freenode to
| discuss. It was really sleazy and created a lot of well
| earned bad blood.
|
| I don't think I ever saw anyone too irritated that lilo
| spent some donations on his living expenses.
| microtherion wrote:
| I once met him in person before he started freenode, and he
| was a nice and passionate guy then as well.
|
| Yes, he did try to make a living off freenode when he hit
| financial and professional difficulties, and people
| resented that, but he was unquestionably the founder and a
| major volunteer (though, by the time he asked for
| donations, one of many volunteers).
| kelp wrote:
| I have similar memories of lilo. Kind, unassuming, and
| helpful. Me and some college friends had a small channel
| back in the early 2000s, and lilo would occasionally pop in
| and say hello. He was always nice. At the time I wasn't
| sure how he was able to spend so much time on IRC.
| [deleted]
| Lammy wrote:
| It's worrisome to me that one of the stated objections I've seen
| to Freenode's new owner is related to his personal politics:
| https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461
|
| My own personal politics are probably very very similar to the
| above author who was complaining about the new owner being
| "Trumpian", but what will happen if/when we disagreed about
| something? Would I get the boot from Libera? I totally don't care
| about Orange Man's fans enough to leave a network over it.
|
| e: You gotta appreciate the irony of which group is censoring me
| right here with downvote-as-disagree :)
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I don't think they mean "Trumpian" in the sense of "a Trump
| supporter". But I understand your worry.
| esjeon wrote:
| I agree. The author likely meant that Lee is acting like
| Trump in the sense that the method being used is mean and
| destructive.
| notRobot wrote:
| IDK man, it's not just politics. Trump supporters also often
| seem to be misogynistic/bigoted/racist. Are those the kinds of
| people you want being in charge of online communities?
|
| That person is completely within their rights to not want to
| work for someone like that.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Are those the kinds of people you want being in charge of
| online communities?
|
| As long as they do a good job running the servers and don't
| censor me, sure. Life's too short for me to add more hate to
| the world in anticipation of receiving hate even though I am
| several flavors of minority in the tech world.
| coldpie wrote:
| I agree with you, although it would be nice if there were
| some real sources instead of just a pile of invective.
| notRobot wrote:
| I'm not sure what you want sources for?
|
| Trump being racist? Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/F
| ragileWhiteRedditor/comments/ecajm...
|
| So people who support him are also probably racist, or at
| least okay with him being racist.
| Lammy wrote:
| Personally I don't think racism is a binary. Trying to
| bucket people into racist and not-racist seems like an
| overly-simplistic way to look at humans.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| I don't see how being even a little racist is good in any
| way. I honestly feel like a lot of people don't realise
| what being subjected to racism is like in our present
| day.
| Lammy wrote:
| Where did I say it was good? :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM
| coldpie wrote:
| No. The Freenode guy.
| api wrote:
| To be fair (and I'm not a Trump fan), there's more than one
| reason someone might support Trump.
|
| I know a fair number of people who supported Trump because he
| was a departure from the Bush/Clinton oligopoly and promised
| no more "wars like Iraq." He also promised to push back on
| grossly unfair trade policies with China.
|
| Had Trump not run in 2016 it's entirely likely that we would
| have had, starting in 1992: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama (more
| or less Clinton), and then a race between (drum roll...) Bush
| and Clinton!
|
| Though I gotta say... many of them didn't vote for Trump the
| second time because even if he did have a few good points his
| personality is too repellent and humiliating to tolerate.
| notRobot wrote:
| Voting for trump and being a trump supporter is not the
| same thing though. If someone is publicly saying that
| they're a supporter, that means that they support trump's
| policies and practices. Which includes bigotry.
| api wrote:
| I voted for Joe Biden, but do not support all his
| policies and positions.
|
| Racism is awful, but American racism has not killed
| anywhere from 500k to 1m people (depending on who is
| counting) recently. The Iraq war did that along with
| setting fire to over a trillion dollars.
|
| Sometimes I think Trump was worth it to make sure nobody
| named Bush or Clinton ever inhabits the White House
| again.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| While we're all switching to Libera chat, anyone have good
| recommendations for general channels they follow besides project
| channels? (the Lubuntu and Ubuntu channels where very helpful
| when I needed them!)
| capableweb wrote:
| Examples: /msg alis LIST *linux*
| /msg alis LIST *clojure* /msg alis LIST *art*
|
| Up to you really, tooling is there for you to explore :)
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| RIP freenode. This is never gonna take off. Terrible name. I have
| zero temptation to type `libera.chat` into my IRC client. I feel
| like I got chlamydia from typing that just now.
| [deleted]
| aasasd wrote:
| > _When freenode announced that it was joining with Private
| Internet Access, staff were uncertain but assured that PIA was to
| have no operational influence_
|
| I mean, promises like that sound like obvious bullshit to me. 'EA
| promises that Codemasters will continue to operate on their own
| like they did'. Yeah sure buds, who are you taking me for. Unless
| the company is a cash cow startup, why would anyone buy it with
| other aims than to try making it bring a bit more profit than the
| previous owners could manage? (Buying the team/the technology is
| pretty much the same, as it means the workings of the business
| will be thrown away.)
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Private Internet Access commented on Twitter that they have
| nothing to do with this actually. They used to be in the same
| portfolio of companies (of this mr. Lee), they are not anymore.
| dt3ft wrote:
| He acquired a site I built which I used to operate on user
| donations. Today the site no longer exists.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I don't know if this is legit or not, but a Swedish non profit is
| pretty awesome, it means that _anyone_ can be a member as long as
| they pay a yearly symbolic member fee. Everything is owned by the
| members and is fully democratic, where each member has equal
| voting power, where members usually select a board, and the board
| makes the daily decisions. When it comes to taxes, etc, non-
| profits pretty much don 't pay any taxes, yet can make millions
| in profit - as long as you spend that money in ways that benefits
| the members.
| nexuist wrote:
| Is this something anyone can do, or do you need someone to be a
| Swedish citizen first?
| dijit wrote:
| The way you put this it sounds as if it would be easy to take
| over a non-profit.
|
| Just send people in with token amounts of money and vote on
| things that benefit your company.
| tephra wrote:
| Indeed this can (and does happen) but the non-profit can
| loose its status if it starts doing stuff that does not
| further its purpose as stated by the bylaws. And the tax
| authorities can decide that your stated purpose would not be
| tax exempt (for example a union would not be tax exempt and
| neither would a collector society [think for example a
| numismatic society])
| jlokier wrote:
| This is in fact possible and done sometimes, if the
| membership rules allow people to join like that.
| antris wrote:
| The non-profit can still have rules in place on who is
| accepted as members and who isn't, as long as the rules don't
| break any laws (discrimination etc.). They also can have a
| mission statement and rules that are not up for vote. They
| can have members enter a contract with the non-profit when
| joining as a member.
|
| Also, depending on who's "taking over" and who's "taken
| over", it can be argued that if the majority of members that
| provide the majority of the funding to the non-profit,
| shaping the non-profit according to the majority of its
| members is the right thing to do. If there's too much
| differences in opinion, the non-profit can also split any
| time.
| tephra wrote:
| To be precise, not everyone can join (indeed it is the non-
| profit bylaws that establishes this) but to be tax exempt it
| has to be what is called "open". I.e any person that fulfills
| the membership criteria can join (and it is the non-profit that
| decides on there should be a fee or not).
|
| To be a non-profit you also have to spend at least 80% of the
| income on the stated purpose of the non-profit (which of course
| might benefit members in the way that the goals of the non-
| profit is worked on but not in the way of paying money to
| member).
| natural219 wrote:
| If you're going to switch a bunch of servers anyway, why not
| start over by partnering with someone like Matrix.org? Dead
| simple to create an IRC<->matrix bridge for people who just love
| the old protocol, and decentralization efforts always have
| strength in numbers.
| tristan957 wrote:
| The Matrix-IRC bridge is absolutely horrible and leads to
| terrible experiences for Matrix users and IRC users.
| natural219 wrote:
| Ahh, I haven't used it before. Appreciate the feedback,
| probably makes Matrix a less attractive option for this case
| then.
| nullc wrote:
| For example, if your lines on the matrix side are long it
| converts them into urls. So people on IRC end up seeing you
| talking with 1/4 of your messages just being urls to some
| random server's pastebin.
|
| When the matrix gateways go up and down you'll have 1000
| random users thunderously join and part the channel at
| once.
|
| Matrix comment edits flood the channels.
|
| Matrix is unhelpful with abuse reports, in my experience.
|
| I generally ban matrix from IRC channels for these and
| other such nuisances.
| Arathorn wrote:
| fwiw we've just added stuff to the IRC bridge to let the
| pastebin, edit & reply behaviour be configurable on a
| per-room basis so that if folks have strong opinions they
| can enforce them.
|
| In terms of abuse reports; Element hires a fulltime team
| of folks to man abuse@matrix.org on behalf of the
| Matrix.org Foundation and chase down the tickets as they
| come in. Please ping abuse@matrix.org if we've dropped
| stuff.
| Freso wrote:
| As someone managing a number of IRC rooms, how do we
| configure this? (I don't use Matrix.)
| Arathorn wrote:
| First it needs to be merged & deployed. Then it'd have to
| be configured from the Matrix side as a one-off (a bit
| like configuring ChanServ stuff is a one-off on IRC).
| You'd log in on Matrix, give the Matrix user ops from
| IRC, and then twiddle the settings (for which there isn't
| a UI yet, but will get added soon). Also, we'll be
| setting the defaults to be pretty conservative based on
| the preferences of the target IRC network admins
| (potentially disabling pastebins & edits & replies
| entirely, to minimise impedance mismatch between Matrix &
| IRC), so the chances are you wouldn't need to configure
| anything.
| LTom wrote:
| Splendid, this sounds exactly like what we need in our
| channel. Is there a specific project page/Github
| issue/... I can keep an eye on, so that I know when this
| functionality is deployed?
| Arathorn wrote:
| Sure - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-
| irc/pull/130... is the PR, which links to related ones.
| It'll be deployed when, uh, libera.chat give us
| permission to run a bridge, assuming they do.
| qiqitori wrote:
| TBH it's silly that IRC clients and servers still respect
| the 512-byte limit for messages. Clients should send a
| command (e.g. something like PROTOCTL NOMSGLMT) to let
| the server know it supports messages of arbitrary length.
| And the server should cut off messages as before for
| every client that hasn't sent the command in question. Or
| there could be a limit matching the limit in the Matrix
| protocol if there is a limit in e.g. Matrix.
|
| Seriously, I think message length limits are the main
| thing that's holding back the IRC protocol. If you can
| send e.g. 65536 byte messages, anybody will be
| immediately able to create scripts for sending images or
| code snippets.
| progval wrote:
| There is a draft specification to allow sending longer
| messages without cutting the end for old clients:
| https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/multiline
|
| Please encourage your favorite client's developers to
| implement it if possible.
| metroholografix wrote:
| A lot of people find Matrix completely unpalatable. Why would
| they support it in this way?
|
| IRC works and has worked for decades. Its minimal, text-only,
| no bs, no distractions nature is its greatest asset. Client
| support, programmability, and ease of integration too.
|
| The folks that like Matrix are already using it. The folks that
| have stuck with IRC for decades will not abandon it for a
| protocol they deem to be inferior.
| natural219 wrote:
| Trust me, I get that; the main argument is that, in protocol
| wars, there's strength in numbers; IRC is a waning protocol,
| Matrix is a waxing protocol. I'm not saying people must
| change what's working for them already; my only case is that
| _if_ what _was_ working for you is now broken (the freenode
| network), you have a new opportunity to re-evaluate your
| position. That's all.
|
| You don't even have to go "all in" on all the fancy new
| Matrix stuff; just write a wrapper to comply with being a
| "homeserver", and continue using the IRC API with no changes.
| If not, that's also fine, I'm not that invested in this
| personally.
| ecmascript wrote:
| Seems like the chat just died, I cannot reconnect anymore.
|
| HN hug of love?
| staz wrote:
| https://twitter.com/liberachat/status/1395009986921652233
|
| > Hi all. The IRC network is currently experiencing technical
| difficulties, likely a result of a massive influx of people.
| We're working on fixing it.
|
| all the people migrating from Freenode it seems
| [deleted]
| snalty wrote:
| I think it's all the people jumping ship from freenode rather
| than HN.
| [deleted]
| ecmascript wrote:
| Yeah maybe true :)
| wchar_t wrote:
| I suppose that Freenode will survive the mass exodus going on
| right now, but will become something akin to the Sourceforge of
| IRC afterwards.
| Avamander wrote:
| Sourceforge has tried hard to get rid of that reputation under
| new management.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| I'm afraid they may as well try to bail the Titanic. That
| ship has already sunk.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I dunno I think it is doable. They still have a fairly well
| known name and a fair number of projects are still there
| (somehow).
|
| Their real problem is the actual website UI sucks. I don't
| think they've changed it for about a decade.
|
| If I were them I'd take something like Gogs and rebuild the
| site based on that.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm interested in the fact that, given all the shadiness about
| ownership etc with Freenode, there is not a single name of a real
| person anywhere on the site that I can find. Indeed, there is
| only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in
| Sweden."
