[HN Gopher] Freenode ops take control of 700 channels
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Freenode ops take control of 700 channels
Author : LambdaComplex
Score : 534 points
Date : 2021-05-26 05:11 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mastodon.sdf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.sdf.org)
| rascul wrote:
| I'm skeptical about the 700 number. I'm in some of those channels
| and they have not (yet) been taken over. Others have been. Others
| might be soon.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I am not following the whole story but how does the crime profit
| anyone ? Who wins what ?
| immibis wrote:
| It's not rational.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288630
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Interesting, thanks.
| xupybd wrote:
| This is not a good look. None of this makes any sense. Why does a
| Millionaire want to deal with any of this drama? Does freenode
| even make money?
| midmagico wrote:
| Actively spying on the comms of thousands of people would be
| superb intel-gathering technique, especially when so many users
| are now virtual currency users.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Most of freenode was public channels, no? Couldn't he just
| use a bouncer and store logs?
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah but if that's your goal why piss everyone off and torch
| your platform?
| asddubs wrote:
| seems like the guy genuinely does like IRC/freenode. So it's
| just a misguided attempt at wish fulfillment to the detriment
| of the community
| [deleted]
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Seems like emacs also suffered a similar fate and is moving to
| librera.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/nl70vo/emacs_is_on_l...
| syntaxing wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but what does it mean when your Freenode
| channel gets hijacked? As in the original admins does not have
| any control anymore?
| kekebo wrote:
| Basically, yes. Here's a log of how that may look like:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287039
| syntaxing wrote:
| Whoa, that's interesting. Seems like they made a bot to do
| this anytime a channel mentions Libera
| q3k wrote:
| Yes.
|
| For any #foo that contained `libera.chat` in the topic, #foo
| was grabbed from all existing chanserv ops and is now managed
| by freenode-placeholder-account. A +ifm ##foo was set up: No
| one who's still on #foo can speak there, and any attempt to
| join redirects to ##foo.
|
| In addition, a ##foo got created if it didn't exist. If
| created, it is also managed by freenode-placeholder-account.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > A +ifm ##foo was set up: No one who's still on #foo can
| speak there, and any attempt to join redirects to ##foo.
|
| I'm not super familiar with irc, what is the significance of
| this? What does creating a second channel accomplish?
| Jemaclus wrote:
| The ## implies "unofficial" channel, so if you have #lego
| and ##lego then #lego is the "official" channel that is
| claimed by the official Lego corporation, and ##lego is
| unofficial people helping out.
|
| The +ifm refers to channel "modes". +i is "invitation
| only", meaning that you can't join a channel you haven't
| been invited to. This isn't good for FOSS things, because
| anyone should be able to join. +f generally is anti-
| flooding, so you get kicked out of the channel if you send
| more than X messages per Y period of time, and +m is
| "moderated" or "mute" meaning that everyone in the channel
| can see what is being said, but only people that have been
| approved can actually chat. Again, not really conducive to
| the spirit of FOSS.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Your explanation only makes things more confusing. So if
| you try to join #foo you are redirected to ##foo which is
| invitation only, which just means you fail to join? Why
| not just make #foo invitation only instead? And why are
| there still people in #foo? Why not kick them?
| Jemaclus wrote:
| Sorry, so what happened was #foo was made invite only
| (+i), moderated (+m), and throttled (+f), so anyone who
| is in #foo is silenced and can't chat. Simultaneously,
| everyone was added to ##foo which is neither moderated
| nor invite-only. Freenode will grant operator access to
| #foo if you can prove that you're the official person for
| #foo, somehow. (I don't know the process). Once you have
| proven that, the new operator can change the modes again
| and make it open to everyone (or not).
|
| Last night, hundreds of channels were effectively closed
| by muting everyone and making the channels invite-only
| and kicking everyone over to the ##foo unofficial
| channels.
|
| > Why not kick them?
|
| No idea.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Wow that's crazier than I thought, thank you for the
| explanation!
| dragontamer wrote:
| "Admin" is someone running the server itself. Since they have
| physical access and/or root access to the actual underlying
| machine, they can do whatever they want.
|
| "Operators" are people who create channels on an IRC-server /
| network. Anyone can be an operator. The closest analogue would
| be a Reddit moderator. You become an operator by simply being
| the first one to create any channel. By doing so, you gain
| moderation powers: you can mute individuals, kick them out of
| the channel, change the topic, and name new "operators" and
| "half-operators" (a lieutenant: a half-operator can do
| everything an operator can do except name other operators.
| Operators can remove each other, so its a bit dangerous to
| promote people to operator).
|
| There are "Squatting" issues of course: someone may "squat" on
| a name (ex: I probably can create the #gentoo channel if I am
| the first one to make the channel, and then squat on the name
| holding it hostage), but that's what admins are for, to fix
| those little problems. Normally, the admins would hijack the
| channel from a squatter, and return it to its rightful owner
| (ie: making sure the "Operator" is truly a representative of
| the #gentoo project, and not just some dude who logged in at
| just the right time).
|
| --------
|
| What's going on is that FreeNode's administrators are seemingly
| hijacking channels that simply mention the competitor
| "libra.chat". Which is... not cool.
| JasonHarrison wrote:
| Wow. I chat on Freenode daily during my teen years (~2007) and I
| used to be friendly with many of the Freenode opers, including
| Christel.
|
| I mostly stopped using IRC in 2017. Reading about Freenode's
| "acquisition" (takeover) spurs lots of nostalgia and makes me
| sad.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The people are mostly still around on libera.chat
| q3k wrote:
| We also got a number of channels totalling a few hundred names
| hijacked from chanserv, because of 'libera.chat' in the topic. No
| contact, nothing. We aren't even a F/OSS project, but a
| hackerspace. 10 years of a chanserv registration, gone, just like
| that.
|
| The irony is that we were planning on a progressive transition to
| Libera via bridging to make sure everything went smoothly for
| everyone and that we didn't split the community. Now, well,
| there's nothing to do but just move cold turkey.
|
| Great job, Andrew Lee.
| fouc wrote:
| this hijacking was presumably done by the liberachat
| "defectors" rather than Andrew Lee ?
| q3k wrote:
| What? No. Our hackerspace decided that we should probably
| maybe move our IRC channels to libera.chat but have a grace
| period, generally do things carefully and slowly. We had
| 'moving to libera.chat soon' in our /topic, set by myself in
| haste just to let people know that we are aware of the
| Freenode kerfuffle and that yes, we will likely move over.
|
| Then we lost control of our IRC channels on Freenode, because
| someone from Freenode took it from us. No-one member of the
| hackerspace has control over it anymore. That's a hijacking.
| fouc wrote:
| I meant I had assumed the libera.chat staff still had admin
| status in freenode, and had been behind this move, but
| apparently they all got removed a week ago.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Maybe you should've checked that assumption first?
|
| Just a thought.
| q3k wrote:
| This has been officially addressed by the new Freenode
| owners as expected and intended [1], so of course it's
| not the old staff's doing.
|
| [1] - https://archive.is/LGsY2
| sp332 wrote:
| I might be misreading the screenshot, but it says that a
| channel admin changed the topic and then also banned
| everyone from the channel?
| q3k wrote:
| Yes, #rsync apparently force migrated everyone off
| Freenode that way.
|
| We didn't. We still got hijacked. Many others did, too.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| No, that was done by the #rsync admin, because they opted
| to do a "hard" move. What the freenode guys are doing is
| using this fact as an _excuse_ to subsequently and
| indiscriminately hijack every channel which mentions
| Libera in the topic, in any way.
|
| I myself did a hard move of my project's channels to OFTC
| (#asahi and friends) - I didn't kick everyone out but I
| did leave the channels +m and with an explanatory topic,
| as I figured going cold turkey would be the best option,
| especially given the relative youth of my project (it
| started in JJanuary). We were spared the takeovers
| because we moved to OFTC, so our topic didn't include the
| "Libera" trigger word.
|
| In retrospect, this hard move was evidently the right
| choice, given subsequent actions by freenode admins, and
| after this latest action I decided that even the
| moderated state was too unstable, and did what #rsync did
| (kick everyone out), except I changed the topic to
| something that doesn't mention any moves and locked it
| with +l 1. I hope perhaps this will allow the channels to
| fly under the radar of freenode staff, so they don't take
| them over - especially since they've been redirecting
| project channels to identically-named topic channels with
| no regard to who owns them, and ##asahi is some older
| channel owned by an unrelated person.
|
| It is ridiculous for freenode to claim authority to
| override project owners' choice to migrate to another
| network. The entire point of (old) freenode, and what set
| it apart from other networks, is that its official
| namespace was _verified_. That means it is officially
| controlled by a given project 's leaders. For example,
| our project owns #asahi and the #asahi-* namespace on
| freenode. That also means that we project leaders should
| be free to choose _not_ to use freenode for our project,
| and direct users elsewhere.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| It says that the leaders of a community that existed
| outside of Freenode chose to switch to a different
| communications provider.
| philpem wrote:
| This is exactly the situation DiscFerret has found itself in.
| We were bridging to guarantee a smooth transition... within
| hours of changing the topic to point to the new chat, they took
| over our channels.
|
| This scorched earth policy is only going to make them look
| petty and childish, and cost them in the long run.
| xbar wrote:
| I'm sure all of HN feels for the hassle you and others are
| going through. Please consider thoroughly documenting your
| experience publicly, permanently, so we have a record of
| these harms.
|
| This is certainly an historical situation.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you
| transition away smoothly? Going cold turkey means a chance of
| leaving someone behind on freenode.
|
| Edit: I see that I have not expressed my point clearly.
| Freenode knows that it is dying already. Allowing a smooth
| transition wouldn't stop that or heal that. A downwards
| trajectory. Like a dictator usurping the throne, the new
| management wants to gulag everyone who even slightly disagrees
| to not leave any dissenting voices on the network. This way
| those who stay might stay for good, instead of only for the
| smooth transition.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| >I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you
| transition away smoothly?
|
| The actions here are of an abuser seeing their partner is
| considering leaving, beating them harder as a result, locking
| them out of the house, then using their victim's devices to
| contact the victim's friends and tell them that everything is
| actually alright and the victim has decided to stay.
|
| Consider the argument, "I fail to see why a domestic abuser
| would prefer that their victim leave smoothly?"
| jeltz wrote:
| To keep any form of goodwill. I personally did not care for
| this IRC drama (since I have not done enough research to take
| any side) but now I do. Now I will never join a community at
| Freenode. I do not want to use a server ran by immature jerks
| who hijack communities as retaliation. They are under no
| obligations to keep running it but then just shut down the
| server instead of acting like dicks.
| danaris wrote:
| > Freenode knows that it is dying already.
|
| This is a highly charitable reading of the situation, and in
| fact, Lee has put out a post claiming (more or less) that
| he's trying to do all this _for_ the FOSS community.
|
| From where I sit, it's abundantly clear that Lee thought he'd
| be able to come in and "own" the IRC network that hosts the
| plurality of FOSS projects' chat communities, and when they
| all started leaving, he lashed out and tried to stop them in
| the classic way an ego-driven control freak does: by imposing
| draconian restrictions, punishing those who dare to defy him.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Gulag is a poor analogy. Freenode can't imprison people or
| force them to stay on their service. Nor can it control the
| spread of information and opinions. Lee might own Freenode,
| but he doesn't own the front page of Hacker News.
|
| In terms of effectiveness, this is perhaps more analogous to
| the boss screaming, "You can't quit, because I just fired
| you!" It doesn't keep anyone from leaving, but it does create
| unnecessary drama and make them look bad.
|
| On the other hand, if Freenode had done nothing, it wouldn't
| have stopped some communities from leaving, but the flow
| might have abated all by itself. Like my mom used to say, "It
| won't heal if you don't stop picking at it."
| capableweb wrote:
| Realistically, most channels are moving to Libera and the
| people are remaining are people who haven't noticed yet.
| Going cold turkey will just give those people a WTF feeling
| without being able to do anything about it, and eventually
| they'll also leave since everyone else left.