|
| I don't know enough about Freenode. Is it normal for the staff of
| such a project to be secret? (Or, at least, secret if you haven't
| been following the previous history of Freenode?)
| rwmj wrote:
| A year or two ago the Freenode admins were subjected to an
| intense and somewhat bizarre campaign against them where
| unsubstantiated and false claims about them were spammed into
| Freenode channels (also incredibly annoying for those of us
| trying to run free software through Freenode channels at the
| time). So I can kind of understand that they might want to
| remain anonymous.
| caf wrote:
| Pseudonymous, really.
|
| I mean, "Fuchs" for example means far more to me than
| whatever the name on their drivers license is. Typically the
| only time I find out someone's real name on IRC is when their
| obituary gets posted!
| pmlnr wrote:
| Yep. No names, no contact, no impressum, but "trust us, we're
| the good ones" - right. Than act like it.
| politician wrote:
| Trust is built over time. The same complaints exist even if
| they provided all of the information requested. "How do we
| know these people are really the real people that worked on
| freenode?" Etc.
|
| The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat,
| but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a
| more complete story will emerge.
| dannyw wrote:
| That's how the internet worked for decades.
| cpach wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. What do you mean by The Internet in
| this context...? Organizations such as ICANN and IETF are
| not exactly anonymous.
| admax88q wrote:
| It's not how it works now.
|
| I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of
| freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the
| staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat.
|
| With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make
| sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service
| is more clearly documented and understood by everyone.
|
| At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit
| they have established should be clearly displayed on the
| web page somewhere.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Yes. Look where it got us: fb, twitter, reddit, etc taking
| it all over, because people "trust" them - see ominous zuck
| quote. Why? Because ordinary people need faces and names.
| So unless libera is aiming for the oldschool nerds, like
| us, they need to align with 2021.
| politician wrote:
| FB requires true names.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| FBI can fetch the true names thus nicknames became
| irrelevant
| pmlnr wrote:
| That's not the point (edit): the only thing I'm missing
| from libera is an impressum. Mentioning a nameless
| swedish nonprofit is actually worse in my eyes, than
| calling it xyz's server in the basement.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That is the point. People don't use Facebook because they
| like using real names, people use real names on Facebook
| because they were forced to in order to stay on Facebook.
|
| When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require
| real names.
| icedchai wrote:
| It actually doesn't. It requires your name _look_ like a
| true name. I know plenty of folks with fake last names on
| Facebook.
| qu4z-2 wrote:
| My understanding is it requires true names and is
| unevenly enforced.
| icedchai wrote:
| If it's unevenly enforced, then it's not "required" in
| any practical sense. Nobody I know has ever been kicked
| off for a fake but reasonable looking name. Facebook is
| not a government authority. If you ask for a picture of
| my ID, I can generate a fake one without consequence.
| smhenderson wrote:
| _So unless libera is aiming for the oldschool nerds, like
| us_
|
| Isn't that exactly who they're aiming for though?
| remram wrote:
| Freenode operated this way and failed.
| Macha wrote:
| Failed how?
|
| Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but
| it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed
| solution is basically to do this out the gate.
|
| Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC
| funded chat service with lots of users and a looming
| prospect of having to be profitable without losing them.
|
| Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a
| non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of
| money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather
| used it to set up new events like freenode live.
| teachingassist wrote:
| You use and buy things from corporations all the time,
| without knowing a single name or face behind it. 2021
| hasn't changed that.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| But those are isolated transactions, and I can return a
| product to the store.
|
| We're talking about networks and communities here. Those
| aren't as interchangeable as things we buy.
| dannyw wrote:
| They're pretty interchangeable: "/topic We have moved to
| irc.alternate.server. Join us in #project".
| munificent wrote:
| _> without knowing a single name or face behind it._
|
| That's because we are ensconced in a framework of
| corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that
| generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it
| isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses
| happen all the time.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| Meanwhile Discord is one of the most commonly used
| platforms for young people, where everyone is an anime
| girl named after their favorite song. I wouldn't be so
| sure about your assumption. Facebook is becoming
| increasingly known as an uncool boomer thing.
| pmlnr wrote:
| OK, it looks like nobody understood my point,
| fascinating.
|
| Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are
| contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their
| community there trust the entity running Discord.
|
| I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with
| that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't
| mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity
| behind them.
|
| I was never talking about the community on top of a
| platform, but the platform itself.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Trust has nothing to do with names, contact page or
| impressum.
|
| The other way around also works (e.g., Facebook has all the
| impressum and contact pages you want, but it's the least
| trustful tech company out there).
| neatze wrote:
| Trust is established through interactions (behavior) and not
| by; real names, titles, certifications, wealth, and location.
| lisper wrote:
| > Trust is established ... not by; real names
|
| That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity
| is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the
| persona and back to the person behind it. A single person
| can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be
| trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains
| this kind of gaming of the system and so makes
| trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.
|
| This is not to say that the costs of using real names
| outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say
| that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of
| establishing trust is just wrong.
| neatze wrote:
| Irrespective of real/fake name, behavior is most critical
| factor in trust, furthermore behavior changes, so
| interactions is your only information for degree of
| trust. Your real name is just label nothing more.
|
| Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier
| to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title,
| etc ...
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It's also established by pointing to one's past behavior to
| demonstrate a track record of trustworthiness, of certain
| values, etc. If it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg is
| leading the charge, here, you'd be unhappy.
| neatze wrote:
| If new product/service is not lead by Mark Zuckerberg you
| should not trust it ether, since you have no track
| record, furthermore past performance is not guarantee of
| future results.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| fwiw: the privacy page states that it's a non-profit under
| Swedish Law, mentions the GDPR, sets terms regarding your
| personal data which ought to be aligned with the GDPR and
| refers to the Swedish Authority for Private Protection if you
| want to file a formal complaint.
|
| It's odd to only get a mail address - policy at libera dot chat
| - and no further formal contact information of the non-profit
| as a legal entity in Sweden.
|
| I suppose you could try an inquiry via the Swedish tax office
| asking them for a formal statement from the public record. I
| don't know any Swedish but I suppose there might be a search
| engine which lists public information about non-profits?
|
| Even so, there are other hints: the footer features a link to a
| Github organization where you can easily track development in
| the open. Of course, that still doesn't give the project a
| clear, identifiable "face" or formal point of contact.
|
| Other commenters argue "anonymity is how Freenode got big, and
| how the Internet used to work and that's perfectly fine since
| it fosters trust."
|
| I think this only holds so much water today. It's not about a
| relationship between users of a service which provides the
| affordances to hide behind an anonymous handle. This is about
| the relationship between users and the operators of a service.
| You trust that an operator "won't do harm" when you log onto
| their service.
|
| Such trust is tenuous at best if the decade has demonstrated.
| Legal frameworks such as the GDPR and privacy laws exist for
| the exact purpose of protecting users, and creating a legal
| liability on the part of all too zealous operators of services.
|
| Moreover, the GDPR framework actively tries to de-incentivize
| gathering and storing any personal data which can be tracked to
| identifiable individuals without due cause.
|
| Testing Libera Chat's trustworthiness would be, theoretically,
| as easy as sending a formal subject access request under the
| GDPR rules to the listed mail address.
|
| Now, I'm aware that all of this are round about ways of
| figuring out whether this service is legit. It would help if
| their website just listed formal contact and legal details that
| identify the legal entity which can be held liable.
|
| Then there's Freenode Ltd which is a UK company. Since Brexit,
| the GDPR doesn't apply. Given the latest publicly published
| updates, I don't feel similarly confident about the credibility
| of any statements regarding the safeguarding of personal data,
| nor backed by a similarly strong legal framework as far as my
| own rights go (I'm not acquainted with British privacy laws).
| Macha wrote:
| The GDPR has been replaced by the "UK GDPR" with the same
| requirements as part of Brexit. Unless the UK government
| decides to change it, you have the same protections.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| What personal data are you actually sending to the IRC
| server? They can associate your IP with your Nick, and
| that's... It. I suppose chat logs are also your data? And the
| results of the port scans, if those are saved? But this seems
| honestly less than what the average website visit sends out
| euroclear wrote:
| It would include your email address if you register with
| NickServ.
| SamBam wrote:
| Associating everything you've ever written with your IP is
| a pretty big one, if there was ever any expectation of
| anonymity.
| wlonkly wrote:
| An IP address, alone, is considered PII under GDPR.
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/
| nemetroid wrote:
| Registering your Swedish non-profit with the authorities is
| required for many useful things (e.g. having a bank account),
| though technically not mandatory. There are several free
| services for querying the registry, e.g.
| https://www.allabolag.se/.
|
| I wasn't able to find Libera Chat there, though it might
| simply be the case that the registration has not been
| finalized yet.
| cpach wrote:
| According to The Swedish Tax Agency there are no civil laws
| regulating exactly how to form a non-profit organization.
| But it's customary to create a "decree" (stadgar) that
| declares such things as location ("sate"), purpose, rules
| for how to operate the organization, rules for how to elect
| the board of directors, etc. Not sure if they have done any
| of those things.
|
| If the organization hasen't created a decree and elected a
| board, then it will not count as juridical person.
|
| _[Edited slightly]_
| piokoch wrote:
| The Old Internet way, you knew people by their nicks. The only
| thing that mattered was what they are bringing to the table in
| terms of valuable input. Sex, race, nationality, education,
| believes, age, etc. were irrelevant.
|
| Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if
| not offensive.
| wyclif wrote:
| I have been on IRC for a long time (since 1995) and I can
| attest to the truth of this. The same thing was also true of
| Usenet. Back then tech was far, far less politicized than it
| is now and most users had connections and collaboration with
| people that had nothing to do with off-internet life.
|
| I remember one time that after having been in the same
| channel with a user and chatting to them almost every day for
| 10 years, they finally revealed that they were female not
| male. That was a real revelation. The same could be said for
| people who you assumed were from the Anglosphere but turned
| out to be Indian, African, or from other far-flung places.
| The point is, none of this mattered. What mattered was your
| intelligence, knowledge, problem-solving ability, and
| programming chops.
|
| In many respects, the Old Internet Way was better than the
| New Internet Way.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Not just gender and race. Age as well. When I revealed my
| age to my friends/guildmates there was always shock (I was
| 12-16 at the time). Some of them I'd known for several
| years before I told them.
|
| The internet was the only place I was treated as an adult,
| an equal. As I got older I no longer felt the need to hide
| my age to be treated that way, but I really hope kids of
| today can find a similar place.
|
| People on the Old Internet assumed you were "like them". If
| they're a white, 25 year old american male, they're going
| to assume you are a white, 20-something american male by
| default. You can correct them, but... why would you care?
| Back then we didn't really try to paint a picture of who we
| are in real life. Like you said, all that mattered was what
| you would concretely bring to the table. Trying to
| emphasize your age, gender or nationality would be seen as
| rude in an "is _that_ what you 're bringing to the table?"
| kind of way (less of an issue in the case of nationality as
| RL meetups became more common, and especially less of an
| issue in europe-centric international groups where your
| location could in fact be something you're bringing to the
| table).
|
| There's a lot of valid criticism of the Old Internet and it
| wasn't a perfect place. Sexism was certainly rampant. So
| was ageism. But in a much more practical sense, it was _way
| the fuck more egalitarian_ than what we have now.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| The golden era. When the only identity that mattered was your
| username and behavior.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I recently tried to join a discord that was tangentially
| relevant to the trans community and the amount of self-
| identification they wanted was troublesome to me (region,
| age, sexual preference, opinion on pronouns/pronouns, etc).
|
| EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News
| karma scores are fucking cold.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| S'ok. I was asked for my preferred pronouns on an
| application (for a job I didn't care too much about, but
| the pay was OK) so I put my preferred pronouns as
| he/him/dude, which are my actual preferred pronouns. I
| was told never apply to the company again. They make
| video games...
| cout wrote:
| My first response to reading this was "dude isn't a
| pronoun", but after thinking about it, I realize it is
| being used more and more as a pronoun and not just as a
| noun.
|
| I wonder what other words can be used as a pronoun?
| hunter2_ wrote:
| A name for the male segment of this class of words is
| "bronoun," which includes things like bro, man, guy, etc.
|
| Basically anything you can use in place of a name, so
| long as the grammatical usage is namelike.
|
| "That guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a noun
|
| "Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can
| tell because "he" also works grammatically)
|
| However, I think these would need to be in the initial
| position(s) when slash-delimiting one's pronouns, because
| the final position is for a possessive form. That is,
| they're analogous to "he" but not analogous to "his" (and
| using them like "him" would be a stretch, as far as I can
| figure...), which might be what got GP in hot water.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| > _" Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you
| can tell because "he" also works grammatically)_
|
| You don't think that's merely people being lazy and
| leaving off a word that can be inferred ('That')? This is
| something I often do in casual conversation, particularly
| vocal conversations:
|
| "I am wondering what you mean" - 'I' is a pronoun
|
| "Wondering what you mean" - 'Wondering' is now the
| pronoun??? Clearly not. It's just a way that people are
| lazy and sloppy with grammar when correct grammar isn't
| important.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| This is convincing.
|
| But to answer your "wondering" question: nope, because
| "he/him/his," nor their analogues (person, number,
| gender, etc.), don't work there.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| It really isn't a pronoun, but goes into the implicit
| versus explicit thing. If your pronouns are "He/Him" you
| want to be called "Man", implicitly. If I don't say
| "Dude", explicitly, how are they to know?... Plus, I've
| met several people who chafe at being called "Dude", and
| I prefer it TBH. "Hey, dude" or "Dude's got good coding
| practices" are perfectly fine by me, but I'm also in my
| 40's and it shows =/
| [deleted]
| google234123 wrote:
| When I first read this it did sound a bit funny - I'm
| guessing they thought you were trying to be humorous,
| but, like the other reply, I can also totally understand
| that you actually enjoy being called dude.
| wrycoder wrote:
| LOL. Love it. But wouldn't it be dude/the dude/dude's?
| api wrote:
| Any group like that is going to get a lot of trolls, so
| you probably experienced a kind of manual captcha.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| sure, its a shame because I really like the content.
| google234123 wrote:
| You can also enter fake data (for the things that aren't
| important: e.g. location), I do this all the time on the
| internet.
| icedchai wrote:
| Is that a problem? Just give them fake information.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| it changes how people might act around you. I always
| wanted it to only be about the words.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I am guessing you are downvoted because a transforum is
| arguable one of the very few places where that question
| makes sense.
|
| I would find it deeply wrong if HN were to ask for the
| gender of their users, let alone their sexual
| preferences, but I would expect the same of a dating
| site.
|
| But I don't disagree with you in general. I also miss the
| intimacy a nick could afford you. Somehow you could talk
| about deeper things when nobody knew your name.
| raehik wrote:
| I also think asking for some of those things is absurd
| and intrusive. I would feel a little (*not deathly)
| uncomfortable baring my soul like that to some anonymous
| Discord admins. I'd like to know what others feel/why
| this is a downvoteable comment.
| iron_ball wrote:
| I participate in a Discord that is kind of similar. Not
| the same one, because my example has totally optional
| pronoun choice. But they have reason to be cautious of
| newcomers: before they added an interview/onboarding
| step, they were continually brigaded by trolls of various
| levels of sincerity. The internet can be a harsh place,
| and I understand the desire to create a refuge.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I totally get _why_ its like that, and I'm not upset, its
| just unfortunate that this is a chasm of difference
| between very early internet culture.
| fao_ wrote:
| I mean, most spaces have those as roles that you can fill
| in, but don't have to. wrt pronoun roles, they are used
| for figuring out how to refer to you -- it is after all,
| a trans space where appearance and expectation won't
| match up with people's preferences, and where people are
| tired from the water-drip torture* that is constant
| implicit and explicit misgendering.
|
| * - that is to say, each individual instance (drip)
| wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost
| constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can
| cause a lot of anguish.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| In this case they were mandatory. I get that it
| represents an issue for that community but I'm merely
| describing a schism compared with earlier internet
| attitudes and some spaces today.
|
| I left the community because it just upset me to have to
| do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does.
| geenew wrote:
| That was the ideal, and in my experience, the norm at the
| time.
|
| The Hacker Manifesto said it nicely:
|
| "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the
| switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service
| already existing without paying for what could be dirt-
| cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you
| call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals.
| We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We
| exist without skin color, without nationality, without
| religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build
| atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to
| us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet
| we're the criminals.
|
| Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My
| crime is that of judging people by what they say and think,
| not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting
| you, something that you will never forgive me for.
|
| I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this
| individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're
| all alike."
|
| http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/7/3.txt
| echelon wrote:
| It was a simpler, more naive time.
|
| People are too forthcoming on the internet today, with some
| divulging almost their entire being to the megacorp spy
| machines. It's easy for stalkers, let alone adtech and
| three letter agencies, to find and track people.
|
| I prefer today's tech, but yesterday's freedom, mindset,
| and lack of tracking.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I'm not 100% on board with today's tech either. I miss
| when every instant messenger supported XMPP so I could
| just use Adium/Pidgin to handle all my communications in
| one program.
| Spivak wrote:
| The beautiful era where everyone had to either adopt the
| persona of being a cis het white western man or be subject
| to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. I tried
| being a girl openly on the early internet when I was young
| and naive but after constant jokes like "how are you using
| IRC from the kitchen?" and "tits or gtfo" you just give up
| and learn to talk like a guy.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| > being a cis het white western man or be subject to all
| manners of harassment and offensive jokes.
|
| Believe it or not but cis white western men were and
| still are subject to all manners of harassment and
| offensive jokes. As a cis white western man myself I
| personally have experienced harassment online.
| Spivak wrote:
| I didn't say they couldn't be. You're doing the thing
| where you assume that a implies b means that b implies a.
|
| "If you did not pass as a cit het white man you would
| likely be harassed for it on the early internet."
|
| is not the same thing as
|
| "If you were harassed on the early internet then you must
| not have passed as a cis het white man."
|
| During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't
| respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in
| building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I
| didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
| _-david-_ wrote:
| > I didn't say they couldn't be.
|
| The way you worded it sounded like you were as explicit
| as you can be without explicitly saying that men are not
| harassed. You said you either adopt the persona of a man
| OR you are harassed. You also said you gave up and
| learned to talk like a man (to stop certain harassment).
| Both of these implies that you are not harassed if you
| act like a man.
|
| >During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't
| respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in
| building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I
| didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
|
| There is a difference in your original post and your
| analogy due to the use of the word 'or' in the original
| post. If you go to a restaurant and they ask if you want
| salad or soup as a side dish they are not implying you
| get both, but one or the other.
|
| It is too bad in English we do not have xor to prevent
| such confusions.
| tyrust wrote:
| That's all fun and cool until you want to hold $handle
| accountable for forwarding all your messages to their
| favorite state power.
| SamBam wrote:
| There aren't even nicks, though.
| tyrust wrote:
| Yeah I think this person is just waxing poetic about
| something vaguely related to your original comment.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| And species (nobody knows i m a dog)
| bwindels wrote:
| Hackles [1], is that you?
|
| 1: http://www.hackles.org/
| cblconfederate wrote:
| We are Legion
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I'd trust a dog (or any other furry community member) on
| the internet over an international corporation any day of
| the week.
| andai wrote:
| tfw my dog is a member of the furry community
| unilynx wrote:
| We're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in
| the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard
| greeting..
| kragen wrote:
| No, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would
| immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot
| of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was
| the default.
| cout wrote:
| I encountered the "a/s/l" question on numerous Undernet
| channels when I started using irc.
|
| We would joke about it in programming channels, but
| people really did use it in non-programming channels.
| wgjordan wrote:
| In my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was
| common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on
| AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on
| technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this
| greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM).
| wrycoder wrote:
| Yeah, I was on irc in the 90's and missed that one. I had
| to look it up on urbandictionary, which was entertaining.
| unilynx wrote:
| There was a time where the 'hackers' where in the
| minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was
| replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat
| solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was
| never a real thing in western/northern europe
|
| Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks
| in the 95-98s
| novok wrote:
| When I got the asl question i found it rude and told them i
| don't like answering the question. It often had a sexual /
| dating connotation in my mind, which i didn't like.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| In my experience the "a/s/l" question has only ever come
| from people who wanted to have text sex with you, and
| outside of those sort of chatrooms was only ever said as an
| awkward joke.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| And that is _exactly_ what led to the current problem with
| freenode, right?
|
| I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has
| it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal
| organization or legal rights that let one person who had
| enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he
| owned it.
|
| You want that not to happen again, you might want to do
| _something_ different. And indeed the announcement
| acknowledges that, that 's why there is "a non-profit
| association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal
| stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a
| bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it
| will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).
| kodah wrote:
| No. Freenode was purchased by an entrepreneur and former Mt
| Gox employee supposedly to facilitate a conference called
| "Freenode Live". It had nothing to do with use of real
| names.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Somehow I think we're not having the same conversation.
| It's not that it had to do with use of real names on
| freenode. It's that it had to do with no formal legal
| structure for freenode (and a formal legal structure
| requires real names associated with it).
|
| The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the
| authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they
| actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure...
| they got away with it.
|
| The comment at the top of this thread was talking about
| how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that
| sort of thing happening again before investing energy in
| this new thing, one would want to know more about the
| formal legal structure and who is behind it.
|
| The "old internet" way is "We're just some people
| cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to
| know each other's real names." That has plusses and
| minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they
| have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone
| else for personal profit, even though all the people
| informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns
| out it's hard to stop them.
| kodah wrote:
| Freenode was registered under Freenode Limited out of
| Britain, the head of staff was effectively the president.
| There was definitely legal structure, voting, etc...
| People knew Christel's name, the rest of the staffers
| knew each other's names, it's just not circulated outside
| of that circle.
| [deleted]
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those
| characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as
| male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for
| participating online.
| sneak wrote:
| Indeed, but many other women experienced none of that
| because, while it may have been sexist, non-gendered nicks
| were assumed homogenous with the group (ie male).
|
| It really was a lot more about what you brought to the
| table than identity.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| But the other side of that is that potential targets of
| harassment can't _bring_ all of their experiences to the
| table. Many people who didn 't experience harassment
| still had to self-censor to avoid attention.
| api wrote:
| If you doubt this, create an alt with a woman's name and
| try participating in programming, hacking, or gaming
| groups. Prepare to be covered in drool, get lectured
| condescendingly, and get lots of dick pics.
| ggreer wrote:
| I have run this experiment in several communities,
| including Xbox Live (which is full of annoying
| teenagers). My experience wasn't much different from
| choosing my normal male-coded nicknames. Instead of
| assholes calling me, "fag", they called me "bitch". Also
| I got more comments related to sex instead of violence. I
| didn't keep track of actual numbers, but the amount of
| harassment and trolling I received felt about the same.
|
| Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The
| only area in which women reported significantly worse
| harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men
| were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened.
| It really seems like a wash to me.[1]
|
| 1.
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-
| haras...
| emilfihlman wrote:
| Yup. People are generally quite shitty, but not because
| of gender. That doesn't mean they won't use gendered
| language to be shitty (because that's a more natural way
| to be shitty), but it's about the same amount for both.
|
| There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find
| it.
| belval wrote:
| One of these is not like the other. Programming and
| hacking are usually much more respectful groups than
| gaming.
|
| Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people
| screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really
| limited to women.
|
| That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a
| girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't
| play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting
| team killed for making callouts.
| gsich wrote:
| Male until proven female.
| falcolas wrote:
| Dog until proven otherwise.
|
| And even then, everyone's still a dog.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I can only speak about my experience and other people have
| their experiences, which do not want to invalidate.
|
| Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91)
| I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and
| #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything
| beside Linux and Java.
|
| Ah the times of Nickbot.
|
| Years later when some people met IRL for the first time,
| everyone was suprised about everyone else.
|
| (this was some years before the WWW, and before digital
| photography etc.)
| cout wrote:
| I don't doubt that in those days women experienced
| harassment online. There was a running joke, "there are no
| women on irc", implying that anyone claiming to be female
| was actually a male pretending to be female to gain
| attention, or even channel ops. What is an IRL female to do
| in such a culture? It wouldn't surprise me to learn any of
| the people I used to chat with were females pretending to
| be male to avoid the drama.
| kragen wrote:
| This is true, and the expectation of "real names" has made
| this enormously worse. If you were "snopes" or "diogenes",
| nobody could harass you online for being a woman, because
| they didn't know you were a woman. Even a feminine name was
| no guarantee that your real-life gender identity was
| female. Contrast Fecebutt, which extorts photos of your
| government ID from you by cutting you off from your social
| network, then publishes your walletnym for every wanker to
| see.
|
| During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for
| many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.
| dijit wrote:
| I have anecdotes both for and against this from women who
| were on the internet before anything that could be
| considered a "women in tech" movement existed.
|
| I can't say from a male perspective. But I think it's not
| as black and white as you paint it.
|
| The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you
| didn't try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the
| majority of people just didn't really care.
|
| There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people
| are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without
| major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up
| if you are one of those. But those people would find
| another reason anyway, I truly don't believe it's "because"
| a person is female.
|
| So "male passing", on IRC, about technical topics, is
| "human passing" in most cases, and when it's not, nobody
| seems to really care, or that's what I've been told.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Most people not caring isn't the problem though, because
| it doesn't take that many people to constantly harass
| someone.
| falcolas wrote:
| A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the
| internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated
| differently.
|
| This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating
| yourself is the only way to be treated differently from
| everyone else.
|
| I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed
| from that.
| duckfang wrote:
| Weirdly enough, "Tits or GTFO" was primarily a 4chan-ism.
| Everybody was "anonymous", so if someone claimed to be a
| woman, she needed to show tits.
|
| Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any
| sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there,
| and general hate.
| ljm wrote:
| Is it not apparent in the description that you were also
| assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and
| balls or GTFO' being a thing.
|
| The point being that whatever noble intention was behind
| this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not
| a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a
| woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their
| own gender out of it, played along with the guys who
| would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or
| stuck only to conversations where all of that could
| remain ambiguous.