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| Not to mention that the stuff is on top of hackernewes -
| anyone idling / currently on vacation / in coma can quickly
| figure out what is going on.
| elaus wrote:
| One reason could be to not destroy any goodwill that was left
| by some members. Hijacking channels sends a clear signal that
| Freenode can't be trusted to provide a stable and secure
| network.
| q3k wrote:
| > I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you
| transition away smoothly?
|
| Because that transition window (which was planned for
| O(weeks)) could've been enough time to win back our trust and
| make us decide to stay on Freenode. I was honestly starting
| to think maybe we had too much of a knee-jerk reaction with
| the decision move and was willing to reconsider, but now,
| well.
| thinkloop wrote:
| I'm not up to speed, could you expand on what happened?
| bovermyer wrote:
| See these links:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27208422
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207734
| masklinn wrote:
| Freenode was "acquired" a while back, people were looking
| on it dubiously.
|
| Then last week (or the week before) volunteer staff
| resigned en masse saying that the new owners were
| planning on taking control of the project's direction. A
| number of projects using freenode for chat started
| looking at alternative just in case.
|
| As GP notes, this looking around was done in the heat of
| all the resignation, but was not necessarily a done deal
| for all projects, after all nothing has changed _yet_.
|
| Today, freenode highjacked / locked hundreds of channels
| mentioning libera (the alternative network set up by some
| of the resigning staff) out of nowhere, proving that the
| network most definitely could not be trusted anymore.
| rasputnik6502 wrote:
| Clearly some money would have solved the problem. People
| don't like to be sold like a product
| gerikson wrote:
| Here's a summary of the situation up until about 8 hours
| ago
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-
| bee...
|
| 8 hours ago, around 700+ single-hash channels were
| assigned to a placeholder account, redirected to double-
| hash "offtopic" channels, and their topics locked. Ops
| were removed too. The trigger for this seems to have been
| the string "libera" in their topics.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Global Liberation Army will never recover from the
| Scunthorpe attack.
| croon wrote:
| > I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you
| transition away smoothly?
|
| Retaining any user at all on the network?
|
| I haven't used Freenode in a long time, but I would
| absolutely under no circumstances establish a channel there
| now. Not for some grand principled moral standpoint, but
| simply for not knowing if I'd get to keep it.
| immibis wrote:
| Ah, but you retain more users if you prevent the users from
| seeing that anything is going wrong!
| croon wrote:
| And they'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for
| that pesky internet!
| imtringued wrote:
| What if this is a sneaky way to recruit non IRC users to
| a new network? I'm saying this because I want to try it
| out.
| tartoran wrote:
| Towards what goal? Most already useful stuff is going to
| libera but that may not be useful to you. What type of
| new community do you envision being born there?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| This is a key point.
|
| People forget that IRC works like any other product: at
| the end of the day, someone "owns" the customer (in the
| sense of having the strongest relationship with them).
|
| In this case, it's pretty clear it isn't freenode.
|
| The actual relationship is owned by the OSS projects and
| their teams. If they kill the freenode link as an
| official channel, people shrug and use the new link.
|
| The entire calculus on freenode's side seems to be stuck
| in the 1990s.
| handrous wrote:
| > The entire calculus on freenode's side seems to be
| stuck in the 1990s.
|
| I'd say their calculus feels stuck in the 2010/2020s,
| while IRC is (fortunately, it seems) "stuck" in the
| 1990s.
| malka wrote:
| All of this is actually pretty good publicity for irc.
| eli wrote:
| How's that working out for them?
| phkahler wrote:
| But the bet people to share knowledge will be gone. The
| channels will not be of nearly the same quality. People
| may stick around not realizing that, but when the
| usefulness goes down they will leave.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| The whole world still runs on IRC and not everyone realizes how
| fickle IRC users can be.
| dragontamer wrote:
| FreeNode is big, but Discord / Facebook / Twitter are far
| larger, by orders of magnitude.
|
| The main issue with FreeNode users is that they're "elites"
| so to speak. They're the old guard, the ancients. Pissing off
| 1000-children is different from pissing off
| 1000-grandparents: the grandparents have connections and
| powerful friends so to speak.
|
| Given the "age" of these FreeNode communities and users, I
| bet that the typical FreeNode user has more internet-
| influence than the typical Twitter user.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Quantity vs quality.
|
| Discord/Facebook/Twitter users are discussing gaming and
| pop culture. IRC users were discussing how to build OSS
| software and communities.
|
| Obviously its not as absolute as that, and Slack and
| Discord are both making inroads into what was once IRCs
| territory of coordinating small groups of remote thought-
| leaders, but looking at the raw numbers doesn't tell the
| whole picture of IRC's influence and importantce.
| antiterra wrote:
| Yeah no. IRC was often jokingly referred to as "I Repeat
| Class" because it was an unproductive distraction from
| study.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I've used IRC for thirty years (edit: typo 20) and been
| part of immeasurable communities. The whole world runs on
| ideas I typed on IRC.
|
| On the one hand, I'm being facetious but on the other hand
| I'm telling the truth and I prefer there is no record of
| it. I helped boot strap fake internet money when there was
| no market, too many projects to name, too many technologies
| from IRC DCC bots, to running an ebook ftp personal
| fileserver ad for years...
|
| IRC is the protocol I love most and how I talk to _my_
| friends, they live around the world. This is not the first
| time and makes my 5th IRC move DALnet-EFnet-Chatchannel-
| Freenode-Libera
|
| I don't use twitter I think it's stupid. I've said this
| before and been downvoted into oblivion.
|
| IDK ya'll HN is weird like it forgot how the internet
| really works. It's disappointing really.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Forgot? Or are too young to have ever known? ;)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| It's really unfortunate that Andrew Lee is killing the thing he
| loves, and that he can't seem to see it.
| massysett wrote:
| Just got a similar email from zsh mailing list.
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| Is it just that the folks who took over freenode are stupid and
| short sighted, or is there an actually rational reason behind
| their actions?
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah I'm following this from the sidelines but by now I'm
| really wondering what the Freenode staff was expecting and what
| their goals are?
| wchar_t wrote:
| I'm probably wrong, but from what I can tell rasengan was the
| only person behind this. He nuked channels and then
| disappeared, leaving his utterly confused staff to listen to
| the music from all the upset users/chanops.
| izacus wrote:
| On some Freenode channels I've seen the channel owners
| effectively ban/block all conversations before leaving. This
| would mean that even if people chose to stay on Freenode, they
| wouldn't be able to talk on channels dedicated to some projects
| at all. A lot of those channels got taken over and bans
| removed.
| p_l wrote:
| On most of those channels, the previous state was that it is
| an official, supported channel of a given organization
| (especially if it's a non-grandfathered single-# channel).
|
| The mass bans and such are the only way to mass-notify in
| reliable way that an official channel moved elsewhere. In all
| cases I've seen so far, the channel hijacked by new ircops
| was not a random community channel, and in fact freenode had
| policy even before that about prioritizing official org
| ownership.
| izacus wrote:
| I find this explanation a bit dishonest - mass ban of
| people talking about topic to push them to another server
| is not "the most reliable way" of communicating anything.
|
| The whole point of IRC is that people can create channels
| and talk about things without those channels being owned by
| someone. If team members want to go somewhere else that's
| completely fine - but preventing people from staying and
| talking about a project goes against core of IRC and IMO
| Freenode ircops are well within rights to prevent channel
| squatting and forceful bans.
| kemayo wrote:
| Sure, but Freenode has a "namespace" system. A channel
| with a single # is supposed to signify that it's
| officially affiliated with whatever project it's about,
| while a channel with a double ## is something community-
| driven.
|
| It's thus perfectly reasonable to me that, if the project
| decides to move networks and stop using the official
| channel, it should shut it down and redirect it. (If for
| no other reason than because the project won't be
| moderating that channel any more, and it reflects poorly
| on the project if something that's flagged as being
| "official" turns into a cesspool.) It's not _stopping_
| people from creating a ## community channel on the old
| network to keep talking.
|
| That's irrelevant, of course, because Freenode hijacked a
| lot of channels that _weren 't_ doing the full shutdown,
| and just had a soft "we're moving to X soon" topic set,
| thus punishing the gentler communications you'd prefer.
| mercer wrote:
| My impression is that rasengan (Andrew Lee) does really seem to
| care about IRC, and he does see himself as the 'good guy', but
| his thoughts on how to make it all work clash with the somewhat
| more anarchic volunteer-based way Freenode worked, as the most
| charitable interpretation.
|
| Slightly less charitably, it comes across as a rich dude
| wanting, expecting, and/or being used to being boss, and being
| (legitimately) confused as to why this is causing so much
| trouble from his volunteer underlings. It's hard to be a prince
| in this world...
| geofft wrote:
| Even under the charitable interpretation, he "cares about
| IRC" in a way very different from how any of the projects
| that use Freenode care about IRC.
|
| Ask Gentoo or Ubuntu or Wikipedia what they want out of an
| IRC network, and they'll probably say, hm, more stability and
| less spam, I guess.
|
| Ask Andrew Lee what he wants abut IRC and this is what he
| says (from https://irc.com/):
|
| > _Refreshed mobile apps, intuitive web apps, friends lists,
| working team support, video calls and file sharing. All
| within a few taps of the mobile device as people have come to
| expect._
| vfclists wrote:
| > Refreshed mobile apps, intuitive web apps, friends lists,
| working team support, video calls and file sharing. All
| within a few taps of the mobile device as people have come
| to expect.
|
| i.e. he wants to evolve/transmogrify IRC into a system that
| is more amenable to centralization, data collection and
| monetization.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Hmm, sounds like he wants to make another WhatsApp, and
| probably expecting a few billion Zuckdollars buy-out.
|
| Hah, with all the users (the reason Zuck pays billions)
| abandoning the sinking ship, Lee's dream is evaporating
| in front of his very eyes.
|
| Say bye-bye to that superyacht, Mr. Prince!
| mercer wrote:
| I imagine either Freenode will still end up doing fine,
| or he'll just conclude that us nerds don't understand the
| concept of ownership and threw him under the bus after
| all his donations and hard work, and then he'll move on
| to the next plaything. He'll probably get his superyacht
| eventually.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Yeah, he didn't need to buy and wreck FreeNode to do that.
| I do not buy this explanation.
| daenney wrote:
| I personally wouldn't mind IRC (also) having some of those
| features, and a client with a more Discord-like UX for
| those that want it.
|
| But I doubt you'll achieve that by single-handedly
| destroying one of the biggest IRC networks out there and
| basically guaranteeing folks won't want to work with you.