| thefunnyman wrote:
| Rule 29: On the internet men are men, women are also men,
| and kids are undercover FBI agents.
| duckfang wrote:
| When the more puerile culture of The September that Never
| Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take
| hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what
| that place was like and agreed it was a seething
| cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were
| *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on
| the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs.
|
| Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or
| Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever
| nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more
| feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more
| were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the
| gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average"
| (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic)
| people join for the first time, the old guard of the
| internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always
| dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly
| weren't it.
|
| It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web
| 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real
| names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for
| "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like
| Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of
| course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just
| as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different")
| walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name
| online.
|
| Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I
| don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled,
| ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country,
| etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its
| unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those
| areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably
| male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture
| capital and startups.
|
| (I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as
| it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all
| the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's
| marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional
| monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
| ljm wrote:
| I'm going to avoid commenting on your writing style and
| vocabulary and instead focus on this one word:
|
| > _we_.
|
| Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to
| represent, utterly fucking _failed_. You point the finger
| at the The Eternal September, but how many of those
| 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that?
| Failing one time after another until you give up and
| realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.
|
| > _we 've always dealt with a higher class of people, and
| these distinctly weren't it._
|
| I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby
| hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of
| writing I actually just did.
|
| > _we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist,
| homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first
| time_
|
| Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the
| group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed
| masses finding the internet.
|
| --
|
| I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet
| curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has
| changed. I dare say it's worse.
| ygjb wrote:
| Well that's just an awful pretentious revisionist bit of
| rose colored navel gazing.
|
| Now granted, I have only been online in various forms
| since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet
| occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously
| since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine"
| name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native
| speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30
| years of online activity under my real name, I can tell
| you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much
| since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate
| through the university mail system, and probably even
| before then.
| Inhibit wrote:
| Worked with a guy named Nikita who was on phone support.
| So many people in the US who couldn't wrap their heads
| around that normally being a mans name in Russia.
|
| I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird
| people out there.
|
| Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late
| 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and
| largely only psudo-anonymous.
|
| The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users.
| And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited
| connection range. People were locals.
| panopticon wrote:
| It likely originated there, but I observed it all over
| the place. MMOs, IRC, other message boards, etc. From my
| experience, it was a common fixture of the late 2000s
| internet culture.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the
| internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated
| differently.
|
| This is the problem, isn't it? The women who state (not
| "announce" - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I
| attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online
| and then _dare_ to request they're treated the same as
| their peers. They want to be treated _differently_ than
| women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon
| users.
| wyclif wrote:
| _The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you
| didn't try to constantly talk about being a girl /woman
| the majority of people just didn't really care_
|
| That sounds right to me, and matches up with my
| experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you
| weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and
| constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want
| to announce their gender because they didn't want special
| treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual
| attention, but the difference between then and now was
| that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear
| online.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you
| didn't try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman
| the majority of people just didn't really care.
|
| Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral
| username means people "don't really care" you're a woman
| because they just assume you're a man. But often the mere
| mention of the fact you're a woman, however relevant to
| the discussion, is viewed as "constantly talking about"
| your gender.
| [deleted]
| splithalf wrote:
| When is it ever not relevant? It's all most humans can
| think of, arguably for valid if not good reasons.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Passing as male" isn't really a thing on IRC, or even on
| many forums/BBS's. The default is a totally genderfluid
| nickname.
| jfengel wrote:
| The difference is that if you chose to have a male
| nickname, or if you otherwise decided to advertise your
| masculinity (bragging about your genitalia, talking about
| your wife, even hinting at clues like your favorite truck
| or beer), there would be no repercussions.
|
| Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she
| wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she
| mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by
| women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a
| job, she would be known as female and harassed.
|
| Every single woman had to think about that, every single
| day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires
| a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup
| is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but
| just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to
| everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.
|
| Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by
| men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes.
| No, you may not hit on every single person on the
| Internet just because you think they are female." They
| object, but to women, that's something they've done every
| single day of their online lives.
| dijit wrote:
| I've condensed and repeated the anecdotes of others,
| which have been shared with me in this thread, and what I
| say now has no reflection on that.
|
| But:
|
| > bragging about your genitalia,
|
| If you're not doing this ironically, then what the fuck
| communities are you in?
|
| > talking about your wife
|
| Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than
| the other examples. People do talk about
| spouses/partners.
|
| > even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer
|
| Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully
| sexist of you to assume not.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| > Women -definitely- can like these things
|
| Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if
| they _don 't_, or if they like _other_ things, speaking
| up about _those_ things isn 't equally easy.
|
| Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment
| explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves
| the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap
| point with an offhand accusation.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| In my circles, if you start bragging about your dick,
| you'll be asked to prove it or 'stfu'.
| [deleted]
| GavinMcG wrote:
| When it comes to nicknames, sure, but that's not really
| the substance of a forum/channel/etc.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on
| various sites where people use "he" by default to refer
| to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when
| they're known only by nickname.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure, but "he" is a default pronoun in English.
| frereubu wrote:
| That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like
| "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer
| than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group
| of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if
| they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture
| of men and women.
| makomk wrote:
| The thing about singular they is that it only really
| became "perfectly good usage for longer than people
| think" within the last few years, _well_ after the heyday
| of Usenet. I don 't think it was even a major contender
| for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun
| before then.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| TIL Usenet was in use in the 14th century.
|
| What newsgroups did Chaucer post to?
| herewulf wrote:
| Are you trying to claim that Chaucer used "they" as a
| gender neutral singular pronoun? That is extremely
| dubious considering that half of the Middle English
| speakers were still using <he> as the third person plural
| pronoun[1] (descended from Old English <hie> and
| unrelated to the third person masculine pronoun). Chaucer
| himself alternates between native Old English and Anglo-
| Norse forms depending on grammatical case and/or whim[2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Middle_English-
| they [2]: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunci
| ation/gr.html...
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| That isn't at all true. It was absolutely standard
| (British) English when I was growing up in the '80s.
| wahern wrote:
| Epicene they has been common all along. That's why
| curmudgeonly grammarians could never shut up about it--
| because it was so common. The recent innovation is the
| use of singular they in situations where gender would
| normally be assumed. For example, "Jane went to the
| restroom to comb their hair." Until recently that was
| jarring for most people--some more than others--even when
| they weren't invested in the culture wars.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > The thing about singular they is that it only really
| became "perfectly good usage for longer than people
| think" within the last few years, well after the heyday
| of Usenet.
|
| The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of
| style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th
| century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender
| Macha wrote:
| > In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-
| neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in
| manuals of style and school textbooks until around the
| 1960s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender
|
| (Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/2012053002
| 4829/http://www.nytime...)
|
| Of course:
|
| > More recently, this use of he has become less accepted,
| and singular they is becoming the dominant form
|
| But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody
| flips a switch and everyone across the world updates
| their habits, so it takes time.
|
| While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in
| school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he
| or she" being the taught solution for a single person of
| unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is
| going out of favour.
| Lammy wrote:
| In the 18th century do you think most women went to
| school or ever had a job outside the home? Easy
| assumption to make that anyone reading a textbook was a
| "he" lol
| jiofih wrote:
| It is in the Bible at least? There a million verses with
| "He who does not xxx... is" that are intended to be
| gender neutral.
| gbear605 wrote:
| That depends on your translation - some translations will
| translate those to "They who do not". Many of the ones
| who translate it as "he" are maintaining the Hebrew lack
| of gender neutrality, but that's arbitrary. If the
| ancient Israelites spoke Finnish instead, the sentences
| would be gender neutral.
| jannes wrote:
| The bible wasn't written in English. What exactly is your
| point?
| Lammy wrote:
| For people who pass as male online, yeah. It makes me
| feel out of place any time it's happened to me.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| That's your internalised view of the world. It's not "male
| passing", it's "human passing".
| shadowgovt wrote:
| These are not equivalent.
|
| The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it
| turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When
| someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't
| news; tied to a woman, it was.
| okprod wrote:
| Very different in 90s AOL. "a/s/l" was the norm and everyone
| had a profile
| owlbynight wrote:
| Yeah, I miss it a lot.
| runjake wrote:
| I don't know what IRC you were using, but it isn't the IRC I
| knew.
|
| I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by
| "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry)
| and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted
| with.
|
| Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike
| up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask
| for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had
| established enough "rapport" to do so.
| blibble wrote:
| after the disgusting harassment their staff received a few
| years back I can understand not wanting their realnames
| anywhere
|
| ("freenodegate")
| cheph wrote:
| I give it 2 years max until they sell libera.chat to the next
| "totally trustworthy guy who gave them his word" for a pack
| of magic beans.
|
| Count me out of this scam.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| What about all the children harmed by the freenodegate
| conspirators?
| mst wrote:
| That was a fun year.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| No it wasn't.
| mst wrote:
| Allow me my sense of humour about it given I was one of
| the main targets :P
| sdevonoes wrote:
| If I were the author of this project I wouldn't like to share
| my name just like that. I don't know, perhaps it's just me, but
| what's wrong with this?
| smarx007 wrote:
| How do you expect me to accept a privacy policy of your
| website if two parties are not identified? Every
| legal(-looking) document begins by identifying the parties
| (not necessarily names, though a quick lookup on
| https://www.allabolag.se will get you the names of the
| directors). Also, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-37-gdpr/, p. 7
| requires DPO to be identified.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| P 7 says they need to publish the contact details, which
| presumably "You may also exercise your rights by contacting
| policy@libera.chat" fufills.
|
| Also, their privacy policy does begin by listing one of the
| parties as the Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat.
| smarx007 wrote:
| > which presumably "You may also exercise your rights by
| contacting policy@libera.chat" fufills.
|
| I guess you are right.
|
| > Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat
|
| Which could not be found in the national registry.
| Compare to https://www.kth.se/en/om/kontakt/kontakt-
| kth-1.1947 which promptly resolves to
| https://www.allabolag.se/2021003054/kungliga-tekniska-
| hogsko...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The registry is likely just standard bureaucracy, I think
| most of this has happened over the past week or so.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Maybe you are right there as well, but the Privacy page
| says "This page was last updated 2021-04-24." That made
| me post the HN comment in the first place, as I think the
| information gets updated pretty fast in Sweden.
| Thorentis wrote:
| How is this better than Matrix? Freenode had posterity going for
| it. What does a brand new IRC network in 2021 have to offer than
| Matrix does not?
| staz wrote:
| it easier to change what server you connect to in your client,
| especially if all the channels you connect to move over, than
| to adopt a new protocol/client/ etc..
| joepie91_ wrote:
| I'm a fan of Matrix as a project, but I don't think that "the
| house is on fire, we must evacuate" is the correct moment to
| tell people to move to a different messaging protocol and
| ecosystem entirely. That's a big change for a community.
| rockdoe wrote:
| Talking about Matrix...matrix.org had an IRC bridge to the
| Freenode network. Is there any up for libera.chat?
|
| (The bridge is unreliable, but still very handy to stay
| connected to old friends)
| fundamental wrote:
| I don't think one is setup currently, though based upon some
| of the IRC channels I'm in it sounds like one is getting
| actively worked on.
| jordemort wrote:
| Hoping there's one soon, the only way I connect to IRC
| these days is through a Matrix bridge and I don't want to
| run one myself :)
| Apotheos wrote:
| Do you have your own server? How hard was it to set up?
| jordemort wrote:
| I run my own homeserver. It wasn't too hard to set up but
| it's fairly resource-intensive. I have it on a big Ryzen
| and barely notice it but I think it would crush something
| like a Raspberry Pi (especially if you tried to run it
| off an SD card)
| prepend wrote:
| I think protocols are better than systems. Since matrix isn't
| an RFC (yet?), I think there's still value in using an open
| protocol over a particular system or project.
|
| I think an open source project is more scalable and reusable
| than a proprietary one, but if the goal is long term
| communication among diverse users, then using a protocol is
| good.
| SamWhited wrote:
| This is one of the big issues with Matrix that doesn't get
| talked about enough: it's not managed by a real standards
| body. It was previously run by a company who kept trying to
| monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split
| off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how to
| monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it). I'm not
| against the devs being able to pay themselves, that's great,
| but the specs themselves shouldn't be run that way. Existing
| standards bodies have more experience, more legal protections
| for the users, and are just generally better at developing
| standards.
| Arathorn wrote:
| > It was previously run by a company who kept trying to
| monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split
| off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how
| to monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it).
|
| This is just false. Speaking as co-founder and project lead
| for Matrix, it's been the same team all along since we
| began in 2013. We were incubated until 2017 in a company
| which _never_ tried to monetize the protocol, and then we
| span out to set up Element (formerly New Vector) where we
| keep the lights on by selling Matrix hosting and support
| /consulting.
|
| At the same time we set up The Matrix.org Foundation as a
| non-profit neutral standards body, with an independent
| board where the original founders are deliberately in the
| minority - and when we set it up, half of the spec core
| team were independent of Element too. (This changed as
| folks on the team opted to join Element so they could work
| on Matrix fulltime).
|
| Rather than spreading FUD about Matrix, why not collaborate
| and work together? Or at least spend the energy on
| improving XMPP rather than negging us...