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| To offer a different point of view: If I were to create
| my own chat protocol, I would actively try to make it
| next to impossible to implement it on mobile and consider
| this a feature. Nothing is gained by mobile users. From
| the features/interfaces they expect, the kind of
| communication people are accustomed to on mobile, and to
| them just being idlers 24/7 anyways.
|
| Let people who want smileys, gifs, fancy UI, backlogs
| upon reconnect, reply features, friend lists, voice
| features use discord and whatever, and please let IRC be
| a stream of text messages and old school and a haven from
| this modern shiny crappy world.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I agree with you, with the exception of backlogs.
| welterde wrote:
| That's being worked on and there are already irc daemons
| that support it (but it's all a bit bolted on until the
| standard for that is ratified).
|
| However it is also a feature that has to be enabled by
| the server operator and here you may run into different
| opinions if this should be a thing or not.
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| I am not denying they can be useful, I am questioning how
| this should be achieved. You are connected, you receive
| the messages, you aren't, you don't. You don't want to
| miss anything, how about making sure you stay connected?
|
| Is this really something that has to be built into the
| chat protocol, massively increasing its complexity and
| just giving headaches, security issues, debug problems,
| wasting developers' time?
|
| I don't consider IRC a replacement for online boards /
| stackexchange. Even stopped logging completely, don't use
| a bouncer. If I am online, I'm there. Actually think it's
| an improvement.
| daenney wrote:
| > To offer a different point of view: If I were to create
| my own chat protocol, I would actively try to make it
| next to impossible to implement it on mobile and consider
| this a feature. Nothing is gained by mobile users.
|
| I can understand where you're coming from, but it's also
| important to note that a huge part of this planets
| population doesn't have access to a computer. Many folks,
| if they have internet access at all, only have access to
| it through (cheap) mobile devices. A protocol that's
| explicitly designed to be impractical/hard/impossible to
| support on mobile would exclude large swaths of people
| from ever being able to participate.
| mathw wrote:
| Absolutely. Totally up for an IRC-like system with some
| or all of the feature gap closed compared to systems like
| Slack or Discord, but this Freenode stuff has nothing to
| do with that.
|
| And anyway, isn't Matrix trying to be that next-gen IRC?
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Refreshed mobile apps, intuitive web apps, friends lists,
| working team support, video calls and file sharing. All
| within a few taps of the mobile device as people have come
| to expect.
|
| So... XMPP?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Honestly, it screams impulse control problems to me, that or
| a catastrophic misunderstanding of how people actually think
| and act.
| [deleted]
| rplnt wrote:
| Well they certainly make the decision easier for everyone.
|
| I wonder what is their motivation? Do they just want to get rid
| of the irc and reuse the "brand" for something else?
| cmsj wrote:
| Hubris, they believe freenode is _the_ home of FOSS projects.
| They literally say that in the latest (and frankly, quite
| ridiculous) post on their website:
| https://freenode.net/news/for-foss
|
| > freenode has been the home for the entire FOSS community for
| over 20 years.
|
| > Freenode is freenode, and freenode is FOSS
|
| They see those of us who are moving our project channels
| elsewhere, as "an illness".
| aethertron wrote:
| Really strange to call an IRC network 'home'. It's
| infrastructure. And it's (generally) not a private space for
| its users. More like a cafe or a co-working space than a
| home.
| daenney wrote:
| It's not all that strange. Many projects or organised
| groups of people have a "home", call it an HQ if that's
| easier.
|
| It might not jive with the dictionary definition of a home,
| but it's a term that's long been used to indicate the
| central gathering place of (online) communities. Much like
| how a personal website can be your "home" on the web.
| aethertron wrote:
| Fair enough. I'd say these channel takeover shenanigans
| disqualify freenode from being a good candidate for a
| software project's home or HQ. It makes me doubt that any
| IRC network can be rightly considered for that role, if
| this is what such network operators can do to it. It's a
| security risk.
|
| If there aren't technical security assurances against
| such interference (I think this is just the facts of IRC)
| perhaps there is a cultural norm against it (judging from
| the reaction, seems there is) and IRC networks with
| reputations for holding to those norms. So some other
| network might be acceptable to use.
|
| Still, better for software project to have its own
| website as HQ. Then they can have an SSL cert.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| But what is the point of removing ops and some of the other
| things I've heard they've done? How does that further their
| mission?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Silencing dissent.
| techrat wrote:
| It doesn't.
|
| It's the desperate actions of an entitled child. Lee was
| never fit to run an IRC network and now everyone can see
| how.
| cmsj wrote:
| They see us as trying to fracture their community, even
| though these are our communities.
|
| Ironically, by forcing us to keep the freenode channels
| open, _they_ are fracturing _our_ communities. Or, at least
| they are for me, because I 'm not going to back down and
| move the official one for my project back from Libera. I
| might have done if they had acted responsibly, but taking
| the channel away with no notice, convinces me that these
| are not people I want to rely on in any capacity.
|
| I am grateful to freenode for the platform it has provided
| to this point, and I thank all of the volunteers who kept
| it running.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| One could speculate, albeit without any basis in evidence, that
| the motives of the PIA owners might be malicious. The
| combination of IRC and VPN logs could be useful for historical
| and real-time session deanonymization.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I was lurking in #ledger on Freenode, via the Matrix bridge.
| There was some discussion in there the other day to ask if anyone
| cared to move the channel to Libera. I didn't take much notice.
| This morning I noticed a stream of garbage telling users to move
| and making the channel read-only. I didn't really pay much
| attention to it other than to leave the channel, so I don't have
| the logs anymore. After reading this, I assume they got kicked
| off for mentioning Libera. That's totally idiotic. I've
| unregistered my nick and dropped the bridge. I'll wait until a
| Matrix bridge exists for Libera and rejoin #ledger there.
| wrl wrote:
| Just happened to #zig as well:
| https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1397388932367601665
| bjourne wrote:
| Damn. I was quite skeptical about this whole libera thing:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27208073 This kind of abuse
| proves that the split was warranted.
| Offpics wrote:
| I have flashbacks from old forums. When someone got modded with a
| username from some anime (for context, rasengan is an attack from
| Naruto) you knew they are probably young and immature, and slowly
| will opress whole community with their power for attention.
| unixhero wrote:
| This is ridiculous. Ircops need to know better than this.
| isatty wrote:
| ircops and drama? Tale as old as time.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| True as it can be...
| swe_guy wrote:
| Looks like there's a mirror channel ##ob-freenode-policy-feedback
| on Libera if you want to peek at the insane drama happening on
| freenode right now.
| keepwaitingig wrote:
| I wish the Libera folks would've properly prioritized the
| Matrix bridge.
|
| The fact that multiple linux communities *migrated the entirety
| of their live chat ecosystems, nearly over-night to Matrix*...
| and I still can't join Libera from Matrix without ruffling
| feathers... it's not a good look for Libera. Meanwhile I'm in
| multiple Matrix spaces with ... jfc post-2000 communications
| functionality. Moderation? wew boy!
|
| But then again, I appreciate not-being-jerked-around like HN
| making me fill out captchas that even CF has given up on. Yeah,
| ok buddy.
|
| Anyway, I _do_ kind of feel like a jerk, because these are
| volunteers and blah blah blah, but so are the people that moved
| the [X], [Y], and [Z] communities to Matrix (again, seeingly
| overnight, the result of their careful planning and thought...
| they saw Freenode coming, as many did, and apparently starting
| working behind the scenes)
|
| So on one hand, I've got multiple big communities I'm in...
| that saw the writing on the wall, appropriately planned and got
| ahead of it... and then *one of the directly involved parties*
| who seems to be ... behind the ball - from both a technical and
| community-building standpoint.
|
| Anyway, I hope the Libera folks have fun, the Matrix servers
| I'm on are ... much more active than their IRC predecessors.
| Like, _it 's not even close_.
|
| EDIT: maybe this is off-topic, but I joined the listed chat
| room only to find out it's not actually bridged yet. So...
| hence this post.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The dust is still settling, so please wait. Active
| development and negotiations are ongoing between the Libera
| and Matrix.org folks. It's a tumultuous time and everyone's
| trying hard.
|
| (Full disclosure I am NOT affiliated with the Matrix project
| in any way)
| staz wrote:
| the problem is that it is the matrix.org team that can do the
| bridging, not the Libera folks
| account42 wrote:
| > So on one hand, I've got multiple big communities I'm in...
| that saw the writing on the wall, appropriately planned and
| got ahead of it... and then _one of the directly involved
| parties_ who seems to be ... behind the ball - from both a
| technical and community-building standpoint.
|
| To be fair to the libera folks, it seemed that they expected
| to have more time (or even avoid this entirely) and got
| caught off guard when the resignation drafts became public.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Why people love centralization so much? Gentoo hosts their own
| website, they surely have enough expertise to host an IRC server.
| I just don't understand it.
| account42 wrote:
| Besides the reasons mentioned by others, it is also convenient
| for users if Gentoo is on the same server as other similar
| projects since a /join is a lot easier than setting up another
| server with nick registration, SASL and what not in your
| client/bouncer - double so because NickServ/ChanServ are not
| really standardized across different networks.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Apparently running an chat network is a magnet for drama. Maybe
| these projects would rather keep that quarantined. I've
| certainly seen it in Discord servers.
| geofft wrote:
| IRC is an unusual service in that _legitimate_ use is very low-
| traffic and easy to handle (Freenode has under 100K users, and
| human users type at most one message per second or so), but it
| 's also attractive for botnets and spam.
|
| Running the registration services and anti-spam measures to
| keep your small network going doesn't, to borrow a phrase, add
| business value. There's nothing Gentoo gets out of running
| their own server (besides avoiding once-in-a-lifetime events
| like this) that they wouldn't get out of using a service where
| someone is already dealing with all of that.
| immibis wrote:
| And yet I bet they host their servers on one of a handful of
| popular server hosting companies. Interchangeable vendors are
| usually good enough. You don't have to go full decentralized.
| They have now interchanged their vendor to irc.libera.chat.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Centralization is convenient. I'd rather have one account on an
| IRC network and then be in a dozen channels than have a dozen
| different accounts to manage on a dozen different IRC networks
| and then be in one channel on each. This is especially true
| when you're PMing users over IRC.
|
| So looks like I'm leaving FreeNode as my one network of choice
| and joining Libera.
| blihp wrote:
| Without moderation, chat often turns into a spam sewer. The
| ability to run your own server isn't the problem, the ability
| and willingness to moderate it is.
| blfr wrote:
| Freenode has always been convenient in that you can just join a
| channel for virtually any open source project and expect it to
| be there.
| pmlnr wrote:
| If anyone is about to say that it is to make it easy for
| newcomers: it's gentoo. It'NEVER easy.
| vertis wrote:
| It takes effort. Presumably all of the people involved in
| Gentoo are already busy people and running your own IRC server
| is just another task they don't have time for.
|
| Add to this that potential users then have to discover YOUR
| server and use it, rather than just 'all the open source
| project IRCs are on freenode', and it's a big hassle.
|
| None of that is insurmountable, but they have to apply their
| effort in the most efficient way possible.
| dTal wrote:
| Not to mention that "running an IRC server" isn't just a
| technical job, it's a social one. You have to interact with
| channel owners, ban abusive users, combat spam etc. Much more
| efficient and convenient to consolidate all that into some
| sort of community.
| Macha wrote:
| So I mellowed out on if it was a hostile takeover and feel it was
| a communication breakdown between the original staff and Andrew
| largely egged on by the original downplaying of the acquisition
| by Christel and Andrew.
|
| However, actions like this show that it doesn't really matter who
| was at fault in the original drama. By his actions, Andrew has
| proven his new staff team are not suitable stewards of an irc
| network. Regardless of the ownership conflict being largely based
| on misunderstanding and feeling Christel may have been the person
| to do the most wrong, it's clear that libera.chat or unrelated
| parties like OFTC or Matrix are the more trustworthy choices
| going forward.
| wut42 wrote:
| You are mostly right. It was all born on misunderstanding,
| Lee's escalated it too much, then went to interfere and create
| this situation.
|
| But the actions he's been doing on it after that ? It speaks by
| himself, and he's the only one responsible.
| xupybd wrote:
| What does he get out of all of this. I can't understand his
| motive?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, stupidity, I assume. I think he's rather out of his
| depth.
| wut42 wrote:
| I try to, but it's really hard. The initial "take-over" was
| because he felt entitled to do so (feeling an agression
| (that mostly didn't happen and was a misunderstanding) on
| his property). But what he's been doing ever since is
| weird, and could also make think of another motive for the
| original actions as well...
| joepie91_ wrote:
| My read of the situation is that Ariadne was more or less
| correct; running Freenode was a childhood dream for
| Andrew, he mistakenly believed he could get there with
| money and strongarming, the community rejected him and
| refused to provide validation, and now he's increasingly
| trying to keep the community from leaving him by force.
| wut42 wrote:
| This could explain the overall situation pretty well.
| Could be more or less some shortcuts, but in the end, it
| matches.
| xupybd wrote:
| Ah that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
| xupybd wrote:
| I followed a dude on Twitter. He was semi famous and a
| big proponent of free speech. One day he posted some
| steaks he cooked. Some people started responding with
| steak cooking tips. He responded by banning everyone of
| of them. This has the same feel but on a larger scale.
|
| I had a boss that used to get really angry at people when
| they wished him happy birthday. Same feeling.
|
| I hate puzzles like this, they get stuck in my head. I'll
| be thinking about this for weeks.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Logic and emotions are almost diametrically opposed, as
| far as our intellectual understanding of them can be
| concerned.
| asddubs wrote:
| this one at least seems fairly traceable (this is from
| the perspective of an outsider, correct me if any of this
| is wrong):
|
| -christel sells something that wasn't really hers to
| sell, which she technically had some degree of ownership
| over, due to a former non profit being dissolved to save
| costs.
|
| -the guy now thinks he owns it, everyone else thinks he
| just sponsored some conferences in exchange for a logo
| placement
|
| -years later, the guy asks for a logo to be swapped out
| for another
|
| -this causes confusion and christel just resigns and
| disappears, the situation now no longer able to be kept
| under wraps by her (I'm ascribing motivations here)
|
| -the new leadership takes over with christel being gone,
| and doesn't understand why the guy who ran a few
| conferences has control over the freenode domain, so
| seeks to remove him from it (without hostile intent, just
| as part of regular governance)
|
| -the guy thinks he's being usurped, potentially unaware
| that no one really knows that he bought this domain and
| "freenode" from christel (freenode servers etc were not
| supplied by him but rather donated by other third
| parties)
|
| -he seeks to reinforce his ownership of freenode
|
| -fallout ensues
| wut42 wrote:
| This is mostly what happened, yeah. Gathered a lot of
| information on this since a week or so (I am an outsider
| too).
| wally4000 wrote:
| Happened to #dragonbox-* / #openpandora-*
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| I was quite relaxed about the whole thing and was willing to give
| Lee a chance, but mass purging channels and forwarding them to ##
| namespace, and deleting their topics...
|
| #go-nuts had libera.chat mentioned in the topic... saying that
| they were on libera.chat as well "if freenode dies". Suddenly
| every user was forwarded to ##go-nuts, the topic empty, #go-nuts
| invite only ; that certainly is a classy way. This was the
| official golang support channel, no warning, nothing. Can you
| understand what kind of breach of trust that is? How can you host
| a support channel on Freenode for any kind of official project,
| if that's what they're doing?
|
| I was k-lined on Freenode for repeatedly pointing out in one of
| the hijacked channels what had happened. This is _not_ something
| I ever considered doing, but it was so unfair. People being
| forwarded to an unofficial support channel not realizing what had
| happened.
|
| Freenode staff are very aggressive about taking over channels in
| order to limit exposure to this whole fiasco. And they go way
| overboard. From the beginning my impression was "this is ops
| fighting, and who knows what's true, hopefully things will calm
| down", but the way Lee handles this? Like a privileged, rich,
| socially inapt teenager. Every new ounce of information released
| on freenode.net reads like what I would have written with 16.
| https://freenode.net/news/for-foss is this the person you would
| entrust your official support channel for an OSS project with?
|
| I still don't know what's true and what's not. And I can see both
| sides of this. Libera will first have to prove itself, and so I
| hope channels will also consider switching to OFTC (which
| promises far less trouble, and more stability at this point), but
| Freenode definitely is not trustworthy anymore. It's pretty much
| as simple as that.
| greatgib wrote:
| The stupid hijackers of Freenode are pushing themselves for a
| huge streisand effect.
|
| If they did nothing for some times, probably a lot of persons and
| projects would not even have noticed and liberachat could have
| been slow to gain the critical mass of users.
|
| But now, it is like if all the users and projects have a big
| incentive to move and completely exit freenode as fast as
| possible.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Why are people still using IRC? Aren't there better, more
| private/secure channels?
|
| I understand that many of these channels are intentionally
| private, but IRC is still unencrypted in transit, so everything
| is exposed and users have no anonymity.
| knorker wrote:
| Efficient, supports terminal mode natively, open, and frankly
| for exactly this reason.
|
| If whatsapp, or apple, or google, or facebook does anything
| like this then all you can do is shrug and accept it.
|
| But if you have $5 a month then you can run an IRC network
| with a VM.
|
| > IRC is still unencrypted in transit
|
| Sometimes. But there's also a lot of TLS, and it's trending
| upwards.
|
| > users have no anonymity
|
| Less anonyminity against each other, but more against the
| central powerful provider.
|
| And while you may have my IP on IRC (depends on the network),
| what are you as a private individual supposed to do with that
| information?
|
| Whereas when centralized it becomes monetizable.
| andrey_utkin wrote:
| > Why are people still using IRC? Aren't there better, more
| private/secure channels?
|
| Equilibrium.
|
| An old essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" explains this
| idea in an enlightening way:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-
| agroupisit...
|
| > Some pieces of social software, like IRC channels and
| mailing lists,are self-moderating with scale, because as the
| signal-to-noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off,
| until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse.
| You get these sorts of oscillating patterns, but the overall
| system is self-correcting
| agumonkey wrote:
| Stupid, light, fast
|
| I got used.to discord but it's not the same
| donio wrote:
| There is a Discord plugin for bitlbee, that way you can use
| an IRC client to chat on Discord.
| https://github.com/sm00th/bitlbee-discord
| kyrra wrote:
| To pile on, Google uses internally for incident response [0]
|
| > Google has found IRC to be a huge boon in incident
| response. IRC is very reliable and can be used as a log of
| communications about this event, and such a record is
| invaluable in keeping detailed state changes in mind. We've
| also written bots that log incident-related traffic (which is
| helpful for postmortem analysis), and other bots that log
| events such as alerts to the channel. IRC is also a
| convenient medium over which geographically distributed teams
| can coordinate.
|
| Also, irc can still be up when Chat, Hangouts or other tools
| are down. It's simple tech that is easy to interact with.
|
| [0] https://sre.google/sre-book/managing-incidents/
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Worth pointing out that IRC isn't necessarily the first
| choice for coordinating a response, but it is a great low-
| dependency, independent fallback. IRC runs on a stack that
| is completely independent from the rest of Google prod
| (it's just a Linux machine running an IRC daemon). So when
| almost everything else goes down, so long as basic network
| routing is still working, IRC is still up.
| kyrra wrote:
| Point taken. For smaller incidents, Chat or Meet are
| regularly used. But larger (cross-team or maybe infra
| related) are handled in IRC.
| hobs wrote:
| Apple hosted and used its own IRC for decades and sadly I
| saw the last of it die off ~ 2010 for any support uses.
|
| iChat internally at a site was not a replacement.
| donio wrote:
| For me it's the simplicity and the availability of good Emacs
| based clients. For other services there are some Emacs
| clients but none of them are as good as the IRC clients.
| There are also some proxy tools that let me use Emacs IRC
| clients to connect to other chat services, I use those when
| possible. This way I can do all my chatting from the comfort
| of my Emacs session.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Daemon and client implementations have effectively supported
| SSL/TLS for many years now. You can't control whether server
| links are encrypted (that's up to the owners; in a
| competently run network they will be) but all major networks
| have one or more encrypted connection ports. 6697 is a
| typical choice. On mIRC, prefix the port number with a + to
| use SSL.
|
| Newer protocols are more feature rich and don't have some of
| the legacy drawbacks of IRC, of course.
| l-p wrote:
| > but IRC is still unencrypted in transit
|
| TLS is an option, not ideal but better than no TLS at all.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Seen a few people pushing it.
|
| That said I keep having the good old plain data link
| OldGoodNewBad wrote:
| Nothing is better than IRC.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| http://bfinn.com
| pferde wrote:
| That is not necessarily true for Freenode or Libera. Client
| connections over TLS are encouraged, and I'm pretty sure that
| server-to-server links are all over TLS also.
|
| Plus, there are some controls for users and channel admins to
| make sure they are talking over TLS only, such as +S channel
| mode, which only lets in TLS-using client connections to
| join.
| swiley wrote:
| Most modern servers use TLS so it isn't any worse than
| imessage.
| nixgeek wrote:
| This is incorrect. iMessage is E2EE, which IRC is not.
| swiley wrote:
| Even if iMessage is E2EE (I don't think it is) the
| backups mean the messages end up on Apple's servers
| unencrypted. Either way Apple is able to access them when
| subpeonaed.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| It is E2EE, and the backups on Apple's servers are
| encrypted. However, if you also have iCloud Backup turned
| on, the encryption key is backed up plain-text [1][2], so
| the effect ("Apple is able to access them when
| subpeonaed" sic.) remains the same in those cases, but it
| can be configured/avoided.
|
| [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 [2]: https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8nbgyu/messages_in_i...
| swiley wrote:
| Do you use imessage in any groups were there isn't at
| least one member that has iCloud Backup turned off? I
| don't know a single person with it off.
| [deleted]
| qiqitori wrote:
| IRC is inherently non-private because anybody can join and
| then do whatever with what they saw.
|
| IRC isn't really unencrypted in transit though, you can
| connect via SSL (most people do so, probably) and there are
| channel modes on some networks that prevent people from
| joining if they aren't using SSL to connect.
|
| You can also encrypt messages yourself and then send those on
| top of the IRC protocol.