| vlmutolo wrote:
| This topic seems to come up a lot, and I didn't know
| that, for example, the Matrix founders are in the
| minority on the Matrix Foundation board.
|
| Is there a place with this history or the governance
| structure that people can link to the next time this
| comes up?
| Arathorn wrote:
| https://matrix.org/foundation is intended to be the
| single source of truth for this, and has bios of the
| foundation board members (or Guardians, as we call
| ourselves as 'board members' or 'directors' sounds boring
| :)
| SamWhited wrote:
| I am not advocating for XMPP, nor am I nagging you. You
| showed up to advocate Matrix on a thread about IRC, stop
| accusing me of things and collaborate yourself instead of
| reinventing the wheel in terms of specs and in terms of
| standards bodies. Everything I said about the company and
| foundation is accurate as far as I can tell. I am very
| glad there is a foundation, but it's still not okay:
| submit to an existing standards body and stop advertising
| on threads about IRC.
| webmaven wrote:
| Negging != Nagging
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negging
| SamWhited wrote:
| Oops; either way, I was doing neither. They asked, I
| answered, then they had a hissy fit because it turns out
| they're apparently the CEO trying to score some users.
| Let's just end this line of discussion and keep it
| related to IRC and stop talking about Matrix.
| samsquire wrote:
| I think you're being completely unreasonable. They didn't
| have a hissy fit.
|
| You're trying to moderate discussion that you don't like,
| because it's not about IRC. Matrix is relevant in a
| discussion about IRC because it's a valid alternative.
| You can't police natural and useful discussion you don't
| like.
| SamWhited wrote:
| Fair enough, I shouldn't use such strong language. That
| being said, the CEO of a company making money off Matrix
| showed up to advertise, then complained about how I
| hadn't disclosed that I do some volunteer work at the XSF
| while simultaneously not disclosing that they have an
| entire company based on the thing they're asking about).
| That seems rather egregious and made me quite mad. My
| original answer I still think was perfectly reasonable
| too.
|
| All that being said, you're right, I shouldn't get drawn
| in every time this person (whom I've just realized is the
| same person who goes by another name elsewhere) jumps in
| on every chat across the internet trying to advertise
| their product. My own fault for getting drawn in and
| using language like "hissy fit" that is, as you said,
| unreasonable. I'm sorry about that.
| natural219 wrote:
| What are you even talking about lol
| SamWhited wrote:
| What part confused you? If I can clarify I will.
| natural219 wrote:
| You just seem to be making many negative claims with
| little substance behind them.
| SamWhited wrote:
| I don't understand what you want; it's all true as far as
| I can tell, do you want a detailed technical breakdown of
| the protocol in an HN thread? This doesn't seem to be the
| place but the graph protocol mechanisms are pretty easily
| verified from their spec
| prepend wrote:
| These claims seem pretty basic and are easily read about
| in their Wikipedia article,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
| callahad wrote:
| > _Existing standards bodies [...] are just generally
| better at developing standards._
|
| Speaking in a strictly personal capacity, I don't think
| that point can be taken for granted. The W3C's missteps
| with HTML5, and WHATWG's success, is a particularly notable
| failing of a dedicated standards body. The Rust programming
| language is also developed and codified outside of a
| traditional standards organization.
| SamWhited wrote:
| That's fair; I don't mean to suggest that all standards
| bodies are perfect all the time, or that they've never
| made mistakes :) just that it's better than making up a
| foundation spinoff from a company that doesn't have any
| experience and will re-invent the wheel yet again instead
| of submitting the standard to one of the existing
| standards bodies.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| Matrix as a protocol is still in active development.
| Unlike "low-level" protocols such as HTTP, the Matrix
| protocol is much closer to end-user experience and so it
| must be able to move relatively quickly to remain
| competitive with proprietary systems. This generally does
| not fit into the process of standards bodies like the
| IETF very well.
|
| There's a reason why eg. the WHATWG exists, basically.
| SamWhited wrote:
| Sure, it doesn't have to be the IETF, that was just an
| example. But even they tend to do this well (by eg.
| spinning off a smaller more agile standards body to keep
| up with building extensions more rapidly).
|
| Also, rapid development has its own set of problems as
| we've seen with XMPP (where no two clients support the
| same set of features because new ones are being developed
| to keep up with various proprietary things all the time).
|
| Anyways, point is, don't reinvent the wheel, I'm sure
| _one of_ the standard bodies could have been a good fit
| if we needed this at all, but Matrix definitely isn 't a
| good fit for this Freenode replacement and this is one of
| the reasons why (the other is that Freenode works just
| fine and the point is that this is a drop in
| replacement).
| fastball wrote:
| > real standards body
|
| Who decides when a standards body is real?
| SamWhited wrote:
| It just happens over many years and many successfully
| published and adopted standards. I don't have a good
| definition for you (although that's a really interesting
| thing to think about, maybe it's worth writing about) but
| I suspect most people know them when they see them.
| anoncake wrote:
| So only "standards bodies" should create standards, and
| you have to create standards to become one? Then
| standards bodies cannot come into being and therefore
| don't exist.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| SamWhited wrote:
| You're making giant leaps from what I said. I didn't say
| it's an absolute truth forever and always throughout the
| universe that you can't create new standards bodies. I
| said this was a bad place to do it.
| prepend wrote:
| Good standards bodies, I think, allow lots of bee SME
| members who can propose new standards.
|
| I think IETF is a good example of how anyone can propose
| standards on a plethora of topics. When they were very
| young it was hard to trust but now they are decades old
| with hundreds of standards demonstrating how easy it is
| to propose and work on new standards. Maybe even the
| "gold standard" of standards bodies.
| pferde wrote:
| Well, if this comment is not a textbook example of FUD, I
| don't know what is.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think there's a bright line or litmus test, but I
| judge for myself.
|
| Single standard organizations created by the dev group
| are just naturally biased certain ways.
|
| I don't think there's a single perfect body, but it's
| definitely curious to me why someone would start a stand-
| alone foundation rather than use w3c, ietf, or others
| that seem to work pretty well.
|
| I also judge the number of different clients and servers
| implementing the spec for whether it's real or just a
| controlled intermediary. Sun/Oracle seemed pretty bad
| about this back in the day with JSR stuff although I
| haven't paid attention in 10 years.
|
| Projects can make their own choices and set up
| foundations if they are willing to fund and monetize,
| etc. But that stuff isn't as robust as IRC or protocols
| that have independent standards bodies.
|
| Seems like there are lots of different clients [0] and a
| couple of different servers [1].
|
| The idea of a single dev team being VC funded means that
| there's a drive to monetize. That's bad pressure on a
| protocol and one that doesn't exist for IRC and other
| protocols. There's multiple members in the matrix
| foundation and that helps but there's just not much
| diversity of interests.
|
| Again, not the end of the world, and the project seems to
| me to be going to great lengths to collaborate. But I
| feel the same way as if Microsoft started up an
| independent foundation to drive development of the Skype
| protocol. Good on them, but it's not as robust as an
| independent protocol.
|
| [0] https://matrix.org/clients/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
| roblabla wrote:
| Matrix is an open protocol[0]. It's not managed by the IETF,
| but it has an open process for submitting changes. See the
| Spec Change Proposal instructions[1].
|
| [0]: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/
|
| [1]: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals/
| prepend wrote:
| I read a bit about that and I think it's positive, but a
| single company controlling a standard and considering
| changes is not the same as a protocol.
| roblabla wrote:
| https://matrix.org/foundation/ at the bottom of this
| page, you'll find the people who are actually in charge
| with accepting protocol changes (the Spec Core Team).
| It's true that most are part of New Vector, the for-
| profit company behind Element and Matrix, but Alexey
| Rusakov is not as far as I could tell. So there is at
| least one non-New Vector voice.
|
| It honestly feels pretty likely that this is just a
| maturity thing - as more products are built around
| Matrix, the Spec Core team will likely become more
| diverse.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| As I understand it, there's actually an explicit desire
| for more non-NV people to become involved with the SCT.
| There just aren't very many other organizations to fund
| it yet - SCT members need to eat too.
| Arathorn wrote:
| The situation here is that when we set up the SCT we
| deliberately picked a 50/50 mix of core Matrix team and
| community members. What we didn't anticipate is that the
| community members then were sufficiently sucked into
| Matrix that they were prepared to work on it fulltime,
| and a bunch joined Element as the only viable way to do
| so. Given the team is functioning pretty well and we're
| improving Matrix, it feels nuts to penalise people based
| on who they work for, hence the current blend.
| remram wrote:
| That process seems to be "our company will decide what we
| want to do with our proposal"
| nivenkos wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much always the case though? A standard
| is only as good as it's most popular implementation.
| Arathorn wrote:
| yup, much as the W3C and IETF "companies" decide what
| they want to do with proposals to their standards bodies.
| The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit foundation too.
| Boulth6 wrote:
| I don't know why but comparing Matrix.org Foundation with
| standardization organizations such as IETF seems just not
| right. Maybe it would be more correct to compare
| Matrix.org with XMPP Software Foundation?
| SamWhited wrote:
| XMPP is actually managed by the IETF. The XSF just
| develops extensions to the protocol (but it's not the
| official steward of XMPP, confusing as the name is)
| jhugo wrote:
| While this is true, basically everything useful to an
| end-user in XMPP is in one of those extensions!
| SamWhited wrote:
| Indeed; that's why I think this model has worked pretty
| well. You get a nice core protocol and then if you want
| fancy features that keep up to date with proprietary
| offerings that can be developed in a lighter weight way.
| Certainly not perfect, but I'm glad the IETF is in charge
| of the core spec and not the newer, less experienced,
| foundation (though at this point the XSF is well
| established too, but in the beginning it was the close
| relationship with the IETF that let it build that
| institutional knowledge).
| Arathorn wrote:
| I'd genuinely be interested to know what the difference
| is between something like IETF / IEEE / ITU / W3C and a
| non-profit which was created as a standards body for a
| specific standard (e.g. Matrix.org Foundation or XSF). Is
| it just that you're recognised as a peer by the other
| long-established standards bodies? Or is there a
| standards-body-for-standards-bodies somewhere?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| I mean, yes? The IETF has additional cachet as having
| created the internet. ITU and IEEE are international orgs
| relied upon not only by companies, but by governments.
| The W3C isn't as important as it once was, because people
| stopped listening to them (WHATWG is the new org). But I
| would trust the IEEE and IETF like I would the ISO, and
| Matrix.org as far as I would trust Microsoft.
| Arathorn wrote:
| > But I would trust [...] Matrix.org as far as I would
| trust Microsoft.
|
| Ouch. Did you read https://matrix.org/foundation or
| https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-
| doc/blob/matthew/msc177...?
|
| I'd agree that skepticism was warranted if we hadn't
| split out the Foundation and the protocol was de facto
| controlled by Element. But instead we made damn sure to
| create the Foundation independently and frankly protect
| it from being sabotaged by Element or any other
| commercial entity building on Matrix. To suggest
| otherwise is pretty insulting to the other
| Guardians/Directors whose only role is literally to
| oversee and ensure that the protocol isn't sabotaged by
| commercial entities.
|
| This is _very_ different from Microsoft 's model.
| roblabla wrote:
| I for one do not trust the ISO at all. They are a profit-
| seeking organization with an opaque standardizing
| process. That the ISO9660 standard (you might know it as
| the .iso file format) from 1988 is still locked behind a
| 140chf payment is a disgrace. And that won't even give
| you the full standard, because ISO loves doing this thing
| where a standard will reference 5 others, which
| themselves reference 5 others, etc...
|
| IETF is one of the best standardizing organizations out
| there, I'll certainly give you that. They have fairly
| transparent process, and a really good track record when
| it comes to creating robust protocols.
|
| Thing is, I don't see why Matrix.org would have any more
| or less "cachet" than WHATWG, or Khronos Group. In the
| end, the identity of the standardizing org doesn't really
| matter too much. What matters is that the incentives of
| the standardizing org are aligned with those of the
| community.
| ognarb wrote:
| Not all the reviewer are from the Element company.