|
| As for anonymity, most IRC networks allow you to use a cloak
| to hide your IP (requires user registration, which would
| require one email interaction), some IRC networks hide your
| IP (or parts of the reverse DNS) and some IRC networks allow
| you to join using Tor.
| progval wrote:
| > IRC is inherently non-private because anybody can join
|
| Servers and channels can have passwords. Channels can also
| be invite-only.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I also encourage the use of proxy servers and/or
| vpns(preferably not as a service!) when using irc on the
| wild world of the web. In addition to cloaking, and
| everything else you mentioned.
| unionpivo wrote:
| Because it's one of the rare still used open protocol
| supported by multiple servers and clients implementations and
| not backed by single corporate entity.
|
| In short there are other new technologies, but most of them
| are corporate walled gardens, or small open source projects
| that only have one server/client implementation, and few
| servers under control of single entity.
|
| The Matrix ecosystem is the only thing I can think of, that
| could eventually replace IRC. (There might be others, I am
| just not familiar with them)
|
| End even if they are somehow similar, discussions on Discord
| and Slack and other similar platforms are different than on
| IRC, at least in my experience.
|
| One defining future of IRC at least channels I frequent and
| Discords/Slacks/Matrix is less memes and animated things
| grabbing your attention.
|
| Another big thing is, that new stuff like
| Discord/Slack/Matrix are combination of messenger and
| discussion forum, while IRC is discussion only.
|
| I almost never bother reading chat history in IRC, but in
| Slacks/... you are expected to keep up with @mentions and on
| "important channels" etc.
|
| IRC is more of a tavern room, you come in have discussion
| with people currently in, some people come some people go
| during that and then you leave and that is that.
|
| While on newer apps you are expected to keep up. I don't know
| how to describe it better, but fore me that's the biggest
| difference.
| zamalek wrote:
| > The Matrix ecosystem is the only thing I can think of,
| that could eventually replace IRC.
|
| This seems like it should have been the logical conclusion.
| While IRC is a free protocol, this whole controversy has
| shown that you aren't ultimately in control of your
| channels. With Matrix/<other-federated>, it simply wouldn't
| be possible for a hostile actor to claim ownership of their
| channels (unless Gentoo itself were somehow the victim of a
| hostile takeover).
|
| Libera certainly has a good few decades of trustworthy
| service, as Freenode once did, but the protocol is itself
| built on vulnerable assumptions. There's no way to
| guarantee that Libera won't have a dramawave of its own 15
| years down the line.
|
| > While on newer apps you are expected to keep up.
|
| I completely agree with this. I've been auto-kicked from
| Matrix channels for inactivity/lurking, which is
| ridiculous. This could be solved with more client and
| server diversity - it wouldn't be hard to create an IRC-
| like experience on Matrix at all.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Autokicks for idling were mandated by freenode on their
| bridge (which makes sense otherwise you end up with loads
| of zombie connections from folks who have forgotten about
| their Matrix accounts).
| progval wrote:
| > With Matrix/<other-federated>, it simply wouldn't be
| possible for a hostile actor to claim ownership of their
| channels
|
| Can't matrix.org staff hijack rooms hosted on the
| matrix.org homeserver?
| zamalek wrote:
| Yes, my argument is for running your own server. The
| matrix.org wouldn't be able to do anything to the
| gentoo.org server. If you choose to use the matrix.org
| homeserver, then the risks are identical to IRC.
| progval wrote:
| You can also run your own IRC server. Risks are the same
| either way.
| ptman wrote:
| IRC networks are a closed federation. The servers have to
| trust each other and all servers of a network are usually
| administered by the same staff. Matrix is an open
| federation like email. The servers just speak the same
| protocol to each other and messages flow even if the
| server admins never have any interaction.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix's rooms are decentralised and we have
| decentralised access control to stop this from happening
| in the general case. Only a malicious server admin on
| your own server can hijack like this (or the one running
| a bridge in the case of a bridged room). And with P2P
| Matrix, every client gets its own server, so at that
| point hijacks will be entirely impossible.
| progval wrote:
| I don't understand how that's possible. When clicking a
| matrix.to link, there is a room name and a homeserver
| hostname, right? How does that homeserver not have
| complete control over what information about the room is
| sent to the client?
| zamalek wrote:
| Users/rooms on the gentoo.org server can interact just
| fine with users/rooms on the matrix.org server. That's
| basically the whole point of Matrix.
|
| You may be suggesting that matrix.org could, for example,
| block access to the gentoo.org server (or a subset of its
| rooms). In that scenario users could choose a new
| homeserver (and not necessarily the same one) in order to
| regain access, instead of _the entire channel having to
| migrate._
|
| In the incredibly unlikely event where every homeserver
| on the internet is blocking gentoo.org, gentoo.org could
| simply allow user registration.
|
| With IRC you are forced to trust the network operator
| with both your account and channel. Matrix gives you the
| option to trust someone else with both, neither, or
| either.
| [deleted]
| tffgg wrote:
| The room name + hostname is just one of potentially many
| aliases for a room that can be resolved by any server
| that has a member in the room
| progval wrote:
| That's good to know! Thanks
| lolmatrixx wrote:
| > The Matrix ecosystem is the only thing I can think of,
| that could eventually replace IRC. (There might be others,
| I am just not familiar with them)
|
| There is no ecosystem, despite public documentation of the
| "protocol," Synapse is the actual standard when it comes to
| Matrix, so it's your only homeserver choice. Element is the
| only client. These are both produced by a for profit
| company. They're no different than Rocket Chat or
| Mattermost but with way less honest marketing towards
| hackers. Also, the federation is fake (stops working when
| matrix.org goes down) and the identity to Matrix ID mapping
| is centralized at vector.im -- if you want a silo you can
| host your own identity mapping server, but then you can't
| be found on the wider network.
|
| Matrix is a joke. It's a series of grant deliverables
| flying in formation and pretending to be a protocol.
|
| Oh and the CEO is wildly unprofessional, he's on here all
| the time as Arathorn in any thread about Matrix, spreading
| FUD about other networks and selling lies about his to
| gullible nerds
|
| Matrix sucks. Modern XMPP is literally better in every way,
| and also still sucks. But at least federation is real, in
| XMPP.
| miloignis wrote:
| Sigh, none of that is true.
|
| Dendrite is another homeserver that is good enough to run
| as a daily driver, and there's a community developed Rust
| one, Conduit, that's making steady progress.
|
| There are plenty of alternative clients - FluffyChat,
| NeoChat, Fractal, etc. Making a basic client is pretty
| easy (I've written several), and my friends and I have
| been making a more fully-featured one in our spare time.
|
| Federation is not fake, I was there on my own homeserver
| when matrix.org went down and had fun happily continuing
| to chat through the biggest test of matrix's federation
| resiliency.
|
| Every time I've seen Arathorn interact in threads, he has
| been very professional and patient, even when others
| spread FUD ( _cough, cough_ ). He certainly doesn't
| spread lies or FUD about anyone else.
|
| Modern XMPP is _not_ better in every way - Matrix is an
| eventually-consistent distributed event graph, which
| makes it _better_ at handling big federation testing
| events like the matrix.org downtime.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| There are multiple Matrix clients in common use. It is
| odd that you think Element is the only client.
| coldpie wrote:
| It's a brand-new user named "lolmatrixx". Don't waste
| your time.
| BugWatch wrote:
| There are at least 10 different clients, and I'm only
| referring to those that are listed on the Matrix website.
| BugWatch wrote:
| Also, considering the dismissive tone of your post and
| your choice of handle/username, it seems you are here
| (just?) to grind your axe, and not for genuine and honest
| discussion.
| q3k wrote:
| > federation is fake (stops working when matrix.org goes
| down)
|
| Can you elaborate on this, or link to some relevant
| resources?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Matrix requires registration with some server. These
| servers are federated, but the biggest and most commonly
| used one is matrix.org. So if that's down, most users
| lose access.
| q3k wrote:
| But that's not fake federation, that's just federation
| and the reality that most people that can't be bothered
| to set up their own federated server? You can say that a
| fully distributed chat system would be better at this
| (like SSB [1]), but that's a totally different beast from
| a federated system.
|
| Matrix's federation is no worse than any other popular
| federated system I've used (eg. email and xmpp). I'm not
| saying it shouldn't be better (I dislike the matrix.org
| centralization, too), but that's not something inherent
| to Matrix, and I think it's not honest to bring it up as
| 'fake federation' in this context.
|
| Additionally, Matrix is significantly better at this in
| one way than the alternatives: even if matrix.org goes
| down, all rooms can continue working, even ones with a
| :matrix.org label. The same can't be said about XMPP MUC,
| IIUC.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I don't disagree with that, I'm not the OP who called it
| fake federation.
|
| I do think that federated systems tend to become
| centralized, because the federating links tend to be
| unreliable. I think people confuse federation and
| decentralization, when they're very different things.
| tffgg wrote:
| Less than a third loose access through their current
| server. They can sign up on a different server and have
| access again.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > I almost never bother reading chat history in IRC, but in
| Slacks/... you are expected to keep up with @mentions and
| on "important channels" etc.
|
| Isn't that more of a feature of the kinds of environments
| that run Slack vs IRC?
|
| If my office used IRC for communication, I'd still be
| expected to keep up on all important channels and pings.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| My office uses IRC for communication. Actual realtime
| communication. Announcements and any communication that
| you need to read at any time other than "now" comes over
| email lists.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I wonder what their goal is with this. Freenode users are not
| regular people, like Whatsapp users, who will just bend over and
| let stuff like this happen. All of them can very easily move to
| another network. It makes me wonder if the people doing the
| hostile takeover even understand what they are taking over. Do
| they think they have a Discord/Slack/Whatsapp?
| tremon wrote:
| Why would you say that? Freenode users are just regular people,
| they just have freedom. How much freedom did Whatsapp users
| have to choose a different provider after Facebook bought the
| company?
| gowld wrote:
| Freenode users are far more technically savvy than than the
| vast majority of Slack/Discord/WhatsApp users.
| globular-toast wrote:
| And more strongly principled and aware/care about issues
| like security as well.
| pferde wrote:
| Yes, (ex-)Freenode users are just regular people, but it is a
| self-selected group of people who value freedom, and are
| willing to put some extra effort in keeping it. That is, I
| think, what grandparent post meant by "Freenode users are not
| regular people, like Whatsapp users, who will just bend over
| and let stuff like this happen."