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| To be fair, IRC hasn't had an accurate RFC in decades.
| https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ is the closest to accurate
| client<->server protocol documentation, but is fully outside
| the IETF process.
| delfinom wrote:
| The ability to google for it and not just end up with 40000000
| pages of movie results?
| viraptor wrote:
| I checked. "Matrix chat" does not have a single movie
| reference in the first 3 pages of results. It's really not a
| problem.
| Biganon wrote:
| If your search engine thinks you speak French, you might
| get results about that scene in the movie with the glitchy
| cat...
| phaer wrote:
| Wasn't there always the the argument of bridges whenever people
| tried to convince others to switch to Matrix?
|
| IMO it doesn't need to be "better", there are different
| requirements and preferences among users and between Matrix,
| IRC and Jabber, each of those ecosystems got their own set of
| issues.
| ptman wrote:
| Indeed. IRC is closed federation and the server admins are in a
| great position of power. In an open federation like email or
| matrix, the power of server admins is much smaller, and this
| kind of takeover wouldn't happen. Or if it did happen, it would
| be less of a problem.
| rataata_jr wrote:
| Can you use Matrix from Emacs?
| mouldysammich wrote:
| https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el there is this
| medstrom wrote:
| There is also weechat.el, and weechat has a matrix plugin.
| SamWhited wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of IRC (a federated network where some OSS
| projects were on their own servers or different ones would have
| limited the blast radius of a hostile takeover of one server
| like this), but Matrix is bloated and slow and the protocol
| makes no sense for chat (though it may have other
| applications); it's not a great fit for a large network with
| lots of people who may or may not have modern hardware. Not to
| mention that the servers would take a lot more resources to run
| on Matrix (assuming it eventually gets roughly the same size as
| Freenode was).
| Arathorn wrote:
| Wow, that's a lot of negativity. You forgot to disclose your
| XMPP/XSF affiliation, btw.
|
| Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M
| folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or
| indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts
| as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode.
|
| Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated,
| but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's
| Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining
| memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo).
| Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are
| positively skinny.
| packetlost wrote:
| I've tried Matrix multiple times, and each time have been
| turned off by the broken and/or slow clients, both on
| mobile and desktop. No thanks.
| ameminator wrote:
| Speaking of disclosure, aren't you the CEO of Matrix?
| Arathorn wrote:
| I'm the project lead of Matrix (as it says in my HN bio).
| (I'm also ceo/cto of Element, but that's less relevant).
| remram wrote:
| Less relevant? You are the CEO of a company which sells
| Element Home, a product based on Matrix... and you accuse
| others of not disclosing properly?
| gojomo wrote:
| An entry in the HN bio should be considered sufficient
| disclosure.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I disagree, I don't click the bio link for every comment
| I read. I'd have never known they were the project lead
| if another commenter didn't call them out on it.
| 40four wrote:
| Sorry, but I agree with @gojomo. Making it public in your
| bio that you are afilliated with a project, is very
| sufficient disclosure in my opinion.
|
| No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you
| read, but conversely we shouldn't expect him to preface
| every single one of his comments with "Hey guys, I'm the
| project lead of Matrix."
|
| Arathorn is very active in comments, and it's well known
| to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix.
| gojomo wrote:
| You may want to make clicking through a habit when
| commercial & project interests may be involved.
|
| HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such
| disclosures all the time - but making them available in
| bios is practical.
|
| You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts
| may exist whenever there's no bio info at all - as with
| your user page.
|
| Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their
| affiliations declared for when they're flacking their
| company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net
| upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be
| cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but
| things to think about.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Clicking through to everyone's profile is only
| occasionally useful and an impractical suggestion.
| gojomo wrote:
| When a commenter takes strong stands on the relative
| merits of projects or commercial products, and there's a
| whiff of involved partisanship, a clickthrough is pretty
| easy & wise.
|
| And, it often has the added benefit of more useful
| credibility context than just revealing blatant
| conflicts.
|
| It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for
| every comment, "how much involvement in these particular
| topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on
| topics for which the commenter often comments, or
| multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion
| - where such a standard would be onerous for both the
| author, _and_ the readers.
|
| Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're
| covered for comments related to those affiliations, as
| it's then easy to check for anyone observing any
| partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading
| with redundant disclosure-noise.
| fwip wrote:
| They don't need to add the disclosures all the time -
| they've got a lot of posts that aren't about Matrix.
|
| But bringing up that you're the project lead of the
| project your discussing seems like an obvious step.
| remram wrote:
| Considered sufficient by who? I sure don't, and this is
| not a site rule either.
| gojomo wrote:
| A "...by reasonable readers" can be assumed.
|
| If you want scrupulous disclosure of relevant
| affiliations inline in every single comment where they
| could apply, I think you're in the wrong place.
|
| As you note, it's not a site guideline. As I've noted in
| a sibling thread, it wouldn't fit the minimalist HN
| presentation, and would place an onerous burden on both
| writers & readers.
|
| It'd also especially encumber people with deep personal
| knoweldge and interest in some topics, if every related
| post required boilerplate "I'm employed by X"/etc
| inserts.
|
| But putting it in the bio for the curious/suspicious is a
| very honorable thing to do!
| SamWhited wrote:
| You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP.
| Also I have no real affiliation with the XSF except being a
| volunteer and maintaining a library and having written a
| few specs (in the past I have had more strong affiliations,
| but never any financial considerations or anything that I'd
| need to disclose, I have just volunteered more in the past
| than I do now)
| [deleted]
| kbenson wrote:
| > You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for
| XMPP.
|
| Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like
| saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose
| their affiliation when advocating against renewable
| energy sources.
|
| It's not about whether you are advocating for or against
| something specifically, it's about whether you have a
| vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably
| affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how
| you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious,
| nobody can be completely impartial).
|
| To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should
| have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't
| think the reason stated for not doing so is really
| evidence either way.
| SamWhited wrote:
| I was arguing that it makes no sense to use Matrix for
| this and they should continue using IRC, but yes, I have
| written some XMPP related specs in the past. But fair
| enough, consider this my belated disclosure.
| [deleted]
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| "Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow"
|
| The protocol may not be, but in practice, the servers and
| clients that nearly everyone uses sure as hell are.
|
| I run a synapse server for half a dozen people on a
| reasonably beefy box and it sure feels that way when I'm
| using it on a daily basis.
| 40four wrote:
| Really? I run Synapse for a half a dozen people, on an
| EC2 Ubuntu server with 2GB memory and it works great for
| me!
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| Yes. 8GB and 4 Xeon cores here.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Are your users in loads of massive federated rooms?
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| No. they pretty much only use it to talk to each other.
| Until their clients start randomly complaining about
| encryption keys and they no longer can.
| Arathorn wrote:
| This sounds really weird. What was the perf problem you
| were seeing? (aside from whatever has gone wrong with
| encryption failures) For context, message sending latency
| should be measured in tens of milliseconds, at worst,
| unless the server is completely overloaded with
| federation traffic.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I haven't investigated too deeply. It may just be the
| clients rather than the server, but it's been there from
| the beginning. Just a slow laggy experience on all three
| of iOS, Debian and OSX with Element. Spinning progress
| bars, blank appearing rooms whilst stuff waits to load.
| Messages sometimes appearing in different orders for
| different people in the same room. Messages just not
| appearing for other people occasional. Random
| undecipherable complaints about encryption keys leading
| to some people not being able to read other peoples
| messages in the same room.
|
| I regret getting people onto Matrix now. I'm keeping it
| running with the hope that things improve and because I
| don't want to get people to move to another system which
| may also have problems.
|
| Should have just stuck with XMPP and my Prosody server,
| and IRC.
| Arathorn wrote:
| If you can hook synapse up to a prometheus & grafana I
| would be super interested to see what it's doing. Private
| servers should be lightning fast (assuming you use
| postgres and are on sensible hardware). It's only when
| you have public servers which join massive public rooms
| when things can start to chug.
| jrwr wrote:
| Overall, I would pick XMPP over Matrix at this point. it is
| rather bloated and the clients are a little bit obtuse for
| newbies. I do wonder what the DAU for Matrix is at this
| point. as I suspect that 32 Million number might be a
| little overstated.
| Arathorn wrote:
| frankly, as long as folks are communicating via open
| standards rather than being locked into some vendor silo
| then they should use whatever protocol works best for
| them - XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these
| days.
|
| Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around
| 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major
| underestimate given other stats which suggest only about
| 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
| haasn wrote:
| > XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days.
|
| I want to test this claim. After an hour of google
| searching I'm none the wiser:
|
| 1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use
| XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP.
| I would _love_ to integrate them into a single client,
| but afaict it does not appear possible.
|
| 2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some
| automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For
| comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to
| IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the
| Element UI.
| zaik wrote:
| > XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days
|
| Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption?
| Arathorn wrote:
| Yup, OMEMO and Olm are bit compatible. In fact XEP-0384
| went through a phase of recommending Olm as the
| implementation to use (grep
| https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html for Olm).
|
| (Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement
| E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the
| Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
| benschulz wrote:
| > You forgot to disclose your [...] affiliation, btw.
|
| Um.. :D
| quaintdev wrote:
| Psychological projection
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
| est31 wrote:
| The implementations might be bloated (js heavy, etc), and the
| non bloated implementations written in C++ or Rust or so
| don't have the full feature set yet, but is it really the
| protocol to blame?
|
| In which way does the protocol make no sense for chat? IRC is
| extremely complicated as well and a giant pile of hacks.
| SamWhited wrote:
| For clients maybe not, but for servers the protocol itself
| is to blame, yes. A giant distributed graph database where
| everything has to be synced constantly means you use a ton
| of memory. IRC is definitely complicated, and arguably a
| pile of hacks, but an event based system (more or less)
| makes a lot more sense for chat where you want realtime
| communication (more or less), not to wait while you sync
| nodes in the graph to every place that wants them.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| This makes no sense. Propagating a bunch of messages
| doesn't suddenly use a ton of memory just because you're
| organizing them as a graph rather than a linear pubsub-
| style stream.
| SamWhited wrote:
| Sorry, it was a bad explanation. The point is that you
| have to keep a lot of past state in memory for future
| messages to make sense and sync properly, unlike an event
| based system where you (more or less) only need to
| perform some action when you get an event then forget
| about it. This is an IRC thread though, sorry I got
| sucked in but let's not let the Matrix CEO derail it and
| try to score users. The whole point is is that it didn't
| make sense for them to switch to matrix because it uses
| more resources than most IRC servers and because they are
| trying to be a drop in replacement, not make users sign
| up for new things.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| You don't have to keep that much state in memory at all,
| actually. I'm not sure why you think that you do.
|
| Most of the state resolution (eg. the auth chain)
| involves calculations of which you can cache the result
| without needing to care about the inputs beyond that - at
| least, unless you need to recalculate them once later if
| delayed events come in.
|
| Ultimately, the performance problems that Synapse has are
| problems with Synapse's implementation choices
| (especially around the database schema), not with the
| protocol nor with the state resolution algorithm.
| TheCycoONE wrote:
| Presence may be a protocol level issue. My server
| struggled pretty badly until I disabled it and I see
| that's generally the advice: https://github.com/matrix-
| org/synapse/issues/3971
|
| That doesn't seem like a fundamental issue though.
| Arathorn wrote:
| It's a synapse implementation problem, not a protocol
| issue. And it's being fixed currently.
| Dobbs wrote:
| > posterity
|
| This is what it has going for it. It is meant to be a drop-
| in(ish) replacement for freenode. All the same clients, all the
| same protocols, all the same channels (in theory).
| cheph wrote:
| > It is meant to be a drop-in(ish) replacement for freenode
|
| A drop in replacement for a place that was run into the
| ground by the people who now will run the drop in
| replacement.
|
| Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
|
| If the sarcasm is missed, there is nothing at all funny about
| this abomination. I would much rather trust Andrew Lee than
| this bunch.
| dddw wrote:
| Anyone noticed their twitter handle @liberachat is tempbanned?
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Well I joined so I guess I might see you on #libera, #stripe or
| ##orliesaurus
| techrat wrote:
| https://www.kline.sh/
|
| Statement from the ex-Freenode Staff is now official.
| spike021 wrote:
| It's too bad they couldn't export the nick db from Freenode and
| do some kind of auth to allow people to keep their identities.
| Biganon wrote:
| And in addition to nicks, all the channels and who is their
| Founder (at least), or even all users with special roles
| harikb wrote:
| Yeah, this is the biggest issue I see. I am guessing at least a
| few will lose their well-known-ids to someone else.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| The owner of Freenode might have a problem with that.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| The word "Libera" definitely initially speaks like "Liberia" the
| West African country. I wonder if one would mistakenly think this
| was African chat.
| superkuh wrote:
| First a pandemic and now my online home of the last 20 years
| being torn apart. This is really upsetting. The people of
| freenode are something special. I really hope the community can
| manage the switch without loosing too much of everything. Already
| the channel registration on libera is throwing established
| communities into chaos.
|
| I really hate that corporate shell game bullshit and attempts at
| monetization are being made by a dude that professes to love IRC.
| I wish andrew could acknowledge the hurt he is causing but it
| seems like saving face matters more to him at this point.
| drenvuk wrote:
| it will settle. Just keep trying, we'll get back together.
| hashkb wrote:
| > seems like saving face matters more
|
| This is sadly always the case. For everything. We'd rather let
| people die (e.g. Challenger) than admit any fault or delay to
| fix a problem.
| ilaksh wrote:
| If he has caused that much of a problem, then just move on.
| Block him, stop mentioning him by name, and forget about it.
| For the open source community, he no longer exists.
|
| I mean I feel like changing the domain name is less of a
| problem than the one all of the 4000 people named Andrew Lee
| who are not that guy now have. It's a lot harder to change a
| legal name. So they will have to live with his bad reputation
| potentially rubbing off on them. But luckily online most people
| use aliases so that should mitigate it somewhat.
|
| Libera.chat is a more modern name anyway.
| na85 wrote:
| Libera.chat is actually an awful name, but I still embrace
| the change and have already bid Freenode a permanent
| farewell.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| That is a subjective opinion, not objective fact. I think
| it rolls nicely.
| fairity wrote:
| It is both harder to spell and pronounce than freenode,
| and objectively worse, by those measures.