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| For anyone wondering "what now":
|
| https://libera.chat/
|
| This network is run by the old staff that Andrew Lee evicted last
| week to seize the network. Libera cares about foss and will help
| you transition your project.
|
| From last week: https://kline.sh/
| Seirdy wrote:
| Some channels are also moving to OFTC. Alpine, cat-v,
| #freedesktop, #wayland, and others are examples.
| endgame wrote:
| #dhall is on OFTC too. The #nixos universe seems to have
| moved to Matrix.
| fosshost wrote:
| Fosshost.org has moved all of its channels to Libera with
| immediate effect. We no longer support the Freenode network by
| its current management and or leadership. It is such a shame that
| it has come to this.
|
| Thomas, CEO - Fosshost.
| riccardomc wrote:
| I fail to understand the strategy behind this. They're driving
| all users away. What is the plan?
|
| I'm genuinely baffled. Anyone know why?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Driving away the "free beer" guys to turn it to corporate chat
| so then VCs will invest and pump up their valuation to the moon
| and then dump it in the public markets and buy yachts?
| gwd wrote:
| One thing to remember is that _nobody_ thinks of themselves as
| The Bad Guy. (Some people may come to believe that Previous
| Them _was_ The Bad Guy, but that transformation is rare, and
| doesn 't happen in the heat of the moment.) So when people do
| things that any clear-minded person would describe as Bad Guy
| behavior, they have to distort reality in order to maintain
| their Good Guy image in their own eyes.
|
| If Andrew Lee simply wanted to destroy Freenode, he could have
| just pulled the plug on the domain name and/or shut down all
| the servers. It's clear, however, that he wants freenode to
| continue operating, just under his control; which means he has
| a reason why what he's doing is the Right Thing to do. Which
| means all the people advocating that their channels move over
| to Libera are either deluded or evil and are destroying
| communities. So in his mind, he's fighting the Bad Guys by
| seizing control of channels where the Bad Guys are abusing
| their privileges to destroy communities.
|
| I mean yeah, it's easy for an independent observer to see that
| it's actually _him_ who 's abusing his power, and that those
| attempts will be counter-productive. But he's not an
| independent observer.
|
| We've all got a thumb on the scales when evaluating our own
| behavior; its just more noticeable in a situation like this,
| where the thumb is more like both arms and a foot.
| immibis wrote:
| It's a microcosm of a lot of real-world politics.
| varjag wrote:
| Lee is a person unironically considering himself a prince.
| This explains a lot about his governance model.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Why leverage personal attacks? That's totally uncalled for.
| immibis wrote:
| Because this whole thing is about one person being
| sh*tty?
| gwd wrote:
| My policy when people are being unpleasant is to try as
| much as possible to stick to the facts and let them speak
| for themselves. This is for several reasons:
|
| 1. It's easy when you're angry at someone to paint things
| more black than they are, or to interpret neutral actions
| poorly intentioned. Forcing yourself to state the facts
| helps make sure you're not exaggerating or
| misinterpreting things. (In fact, occasionally when I've
| gone through that exercise, I decide that I was
| overreacting and they didn't mean what I thought they
| meant anyway.)
|
| 2. Laying out the facts is much more convincing. Some guy
| on the internet says, "He things he's a prince"? Well,
| OK, one guy doesn't like him. Laying out specific actions
| he's taken that are consistent with considering himself a
| prince? Well, now I have data with which to form my own
| judgement.
| ratww wrote:
| Keep in mind that the "prince" thing is not a gratuitous
| attack or some joke created because of Freenode, it's
| real:
|
| _> In October 2018, Yi Seok, a member of the House of Yi
| and one of the pretenders to the defunct imperial throne
| of Korea, declared Lee the crown prince of Korea at a
| ceremony in Los Angeles attended by city officials from
| Los Angeles and Jeonju, the family 's seat._ [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur)
| gwd wrote:
| I did find that out afterwards, but because of the way
| the comment was phrased, it wasn't at all obvious. I
| would probably have said something more like:
|
| > NB that Andrew Lee literally considers himself a
| prince:
|
| >> [Your wikipedia quote & reference]
|
| > That may have something to do with his governance
| style.
| varjag wrote:
| It's not an attack, he literally claims he is the crown
| prince of Korea.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Being the pretender to a defunct imperial throne says a
| certain amount about somebody.
|
| Typically, to be honest, that they are unhinged.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| They are driving away an active and vocal part of the
| community. Perhaps they're hoping to capture a more general
| audience reaching for support, and somehow monetize it?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Perhaps to vacate community of old members? Lots of F2P/P2W
| games do this kind of community destroying changes, probably to
| restart growth, with a letter of sincere apology to follow
| without reverts for changes.
| indy wrote:
| Bruised egos lead to bad decision making.
| Seirdy wrote:
| It's hilarious that rasengan is complaining about Libera
| "fracturing the FOSS community".[0]
|
| For example, #newsboat members decided to move by June 5th, and
| we've been deciding between OFTC and Libera. Then this happened:
| 20:05 --> freenodecom [freenode-placehol] (www.freenode.net)
| (~com@freenode/staff) has joined #newsboat 20:05 --
| freenodecom has changed topic for #newsboat from "We intend to
| migrate off Freenode. What do you prefer: OFTC or Libera.chat?
| Details here: https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1643"
| to "This channel has moved to ##newsboat. The topic is in
| violation of freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies"
| 20:05 <@freenodecom> This channel has been reopened with respect
| to the communities and new users. The topic is in violation of
| freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies 20:05 --
| Mode #newsboat [+o freenodecom] by OperServ 20:05 -- Mode
| #newsboat [+impsf ##newsboat] by ChanServ 20:05
| <@freenodecom> The new channel is ##newsboat 20:05 <--
| freenodecom (~com@freenode/staff) has left #newsboat
|
| Great. Now none of us can speak on #newsboat, making coordination
| to switch much harder. New users might get confused and join the
| wrong channel operated by a hostile party. The community is more
| fractured now.
|
| To everyone with a freenode channel: whatever you do, do not
| mention "libera" in your channel topic. That's the trigger for
| this action.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210525231635/https://freenode....
| fosshost wrote:
| Fosshost.org #fosshost has taken the decision to move all of its
| channels from freenode to libera with immediate effect. It is
| such a shame that it has come to this, but we had no option.
|
| Best, Thomas CEO - Fosshost
| spicywasabi wrote:
| freenode has now started taking over and removing access, bans,
| and forwarding users from official on topics channels (such as
| #wikipedia, #znc etc) and forwarding them to ##offtopic channels
| saying they are in violation of apparent new policy. no
| explanation and lots of users losing access to official groups.
| irq wrote:
| There's a pretty salty rebuttal to this on https://freenode.net.
| You can feel the hurt ego in the prose. It saddens me to see how
| far the original openprojects.net (renamed to freenode) has
| fallen since the early 2000s, when I was an admin/server sponsor.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| From that link:
|
| "freenode has been the home for the entire FOSS community for
| over 20 years. Fracturing the community only hurts users and
| FOSS. Your users don't wish to migrate. Stop forcing them."
|
| Does he mean "fracturing" the community as in people using
| multiple IRC servers? Isn't that sort of distributed nature an
| _advantage_ of FOSS? Why does everything need to be on one
| server?
| geofft wrote:
| That statement is also simply not true - no accounting of the
| "FOSS community" is complete without Debian and its influence
| - in particular the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which
| became the Open Source Definition, but also Debian itself as
| a technical work and everything downstream of it like Ubuntu.
|
| And Debian left Freenode for OFTC long ago.
| izacus wrote:
| There's small missing part of the story here - many channel
| owners have been adding full bans before leaving, meaning
| that noone was able to join the channel and talk about the
| topic anymore.
|
| Most of those channels got "taken over" and bans removed so
| people could continue conversing on that network if they
| would.
| immibis wrote:
| They took over a bunch of channels just for having the word
| "libera" in the topic. The actual criteria are something
| more than that, because there are some channels that had it
| in their topic but didn't get taken over. But that's
| approximately what happened.
| immibis wrote:
| also, a community spread across two channels is more
| fractured than a community on one. Forcing users out of the
| old one is a good thing.
| p_l wrote:
| The single-# channels were _official_ channels (or
| grandfathered channels from before "official channel"
| policy).
|
| That meant that they weren't random chat channels, they
| were linked with specific organization that handled them
| (this was done to prevent name hijacking... which is what
| rasengan just did)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| That seems pretty reasonable though. If these are the
| _official_ channels for a given project, then it 's up to
| the project what they want to do with them, not the ops of
| the network they happen to be hosted on. If Gentoo or
| whoever want to move their official channel from one
| network to another, then that's entirely their right to do
| so, and it makes sense to close down the previous location
| and leave a link to the new one to prevent confusing people
| and fracturing the community.
|
| If you want to stay on FreeNode, you can create as many
| unofficial channels to talk about Gentoo as you want, and
| you're free to try to recruit users to it. But taking over
| what had been the official channel, but which is now
| officially deprecated by the sponsoring project in
| question, is unreasonable. It's about trust.
| immibis wrote:
| Because he wants to control all of it.
| edejong wrote:
| "And any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all."
| type0 wrote:
| He can comfort himself being a true prince nonetheless /s
| dspillett wrote:
| Another relevant quote from the same show: "There's no cure
| for being a [expletive]".
| q3k wrote:
| Archived link, in case of cowardly edits:
| https://archive.is/LGsY2
| tjpnz wrote:
| Very unbecoming of someone in his position. Seems people were
| right to be concerned.
| cookguyruffles wrote:
| https://i.imgflip.com/5b0hgl.jpg
| dada78641 wrote:
| > A note on cancel culture
|
| > I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads
| on freenode that they are being harassed and are at risk of
| being canceled if they do not leave, to Libera. This activity
| does not belong in FOSS. Stop it.
|
| lmfao sure, why not? Claim to be a victim of "cancel culture",
| and that people moving to Libera are just being forced to do so
| by the evil SJW cabal (no, we're not giving you any proof).
|
| This whole pathetic statement from Lee on the website really
| says a lot about what type of person he is.
| [deleted]
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's reached the point where I now have a mental heuristic
| that anyone claiming "cancel culture" is the one in the
| wrong, and this heuristic is almost always right. It's really
| just a shorthand "How could I have known there would have
| been consequences for my terrible actions?!", with said
| actions typically being completely unrelated to any issues of
| speech policing (as we see here).
| smcl wrote:
| From that link, this:
|
| > I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads
| on freenode that
|
| > they are being harassed and are at risk of being canceled if
| they do not leave,
|
| > to Libera. This activity does not belong in FOSS. Stop it.
|
| Smells like a load of bullshit to me. I'm not involved in the
| Freenode debacle at all, all I know about the characters in
| question are from the original resignation letter, the Andrew
| Lee PDF detailing his side of the argument, the articles about
| the mass cancelling of channels posted here on HN today, the
| Andrew Lee apology comment on HN about how it was a
| "miscommunication" and now this on the freenode.net frontpage.
| So I may be totally jumping to conclusions, but I find it very
| hard to believe that people would be getting harrassed or
| bullied into moving away from freenode and that anyone would
| reach out directly to a VERY controversial at the centre of the
| whole ordeal. This feels like a way to score a few points by
| throwing some vague hard-to-disprove accusations at the other
| side.
|
| edit: the apology in question is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287178, it's "dead" so
| in case it's not readable by anyone the text is:
|
| "This should have been communicated better and for that I
| apologize. We published a draft policy update and worked with
| the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the
| community's wishes.
|
| The policy was updated today to make clear that inappropriate
| advertising was unacceptable. As many of these channels were
| simply wildly unmoderated and closed, yet by protocol
| standards, "open" under a primary (#) namespace while in
| "official capacity", we felt it was best to redirect users to
| an unofficial off-topic (##) namespace.
|
| I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is
| entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that. "
|
| I initially thought "bullshit" on the PDF and the comment too,
| but each time convinced myself I could just be misunderstanding
| due to being a bit distant from the situation. Reading the
| freenode frontpage blew that away in my eyes.