| outworlder wrote:
| Is it hard to pronounce by whom? English speakers? I
| promise you any speaker of a latin-derived language will
| have no problems whatsoever.
| macintux wrote:
| "Freenode" has only 1 possible pronunciation (and
| corresponding spelling) in English. "Libera" has 3 or 4
| conceivable pronunciations and is harder to guarantee
| correctness when spoken.
|
| Fortunately I doubt IRC servers need to be communicated
| vocally all that often.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It's really tough to find an unencumbered name these
| days. Even made-up names like 'eelo' (Android distro) got
| in trouble because a tiny human resources company in the
| Netherlands was using the name 'eelloo'. Not even the
| same name, totally different business type but still they
| lost. Trademarks are applied ridiculously wide now and
| because of that all the good names are gone.
| cout wrote:
| I never understood what was wrong with the original "open
| projects network".
| geppetto wrote:
| Well "libera" means free in Italian so it makes sense to
| me. There are also other projects with sound the same such
| as libre (spanish I guess) office. I like it. But I'm
| biased being from Italy.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| More to the point, .chat is one of those latecomer TLDs
| that is thoroughly abused by spammers. If they send email
| and they want it delivered, they're going to have a great
| time with that, unless they have a .net or something they
| can use.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >If they send email and they want it delivered, they're
| going to have a great time with that,
|
| Your sass is unnecessary. Their nickserv registration
| email was delivered to gmail just fine.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An
| unsettling number of people now seem to be under the
| impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all
| email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.
|
| Even if Gmail is currently delivering the messages (for
| now...), other service providers have to manage spam in
| their own way, and TLDs are sometimes a really strong
| signal for message reputation. For example, 99% of email
| traffic from .info addresses is spam, and the other 1% is
| mostly spam too.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An
| unsettling number of people now seem to be under the
| impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all
| email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.
|
| Even major services. I tried to create an Esty account
| the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my
| Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a
| gmail address.
|
| Luckly it turns out you don't need an account to order,
| and I was able to use my custom domain for an
| unregistered checkout.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and
| it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed
| personal domains, and would only take a gmail address._
|
| This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not
| that Etsy _only_ allows @gmail.com addresses?
|
| I've noticed that some sites will specifically ban public
| domains from throwaway services like mailinator, but I
| can't recall having encountered a blanket tld ban.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > This must be related to the tld you're using, right?
| Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?
|
| I wasn't using a weird TLD. It was a .us that only my
| family uses.
|
| I didn't try too hard to get it to work, or figure out
| exactly what their criteria were, but I kept getting
| blocked until I used my old gmail. Their customer support
| wasn't very helpful, either.
| mfkp wrote:
| Nickserv registration went to my spam folder on
| Protonmail, as a datapoint.
| Arnavion wrote:
| I don't confuse email with gmail, thank you very much. I
| gave gmail as an example specifically because a) that's
| what I used, and b) gmail like all other big providers is
| anal about accepting email and quick on the trigger-
| finger about marking it as spam even when it does.
| withinrafael wrote:
| My nickserv email was indeed marked as spam. Outlook.com
| backend.
|
| But most of the good stuff gets marked these days despite
| spf/dkim so I'm not particularly shocked.
| efreak wrote:
| I have considered removing SPF rules on my personal
| domain, as every time someone spoofs my donation to
| attack corporate emails, their antivirus will incorrectly
| bounce them all back, at which point they end up in my
| inbox due to my catch-all; they will then send me a dozen
| emails complaining about it. The only servers allowed by
| my SPF is Gmail and one of my personal servers (I usually
| I use ssmtp, but that doesn't help with software that
| directly speaks SMTP)
| outworlder wrote:
| We have advanced a lot since the age of spamassassin.
| They will be fine.
|
| My nickserv registration worked fine btw.
| kgwxd wrote:
| It really is an awful name. I'm not even sure how to
| pronounce it and its very forgettable.
| unixhero wrote:
| Hosting an irc Network is more work than you might think.
| Just a new domain name and a VPS with a service running on it
| might not be enough.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Supposedly[0] all the servers and other network
| infrastructure are intact, and it's solely the domain names
| (freenode.{org,net,com}) that were compromised. Grain of
| salt, obviously, but they have at least _claimed_ there isn
| 't a problem there.
|
| 0: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba01
| 8af4...
| tinus_hn wrote:
| So what happened to the original service running on
| freenode.net? Is it down now?
| Arnavion wrote:
| Nothing. It's still up.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| (Again, _supposedly_ ) it's now running at libera.chat
| with superficial cosmetic changes. I haven't investigated
| this in any real depth though, so don't quote me on that.
| jhugo wrote:
| Freenode is still up, at freenode.net, and libera is a
| new network, at libera.chat, operated by the former staff
| of Freenode.
| superkuh wrote:
| >The server hardware is sponsored free of cost; we will
| occasionally receive an invoice for $0, but that's only
| because of how the accounting systems at some of our
| sponsors operate. I can't possibly imagine that the few
| freenode live conferences cost more than 50k; and all of
| the other miscellaneous expenses (like the renewal costs
| for the domain names) are well under a few hundred pounds
| per year. Anything he would have donated before Freenode
| Ltd's acquisition is unknown to me, but that would have
| been from the position of a benefactor, not a supposed
| owner.
|
| https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58b
| d...
| tamrix wrote:
| Freenode has been dead for years lol. No where near the same
| level of activity it used to have.
| tdeck wrote:
| A small community can still have a lot of value to it's
| members.
| deelowe wrote:
| If you've been on for 20 years, you'll remember they last time
| this happened. It'll sort itself out.
| jordigh wrote:
| I remember EFnet and Undernet.
|
| IRC will live on.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Eris has actually remerged with EFnet... They need to
| change the name...
| efreak wrote:
| Knowing only the name Eris Free Net, and none of the
| history, this doesn't mean anything to me. I have no idea
| if this is a network that's free of Eris, or a free
| network named after Eris. While I have a vague memory of
| a server named Eris having existed in the past, I don't
| know if said server is the same Eris in the name, or a
| different Eris that may have a direct
| (ownership)/indirect (named in honor of)/no link with the
| server. Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife,
| not something you'd want in your community.
| Macha wrote:
| One day april fool's joke:
|
| > On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s
| IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some
| EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility
| student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the
| server for April Fools. Only a very few EFnet staff were
| aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a
| defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only)
| server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking
| procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018,
| eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on
| the "Eris Free" IRC network and accepted clients.[11] At
| the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to
| erisnet.org.[12] eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02
| 2018 at 19:50 UTC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet
| dang wrote:
| Looks like the relevant previous threads are:
|
| _Leaving Freenode for a new network_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440 - May 2021 (253
| comments)
|
| _Freenode resignation is official, not a draft_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926 - May 2021 (10
| comments)
|
| _The Freenode resignation FAQ, or: "what the fuck is going on?"_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 - May 2021 (8
| comments)
|
| _I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338 - May 2021 (262
| comments)
| wrycoder wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why did HN bury that last one, with 555
| points and 262 comments, eight pages down within twelve hours?
| Freenode and irc are of considerable interest to the hacker
| community.
| randomcoward wrote:
| Oh honey....do you not know who is behind Hacker News? Peter
| "fascist" Thiel. You think this apple is free n far from the
| tree?
| dang wrote:
| Huh? Peter Thiel has nothing to do with HN and never has.
| I'm surprised you think anyone would fall for that.
| dang wrote:
| We downweighted the thread as soon as we became aware that
| the text was a draft that wasn't intended to be public. There
| were two possibilities: either (1) it would become public
| soon enough, in which case there would be the chance for a
| big HN discussion then, and there's no harm in waiting (https
| ://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
| or (2) it was a false alarm, in which case it probably didn't
| count as significant, besides which none of us would want our
| private drafts on sensitive topics circulating on internet
| forums.
|
| Life took path (1) as we all know, and so this has been the
| most-discussed story on HN in the last couple days, including
| being at #1 on the front page all day today, and still.
| eklitzke wrote:
| Did you read the first comment in the thread? It pointed to a
| draft announcement that was not intended for public release.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Yes, it was an unintentional leak. That was obvious.
|
| What was more interesting - as is usually the case - was
| the HN discussion, from which I learned a lot.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| When something that isn't final or certain reaches the FP
| (such as rumors, predictions, or leaked drafts), the mods
| will often quash the post for being such, even when for
| example it's an Apple rumors post with hundreds of
| comments. I've seen occasional exceptions to this,
| primarily when it's lawmaking or RFC-type work, as those
| drafts are quite often newsworthy. A leaked FYIQ draft
| from an IRC admin wouldn't have registered to me as
| newsworthy, not until it was published, so I would have
| made the same decision the mods did.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Once it's out of the bag, all over reddit etc., might as
| well let the conversation continue.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I do not think HN should be the judge of whether a _public_
| webpage is intended as a draft. Certainly if it stays up
| after being covered.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Seems tricky. Surely the 262 comments were intended to be
| public.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I mean, clearly they are public since we are all looking
| at them.
|
| I think this is a good reaction to accidentally
| publishing information that was intended to be private.
| Nothing is deleted, but you stop telling new people about
| it. People who already know can keep reading and talking.
| wrycoder wrote:
| In that case, I'd say bury it right away, not many hours
| later after it had collected hundreds of comments.
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| Aside from not really knowing what Freenode is/was (a bunch of
| IRC servers?) none of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee
| is actually doing that is so objectionable.
| fapjacks wrote:
| At least some of this is because Andrew Lee is a supporter of
| Donald Trump and this rubs some people the wrong way.
| genmud wrote:
| Is it supporting Trump which rubs people the wrong way, or
| that Trump supporters generally rub people the wrong way.
|
| I know its a bit of semantics but I have found that many
| (if not most) of the loud and proud DT supporters are
| incredibly irritating. I find them just as bad or worse
| than the hyper politically correct/SJW crowd.
| fapjacks wrote:
| I think we are exposed to the loudest and most annoying
| of these groups by media that has every incentive to
| showcase the nutjobs for clicks, and so this is what we
| remember, even though most people aren't this way.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar.
| Nothing good can come of this.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I have no special knowledge, but I think it goes roughly like
| this:
|
| - a few years ago, the previous head-of-staff ('christel')
| became an employee of Andrew Lee's company
|
| - sometime last year they left the company and also stopped
| being active as a staff member
|
| - the rest of the staff elected a new head ('tomaw')
|
| - Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's successor
| (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of successor)
|
| So I think it isn't so much about anything Lee has done, so
| much as the fact that he's no longer taking a hands-off role,
| as (the staff apparently think) he promised.
|
| Also perhaps that his claim to be in a position to take
| charge is based more on his ability to pay for lawyers than a
| solid legal foundation (it's clear that he bought something,
| but not so clear what, and not clear that it was the seller's
| to sell).
|
| I think the underlying problem is that freenode's previous
| parent organisation was dissolved in 2013, apparently without
| setting up an official successor.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130322063238/http://blog.freen.
| ..
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Sounds like the start of many religious schisms.
| ryanlol wrote:
| > - Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's
| successor (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of
| successor)
|
| Is this really correct? As far as I understand tomaw tried
| to claw back freenode assets from rasengan which initiated
| this whole mess.
| XQtN2s7Mo wrote:
| tomaw did no such thing, staffers tried to operate the
| network as normal. But after publishing a blog post about
| how freenode developers will start to collaborate with
| oftc developers, tomaw started receiving threats.
| tootie wrote:
| Seems he hasn't done much of anything and it's more that he
| rubbed everyone the wrong way. And is being opaque in his
| decision-making to the point that the volunteers believe
| he's being dishonest. I get it, but it still seems like an
| overreaction.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > it still seems like an overreaction
|
| Maybe if he's your actual boss and you are being paid.
|
| Free isn't enough to deal with this kind of shit (when
| you can set up and own your competing server in a few
| seconds).
| Doxin wrote:
| The problem is that the guy _doesn 't own freenode_. No
| single person owned freenode outright at the time it was
| ostensibly "sold" to him.
|
| Of course this isn't stopping him essentially staging a
| coup by ejecting the original volunteer staff and
| replacing them with a staff of his choosing.
|
| Freenode is a community project that is in the process of
| being co-opted by a shady organisation.
| varjag wrote:
| He'll have to pay the new staff, pay for new compute
| resources, and regain the community trust. Good luck with
| that.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| "Asserting control." Basically the old admins are having a
| conniption fit because they don't get to do whatever they
| want.
| nolok wrote:
| Freenode was a very popular (for its target) irc server used
| by a lot of open source projects and communities over
| decades.
|
| Freenode was managed by volunteers without any official
| organisation. A couple years ago, the person that the
| volunteers considered their "head" informally made a UK
| company that would own at least the name and domain name,
| merely out of a wish to have some legal structure instead of
| random staff users owning random parts of it. How much of it
| is owned by the company is very vague, staff are not on
| contract, servers are loaned without any paper signed by
| third parties, ...
|
| Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew Lee's
| company, who made the promise to the staff to not involve
| himself. Then that head pushed for profits ads on the
| website, with no warning nor explanation, and with the
| profits going to said company. Staff complained a lot, head
| is removed from the freenode staff and then removed from the
| board of the company she had sold.