| speeder wrote:
| I am user and occasionally I contribute to Allegro.
|
| Freenode attempted to take it over today, and it didn'teven
| mention libera.chat and it didn't even tried to move yet.
|
| Now it has officially moved.
|
| https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629.
| ..
| smcl wrote:
| What was the topic before the bot changed it?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Does anyone have a decent summary of the entire history of this?
| I am not really part of the open source world, but from all the
| activity this seems like a very significant moment.
| 0xBA5E64 wrote:
| This covers the gist (eheh) of it:
| https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
| nabakin wrote:
| 245 points in 3 hours and this isn't on the front page anymore?
| That's a bit too much down weight in my opinion.
| glimmung wrote:
| Today's episode of the "Fresh Prince of Dead Air"...popcorn time
| again.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The apparent cause of this is a channel topic _mentioning_ libera
| at all. This was the topic for the channel that affected me (with
| redacting of URL and channel name):
|
| [memetic people] Logs, stats, etc: [url redacted] -- See also
| #redacted on irc.libera.chat
|
| Also everyone in the #topic channel at the time of the takeover
| was apparently banned from both the #topic and ##topic channel it
| was supposedly moved to.
|
| At this point, I am firmly of the opinion "fuck Freenode."
| Buttons840 wrote:
| This matches the story I got from Reddit on /r/haskell and
| /r/emacs.
| simias wrote:
| I'm very sad for the loss of Freenode and one more nail in IRC's
| coffin (which is probably more nail than coffin by weight now).
|
| That being said reading the various IRC logs and blog posts
| surrounding this issue I can't help but see echoes of some of the
| more toxic sides of "hacker culture". Diplomacy and human skills
| are for sissies, we're HACKERS we only care about TECH and if
| you're offended then you're a PC snowflake, it's just WORDS,
| focus on the issue, not the way it's framed. A horde of wannabees
| Linus and Theo.
|
| And then people wonder why FLOSS projects need a code of
| conduct...
| immibis wrote:
| This toxicity is not just a lack of "diplomacy and human
| skills" - it is actively taking one side of the current
| political divide.
| cpach wrote:
| Good point. It's way too easy for techies to underestimate the
| importance of "soft" skills. Do this at your own peril.
| watwut wrote:
| This is not about soft skills. It is about ideology and
| values.
| simias wrote:
| I disagree. I haven't taken the time to dig deep enough
| into this Freenode drama to really understand where
| everybody stands and as such I don't have a firm grasp of
| the various ideologies and values of the different sides.
| However it's painfully blatant to me that many of the
| participants seem to be making things worse by lacking a
| modicum of diplomacy and soft skills.
| watwut wrote:
| You lack soft skills when you are clueless what you are
| doing. If you are asshole fully knowing what you are
| doing, or if you take pleasure on doing harm or if you
| think being aggressive makes one right kind of person,
| the issue is ideology amd values.
|
| "I will offend you and if you object you are PC
| snowflake" is not lack of soft skills. It is ideology -
| one that specified who has right to object and who is
| lower on hierarchy.
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| Soft skills are how ideology and values get transmitted.
| cpach wrote:
| You do have a point there. Another lesson from this debacle
| could be this: If you shit on people, they might revolt and
| cut all the ties to you and your affiliates :D
| hparadiz wrote:
| A code of conduct doesn't prevent situations like this in any
| way.
| dang wrote:
| All: there was a thwack of threads about this, including several
| on the front page (yikes). I've merged them hither. That means
| there are 800+ comments and to read them all you need (stamina,
| and) to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628&p=3
|
| (Sorry for the interruption. Comments like this will go away when
| we turn off pagination. Yes, you're right and we know.)
|
| There is also the following thread from the other side, which
| I've unflagged, but not merged:
|
| _Freenode Exists for FOSS_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27283964 - May 2021 (20
| comments)
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Their hijacking everything on Freenode and that stuff is now why
| I will no longer use it and now use Libera instead. This script
| to try to block everything, it is very bad. (It is not
| necessarily the only reason, but it is the major one.)
|
| We see these complaints about Freenode, and about moving to
| Libera instead, anywhere, including on Freenode, Libera, HN,
| Mastodon, Usenet, ifMUD, and probably even more.
| techrat wrote:
| Also happened to #r/linux: https://i.imgur.com/02X39YU.png
|
| and #elitedangerous: https://i.imgur.com/02X39YU.png
|
| and #prjmistral: https://pastebin.com/UGgTwRnt
|
| Edit:
|
| Additional channels taken over by Freenode Staff:
|
| #irssi
|
| #reprap
|
| #regex
|
| #ubuntu
|
| #wikipedia
|
| #gcc
|
| #rhel
|
| Looks like it's widespread. Won't be editing further.
| isantop wrote:
| They also semi-affected #system76. I still have ops in the ACL,
| but there was a new ## opened (which is invite-only) and they
| added themselves to the ACL.
| db48x wrote:
| Do you happen to know what the topics were?
| transientbug wrote:
| Seems to be any topic mentioning libera chat.
| techrat wrote:
| Topic: * libera*
| bayindirh wrote:
| I was watching the whole saga as a bona-fide, albeit painful,
| metamorphosis of a community for the better, however this is a
| whole new level of ugly.
| naikrovek wrote:
| nice to see this freenode situation is finally calming down... /s
| math-dev wrote:
| Meh, something smells _funny_ about all this. I still don't know
| what in particular Freenode did wrong, looks like it was a group
| of admins/volunteers who just wanted to have control over the
| network that they have dedicated many hours to supporting. To
| some extent, that's fair - if they contributed the most to the
| network.
|
| I'm always a bit cynical when I hear too many posts/comments
| about the "community" etc, I've seen first hand how many
| community insiders in the FOSS movement pat each other on the
| back and put down the work of fresh starters who are trying new
| things.
|
| And now looks like the migration to libera chat will definitely
| take place. Me personally I'm just going to quit IRC, too much
| drama over nothing.
|
| Take everything with a grain of salt, I've learnt not to believe
| everything on the internet, especially it subtly involves peer
| pressure (which inevitably themes of "community" bring up).
|
| I don't care at all about Freenode, this is just an observers
| view of what's happened.
| q3k wrote:
| > I still don't know what in particular Freenode did wrong
|
| Even if nothing worrying happened with Freenode until now, this
| thing totally is 'doing something wrong'. Blindly taking
| control of any channel that has 'libera.chat' in its topic
| should be enough of a reason to never trust them again. This is
| now how you manage a community. I don't want to use this
| network.
| math-dev wrote:
| (Correct if my assumption is mistaken, I'm not 100% sure) If
| a channel is actively posting to migrate to another network,
| that isn't appropriate. It's like all facebook groups posting
| "Hey lets move to twitter now".
|
| At the end of the day, the "community" has spoken and looks
| to be moving over. I see so many negative posts on this
| thread against Andrew & Freenode, I can understand if they
| are upset and react in the way they have re banning such
| libera.chat messages.
| capableweb wrote:
| > If a channel is actively posting to migrate to another
| network, that isn't appropriate. It's like all facebook
| groups posting "Hey lets move to twitter now".
|
| Which, in the spirit of FOSS, should be ok. Going to
| https://freenode.net/ right now shows the tagline "freenode
| exists for FOSS" but limiting people from changing IRC
| server by blocking messages or changing topics feels very
| much against the spirit of FOSS.
|
| > I see so many negative posts on this thread against
| Andrew & Freenode, I can understand if they are upset and
| react in the way they have re banning such libera.chat
| messages.
|
| I think this is why many are moving away from Freenode as
| well. You don't want a supposedly impartial network to
| start banning users and channels left and right because
| they get upset. You want to have a stable network for your
| projects channel, and right now it seems Libera is a much
| better place for just that.
| math-dev wrote:
| In theory I agree, but imagine if you were running a
| large community and your number 2 just took it all away
| from you. I would pretty upset, even if in theory I
| should support all FOSS projects.
|
| Not to say this is the same situation here as from what I
| understand, the guys who did the most work are moving to
| LC.
|
| I just hope the same thing doesn't happen to LC down the
| track, if it ever does, it will be an interesting case
| study of how they react.
|
| But yes, looks like LC is now the home of IRC and for the
| foreseeable future should be drama free.
| immibis wrote:
| It's not being taken away by the number 2. It's being
| taken away by thousands of individual decisions because
| they all agree that number _1_ is a problem.
| mattashii wrote:
| > In theory I agree, but imagine if you were running a
| large community and your number 2 just took it all away
| from you. I would pretty upset, even if in theory I
| should support all FOSS projects.
|
| Insofar that I understand the issue, Andrew wasn't the
| one running a large community, he was the owner of the
| company holding the domain used by that community. The
| ones running the community were the oppers, who have
| since migrated to run LC.
| p_l wrote:
| Remember - the communities were the ones that managed the
| channels, not Freenode. Especially single-# channels that
| weren't grandfathered were subject to a policy that ruled
| that official project had priority for names reflecting
| it.
|
| And now "freenode" effectively hijacked established
| community centers, changed the locks, sometimes for the
| very "crime" of discussing whether to move... or stay. A
| lot took a wait&see approach, some were more decisive and
| used channel flags to prevent people getting lost,
| thinking they got official org channel while arriving in
| a dead one full of lurkers that forgot to kill a ZNC
| somewhere.
| danaris wrote:
| Andrew Lee _is_ the number 2 who just took it all away.
| Now he 's desperately trying to keep the prize he won
| from becoming worthless, and like many people with
| control issues and a fragile ego, he's doing it in
| exactly the way most guaranteed to make it worthless
| faster.
|
| No FOSS project has ever had any particular _obligation_
| to keep their IRC presence on Freenode, and migrating
| from one IRC network to another has always been a pretty
| standard thing (if uncommon for any given community).
|
| These communities don't belong to Lee or to Freenode, and
| acting like moving to LC or any other network is somehow
| a violation of any reasonable IRC policy is just
| ludicrous. Any network that had a policy that that was in
| violation of is not a network I would ever want to be
| part of a community on: it's draconian and entirely self-
| serving.
| Jochim wrote:
| You're perfectly allowed to be upset but you're expected
| to avoid break the social contracts and rules that have
| been set up and kept as part of the community. If you
| can't do that then it makes sense for the community to
| abandon you.
| soneil wrote:
| I strongly disagree. If wikimedia choose to move their
| official presence to another network, it seems perfectly
| legitimate to inform legacy presences of the same. And it's
| certainly in the better interests of the community.
|
| Going to other channels and advertising the same would be
| spammy.
|
| For an analogy - say I have a repo on github. And I decide
| to move it to gitlab. Would it be fair for me to update the
| readme on github to say that the repo is now being
| maintained at gitlab?
|
| And would it be fair for github to take control of the repo
| so they can pretend it hasn't?
| math-dev wrote:
| I like your analogy to GitHub, and can appreciate /
| change my original viewpoint as a result to the channels
| aren't the property of FN, so they don't have a right on
| what to do with them
| macksd wrote:
| I disagree with this. Take the Apache Software Foundation,
| for instance. One of their mantras is "community over
| code". I love to keep unnecessary drama, ulterior motives
| and contention out of technical open-source projects, and
| the emphasis on healthy communication, decision making
| processes and consensus over purely technical concerns is
| nice. But let's imagine someone started a thread on an
| Apache mailing list and in good faith asked "would the
| community be better served by changing our infrastructure
| and governance?"