|
| Conflict of management erupts, and was justified freenode
| having no clear admin structure. But Lee comes out of it
| acting as if he was the boss and owner of the entire
| platforms, ask that servers and users data gets transferred
| to him. When staff rebels and refuse that, he "removes them",
| which ends up with the hilarious moment of him asking them to
| de-op themselves (remove their admin status) which he can't
| do himself since he doesn't even have the authority. On
| several occasion he claims that "the board of freenode voted
| to have you removed", while he means the board of his private
| company freenode ltd (which the staff have no relation of any
| kind with), and he is the only member of said board.
|
| Most of staff agrees about a need for a proper structure, but
| refuse to see everything transferred to an opaque and for
| profit company. Lee argue that's it's the only solutions.
| Several head of major communities or projects hosted on
| freenode make the suggestion of transferring the control and
| data to an official not for profit like the FSF and Lee and
| staff being given the lead in the interim to a proper
| governance.
|
| Lee reacts by trying to "bribe" some of them with admin
| powers and/or financial sponsorship for their project if they
| side with him, which goes terribly wrong, and them saying
| "Now I will never have anything to do with Freenode under Lee
| anymore".
|
| That's a summary of the event as understood by me. It seems
| the governance issue was real, but it also seems one side is
| saying "it should be owned by a non profit with clear
| governance and clear rules for data protection" and the other
| side, Lee, is saying "all the data and admin privileges
| should be given to my for profit that doesn't report to
| anyone else than me".
|
| Frankly, while there is gray on both side, his action made it
| pretty clear that I wouldn't want any of my data in his
| hands.
| nullc wrote:
| > Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew
| Lee's company,
|
| Not recently. In 2017. Why did freenode staff support (or
| at least refuse to engage in complaints about it) until
| now?
| colde wrote:
| They were told at the time that the company had no rights
| to freenode the network, but were only used to run
| https://freenode.live/
| throw7 wrote:
| Thanks for the summary. That "head" of freenode that sold
| off the name and domain... that's a really scummy thing to
| do. She should be ashamed.
| [deleted]
| gpvos wrote:
| Putting adverts on the website, apparently. Some projects
| just fiercely want to stay noncommercial, so they will object
| at this. I am reminded of a comment from the time when
| Wikipedia was trying to figure out how to cover their costs:
| _The bigger danger isn 't advertisers manipulating content,
| but that people will no longer see Wikipedia as theirs, they
| will see it as yet another place that corporations bombard
| them with adverts._ -- Sid
| http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2007/01/02/wikipedia-
| advertisin...
| fairity wrote:
| > Putting adverts on the website, apparently.
|
| Where is this motive made apparent?
| jethro_tell wrote:
| They put ads on the site, no?
|
| edit: s/add/ads/
| asix66 wrote:
| Interestingly, at the bottom of freenode's website [0] is a
| link to a non-comercial CC license [1]. So not sure how
| anyone could "sell" freenode. At the top of the site is a
| link (not given in this post) to a commercial product, so
| again, not sure how they can do that given the CC license.
| That said, I am no legal expert.
|
| [0] https://freenode.net/ [1]
| https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
| jreese wrote:
| CC no-commercial does not mean the owner of the content
| can't commercialize it. The owner is explicitly granted
| all rights by law, regardless of how they license it to
| others. In this case, the license is to the content of
| the site, so someone else can reuse that content
| elsewhere, but not in a commercial context.
| jhugo wrote:
| The license applies to the content of the website, not
| the organisation itself...
| crdrost wrote:
| Yes. Freenode was the largest public IRC relay network,
| something like 30 servers, 80k+ users, 40k+ channels,
| originally directed to open source software but e.g. I would
| mostly hang out on ##math and ##physics and help students out
| with problems. This is not a "back in the day" situation,
| like, it continues to be extremely popular as far as non-Web
| non-Email internet usage goes.
|
| As for the situation, if I understand correctly:
|
| - Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain
| names without telling the community of maintainers who
| actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers
| running.
|
| - The maintainers perceived the company that now held the
| domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the
| company but it looked like its corporate filing status was
| out-of-date or something.
|
| - In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain
| names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company
| had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name"
| (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made
| references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks
| which documented the transfer, and other such things... there
| was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing
| "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not
| appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean
| our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is
| costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain
| that the main burden is on you rather than on us?"
|
| - And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer
| of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and
| having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came
| across as a domineering outsider.
|
| For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically
| decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate
| one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on
| over to the new domain.
| pmlnr wrote:
| I love how everyone skips the part that freenode's
| democratically elected former leader was the one who simply
| sold something they shouldn't have been able to - blame
| should first be directed at them.
| lapinot wrote:
| Possession of stolen good is equally punishable as
| theft..
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| It's not so much a question of possession so much as ...
| if the good was stolen, you simply have no contract,
| because the seller didn't own it. It's not your good to
| begin with. You may not have stolen it, but you still
| need to return it.
| bipson wrote:
| Interestingly enough, there are drastic differences
| written in law regarding this. In some countries, you are
| in fact allowed to keep purchased stolen goods, if they
| were bought in good faith. While in other countries, you
| as the buyer can be in serious trouble, even if you
| couldn't know if it was stolen and at least need to prove
| that you were misled and did everything you could to
| prove ownership.
|
| I guess you were arguing morally, just pointing out this
| isn't legally true everywhere.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| They weren't stolen though. They gave someone leadership
| power and that person entered into contracts on behalf of
| the organisation. Multiple blogs mention there is no
| legal recourse so they have asked lawyers and it's all
| legit.
| nomadiccoder wrote:
| *Knowingly
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Also he vetod the appointment of a mod mod or something,
| and deleted all trace of that blog post.
|
| Since the volunteers previous could do this, and were
| promised that nothing was going to be changed it was pretty
| upsetting.
|
| Then one other person comes in saying Andrew said he could
| be a mod now, please grant permissions.
| nullc wrote:
| You can see Lee lying about their acquisition of freenode
| on HN a couple years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614362
|
| > Freenode is a non profit organization that benefits from
| support from Private Internet. It is not owned by Private
| Internet. We are serious fans of IRC and the open source
| community, so it makes sense for us to divert profits to
| orgs like freenode among others.
|
| > To be clear, we also donate to other orgs:
| https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-
| spo... Our new merged company will continue to do the same
| as we are in fact the same company going forward - just
| much better resourced.
|
| They're all a bunch of shady scammers. I don't understand
| why people trust the freenode staff either, since they
| evaded or demured when challenged about selling freenode to
| scammers years ago.
| gwillen wrote:
| I don't think anybody trusts christel anymore, but I'm
| not sure why any of the other staff would be implicated
| in the sale. As far as they all claim, anyway, they were
| not aware that Andrew Lee believed/claimed he had
| ownership of the network; and in fact they claim they
| were all promised by christel that this was not the case.
| nolok wrote:
| They knew he got the domain name, not that he claimed to
| own the rest and the users data. They had his promise
| that he would not involve himself in the governance.
|
| Said promise is in writing, but only has a few chats
| message, nothing official (they are a bunch of volunteers
| doing that for a couple decades as friends, hard to fault
| them).
|
| Christel seemed to sell out, and when she got kicked out
| of her op at freenode by other staff Lee came out of the
| shadows.
| 88 wrote:
| Do you have evidence to support the implication (for Lee
| to be lying, as you claim) that Freenode is owned by
| Private Internet Access?
| nairboon wrote:
| He owns Freenode Limited:
| https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/05/19/freenode_file.pdf
| 88 wrote:
| As above, Andrew Lee said Freenode was not owned by
| Private Internet Access.
|
| It doesn't appear he was lying, because by all accounts
| he owned it personally.
| gwillen wrote:
| Well, from the current front page of freenode.net:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210520103526/https://freeno
| de....
|
| "The rumors of a 'hostile takeover' are simply untrue -
| I've been the guardian and owner of freenode since 2017,
| when Christel, the former owner approached me and asked
| if I was interested in purchasing it, as we had in
| previous years discussed this."
| 88 wrote:
| Andrew Lee [?] Private Internet Access
| exo762 wrote:
| Lee owning the domain does not make him an owner of
| freenode. It's a community project.
| XQtN2s7Mo wrote:
| Freenode staffers were lied to by the person who made the
| sale. Read their resignation letters, some are very
| detailed.
| ryanlol wrote:
| >you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get
| paid for is costing you millions? how??
|
| Sounds like you forgot about the very expensive conference
| freenode staff organized with rasengans money
| XQtN2s7Mo wrote:
| rasengan was very adamant that the conference takes
| place. It was a contractual obligation.
| fairity wrote:
| > None of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee is actually
| doing that is so objectionable.
|
| I second this sentiment. Can anyone summarize objectional
| actions that Andrew has either taken or committed to taking
| in the future?
|
| As far as I can tell, he found a way to purchase legal rights
| to Freenode. And, he's communicated this control in a way
| that pissed off existing mods.
|
| But, as a Freenode user, what I really care about is how this
| will impact me as a user. If the only potential impact this
| will have on me as a user is a smaller user base, there's a
| clear solution: don't leave?
| varjag wrote:
| Freenode is a volunteer-run organization, with some
| volunteers doing the work for better part of two decades.
| There is no unique technology behind it; it's a community
| that's been successful for many years thus far.
|
| From what has been revealed, Lee wiggled himself in from
| conference sponsorship side. He used this inroad to strike
| a secret ownership deal with a person who the rest of the
| crew reckons was not in position to decide. Freenode is not
| a commercial enterprise. It's more like a community soccer
| club sold to a sponsor by a guy who happened to be a
| secretary with a stamp - after the years you've been
| tending the lawn and volunteering with training.
|
| Yes, they are understandably pissed off, as one would be
| with hostile takeover by some renegade crypto prince (yes
| he really claims he's a prince).
| fencepost wrote:
| Also relevant is that while they might be able to fight
| it that would involve substantial personal outlay of
| lawyer money by volunteers (all so they could continue to
| volunteer) and as unpaid volunteers the first thing
| attacked would likely be questions of standing.
| BFatts wrote:
| There are reports of Lee, or one of his contacts, offering
| admin roles for money basically to allow for paid
| harassment. Whether that is true or not isn't clear to me,
| but that would be a big issue if true.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| His broken promise that FreeNode will be run independent of
| his control is pretty objectionable. Like others have
| pointed out, you can even find hackernews posts from him
| saying that. The fact he's now asserting control to self
| appoint what would essentially be the leader of a decades-
| long group of volunteers without their say-so is pretty
| ridiculous.
| ashneo76 wrote:
| I am so excited about Libera.chat. I am excited to go on the next
| step of the journey with all of you!
| globular-toast wrote:
| I suspect IRC will always have a place in my heart, but it
| doesn't seem to be what it once was. Is there some hip new place
| where people hang out to discuss and help with stuff like JS
| frameworks and the like? I don't necessarily want to go there,
| but I'd like to know where it is.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Freenode has been a positively awesome and welcoming group of
| communities. Was particularly pleased with the security
| enhancements over time compared to most IRC networks
|
| Looking forward to joining Libera Chat.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It might prove foolish to move decades-old communities to
| something that can't withstand HN front page, or freenode
| jumping. (Libera is currently down for many people.)
|
| One thing I learned with my own community is that building one on
| negatives isn't sustainable. Think about it: all of the big
| communities had a positive purpose for being created. They stood
| for something. What does Libera stand for?
|
| Mission statement is crucial, and it seems to be absent here.
| jacob019 wrote:
| I don't think that's fair. Give them a chance to scale up the
| new service.
| dannyw wrote:
| Libera is just the new freenode. You probably wouldn't blink an
| eye at it.
| junon wrote:
| Goodness, they set this up in record time. Cut them some slack.
| Even #help states in the topic to allow the dust to settle a
| bit.
| mech422 wrote:
| The part I don't get is there was the same drama when freenode
| was founded...
|
| The org structure (wasn't it a non-profit at one point?), the
| donation drives, etc. There was a lot of "much larger irc
| networks don't need all this", "its a cash grab", etc.
|
| Now, it seems to have fallen victim to the very issues the
| organization was supposed to prevent ?
| chx wrote:
| There was a nonprofit, but it was dissolved in 2013.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130423011409/http://blog.freen...
| mech422 wrote:
| Interesting...I wasn't even aware they had moved to the UK.
|
| It does seem anything more then 10 years old now is forgotten
| as 'ancient history' :-P The whole purpose of the original
| freenode organization seems to have been lost in the mists.
|
| Or maybe I'm just getting old and poetic :-P
| aw4y wrote:
| amazing how it's called "libera" (free as in freedom) and you
| cannot connect if on VPN -.-
| mrweasel wrote:
| Well, that not really true is it. I'm on a VPN and it works
| fine. They also write that they're working on being available
| on TOR.
|
| Perhaps it's your VPN provider?
| aw4y wrote:
| it's ProtonVPN, paid version. weird, uh?
| nso wrote:
| It looks like the DNS is still propagating through the
| internet, and from some servers it does not resolve yet.
| Also it looks like they are just generally down a lot right
| now.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Related discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440
| EamonnMR wrote:
| While we're talking about IRC/former freenode, what where your
| favorite freenode channels?
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