|
| If members of the Apache board came in and shut that down,
| I would take that as a clear signal that they valued their
| own brand / power / whatever over the community. It would
| be understandable from a human nature, but it would destroy
| a lot of the respect I have for them and their principles.
| gerikson wrote:
| It seems that many channels that just had "libera" in their
| topic got nuked (the one I was in certainly did). Even if
| it was in the form of "we're discussing a move, nothing's
| decided yet".
| throwaway525142 wrote:
| > If a channel is actively posting to migrate to another
| network, that isn't appropriate. It's like all facebook
| groups posting "Hey lets move to twitter now".
|
| I feel like only a non-open networks would forbid
| advertising that the project moved to another place.
|
| But completely unrelated to that, it seems that Freenode
| took control of communities that haven't moved to
| libera.chat: Allegro (https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/st
| atus/139750445711463629...), Elixir
| (https://twitter.com/AmNicd/status/1397448111291879424).
| munro wrote:
| Interesting policy update from diffing the police page on
| Arvive.org:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20210513234811/202105230634...
|
| > For abandoned project channels that have moved or are no longer
| available to the public, you may request the ownership of the
| channel be transferred to you. Please make said requests in the
| #freenode IRC channel.
| debacle wrote:
| As an outside observer, I really didn't believe that IRC could
| cause this level of drama.
| rubin55 wrote:
| Many rooms have 500+ people in them. Heck, I think FreeNode was
| ~70000 peeps? I'm pretty sure almost all of them are pretty
| pissed off about the developments of today in particular. I was
| in wait-and-see mode yesterday. From the 44 channels I was in,
| about 20 moved to Libera and the others seemed to have the
| intention to stay on FreeNode. Today all of those channels
| packed up shop. I took a look in #freenode-services and I can't
| blame them either.
|
| Yesterday I would have stayed on FreeNode. Today, fuck it. OFTC
| and Libera for me.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| There's the smoking guns if you were on the fence about who is in
| the right on all this.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's actually great that he still comes on HN. It gives people he
| screwed a chance to vent a little.
| mariuolo wrote:
| I think rasengan's actions are making everyone's decisions very
| easy.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| "WTF is going on with FreeNode?"
|
| From my read it looks like Culture War.
|
| > Andrew was repeatedly asked in the "policy discussion channel"
| whether slurs, racism and transphobia are now permitted on
| Freenode. No answer has been forthcoming.
|
| The new owner either will not answer, or will not take a side, in
| the Culture War, so a bunch of users are leaving.
| kbelder wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that a business will go out on a
| limb to take over an open network, with the plan to expand it
| and commercialize it, while also thinking "let's make it more
| like 8chan".
| eminence32 wrote:
| I was willing to idle on freenode to help any users who came into
| our channel looking for help. But freenode has forcibly set the
| channel to secret, invite only, and moderated.
|
| If they want people to use their network, they're not acting like
| it.
| techrat wrote:
| They also nuked private channels that were being used for
| Wikimedia and Wikipedia's editor communications.
|
| This is less about enforcing policy and more about angry, petty
| grievances.
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| For anyone wondering what to do now:
|
| https://libera.chat/
|
| This network is run by the old staff that Andrew evicted from
| freenode last week. Libera cares about foss and will help you
| transition your project.
|
| from last week: https://kline.sh/
| beprogrammed wrote:
| The worst part of this debacle is now I have to abandon PIA. I
| had no idea this was that guy.
| mst wrote:
| PIA was sold in 2019 and have explicitly said they have nothing
| to do with him anymore and have no idea wtf he's thinking.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| PIA is an independent operation from Andrew Lee now?
| Interesting.
| xbar wrote:
| A short-cycled policy update to https://freenode.net/policies and
| a blog post espousing love and FOSS by Lee
| https://freenode.net/news/for-foss ("President freenode limited")
| feels hollow and vindictive.
|
| Goodbye, whatever open culture remained in Freenode.
| ilaksh wrote:
| They just moved to a different domain name.
| kemayo wrote:
| The tone of that blog post is a bit unhinged. Taking a break to
| talk about cancel culture, and the definitely-real hundreds of
| complaints Lee has received about it...
| asddubs wrote:
| as well as the "tens of thousands of messages of love and
| support we have received". So at least 20,000 people took the
| time to write a message of support for an irc network that
| has 60k members, by their own count
| tremon wrote:
| It could have just been one spambot, they don't say from
| how many users the messages came.
| asddubs wrote:
| we've received tens of thousands of messages of support.
| thanks, gary!
| 1propionyl wrote:
| If you think that's unhinged...
|
| https://www.irc.com/lets-take-irc-further
| lioeters wrote:
| > I will do unto others as I would like done to myself.
|
| Too bad he didn't follow through on this statement.
| arkitaip wrote:
| It's sad that he destroyed the very thing he cherished
| above everything else. That is, if he is telling the truth.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| I do believe he was truthful about his intentions. But
| his ego has gotten in the way of realizing that his
| approach is wrong, and is causing harm.
| jeltz wrote:
| I suspect that he is. It is pretty sad to see delusional
| people like this.
| swe_guy wrote:
| Watching this from ##ob-freenode-policy-feedback on Libera, it
| relays the drama channel from freenode.
|
| This is just an unbelievable move. Absolutely nuking the network
| for a completely nonsense reason. Reverse PR moves.
| xena wrote:
| I was inspired to write my thoughts about this:
| https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26
| okoslaatoo wrote:
| this has something to do with it
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...
| nednar wrote:
| Not affiliated with either side, but I saw that nobody mentioned
| the blog post by freenode about this topic yet:
| https://freenode.net/news/for-foss
|
| Sadly, it doesn't mention what they actually changed in their
| policies or why. Just that in general they seem to feel tricked
| by OTHER parties kicking people from freenode channels for NOT
| going to Libera.
|
| My take: Instead of participating in the flame war, the best
| approach may just be to help both sides keep a voice, document
| what happens, support reasonable decisions. As long as both sides
| block and kick users there are no reasonable decisions to be
| made. Personally, I probably won't even open either chat tool
| until things calmed down.
|
| As a side note, I also want to remember the time when Matrix was
| trying to get users by building interfaces to other chat
| platforms and mirroring the communication in both platforms. That
| sounds like a reasonable decision to me.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The new "Freenode" has little to no credibility and that post
| comes off as pure propaganda. Look at how the new "Freenode"
| has behaved and it is very clear...
|
| Official project channels should be able to ban users and move
| elsewhere. Freenode is welcome make new community channels on
| those topics. Trying to prevent or hinder official channels
| from moving is absolutely not acceptable behavior.
| tapland wrote:
| This has been going on for some time.
|
| Snoonet was the first (attempted?) victim with mods being hired
| by Private Internet Access and London Media Group (Lee's founded
| companies) and some weird corporate IRC 2.0 plans.
|
| Sad to see they got freenode now =/ But yeah moving to Snoonet
| and mentioning that in topic was not a ToS violation back in the
| day.
| duckfang wrote:
| Mentioning Libera.chat was a ToS violation as of last night.
| The IRCOP bots that swept doing the de-op, de-voice, de-ban,
| rename-topic, rename room was the initial pass.
|
| Then they updated their website to say that.
| sicco wrote:
| Given the amount of backlash this whole debacle has in the
| community, couldn't a crowdfunding to cover legal costs be
| successful enough to start a lawsuit? AFAIK funding is the main
| reason why a lawsuit isn't happening
| (https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461).
|
| Everyone should still move to Libera, but a lawsuit might bring
| some justice.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| RIP IRC. The destructive splintering has already sent too many of
| what little was left to Discord, Slack, and Matrix.
| jgb1984 wrote:
| Until now my weechat was connected to freenode and libera, but
| this simplifies it for me: freenode is out. I recommend anyone to
| do the same and switch fully to libera: it's best for the IRC
| community if freenode dies a swift death.
| medstrom wrote:
| I did the same after you said this.
| monkin wrote:
| Oh, #vim was also taken and closed. :O
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Lets be serious. Libera is a direct competitor for the userbase
| of Freenode. If you went on to some message board and posted hey
| come to my message board we're over there. Even though the
| message board makes no profit, that is still someone's project
| and they will not take kindy to taking their userbase and will
| delete the message. Expecting otherwise is just acting entitled.
|
| Honestly, the entire freenode nonsense is just a bunch of people
| acting super entitled over an IRC network they don't pay for and
| is basically their hobby. From what I can tell it basically all
| came down to the fact the staffers got pissed they couldn't
| control the domains which they didn't pay for. The fact they
| expect someone who bought the domains just to give the domains to
| them is nothing but entitlement.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If you went on to some message board and posted hey come to
| my message board we're over there. Even though the message
| board makes no profit, that is still someone's project and they
| will not take kindy to taking their userbase and will delete
| the message.
|
| Let's not pretend that this is normal. I can freely mention
| https://lobste.rs on HN and my comment is not going to be
| deleted or flagged even though lobsters is a directly competing
| message board, as long as my mention is relevant to the
| discussion. This was a case of channels being taken over for
| merely mentioning liberachat as something they might care about
| in the future, not even trying to actively direct users away
| from Freenode.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Come on, we both know those topics mentioning libera.chat
| were "Go to Libera.chat instead! Our channel is now there.
| Details are..."
|
| If you posted hundreds of messages on this site saying go to
| lobste.rs then you would get banned. If you posted one I
| doubt anything happen because that is fair. But lets also add
| in the fact that libera.chat went around bad mouthing the
| hell out of freenode and are now crying that freenode won't
| let them advertise their new network on their network.
| larvaetron wrote:
| > even though lobsters is a directly competing message board
|
| lobste.rs is invite only, so not exactly an apples to apples
| comparison.
| Lazare wrote:
| It's pretty easy to get an invite.
| tyingq wrote:
| The history of IRC, though, is full of network fork/splits when
| the network owner goes heavy-handed.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| > Expecting otherwise is just acting entitled.
|
| As is the idea that you can just buy users.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I'm 100% with you. What's Freenode supposed to do, let all
| their channels become pointers to some other server run by a
| hostile group who's actively defaming them?
|
| The outrage mob only wants to be outraged, they're incapable of
| considering both sides.
| alias_neo wrote:
| You missed the part where all of the channels who moved were
| given reason to move.
|
| Nobody makes like a tree and leaves unless they're just
| pissed off with the way things are now. People don't enjoy
| making work for themselves.
|
| So no, Leenode wasn't meant to let their channels become
| pointers, they should have not taken several actions which
| caused Libera to need to exist in the first place.
|
| The great thing is, the visitors are what make the
| communities on IRC, so if people want to move server, they
| just do, there's no need to even talk about it other than to
| inform visitors that Leenode is actively trying to prevent
| communities from notifying their users that they've left for
| greener pastures.
|
| I don't really care to get involved with the whole debacle,
| I'm just someone who goes to odd communities for specific
| subjects from time to time. Other than dropping my account on
| Leenode and recreating it on Libera, I'll just update my
| server URL and carry on with my life.
| cmsj wrote:
| Freenode could have reached out to channel founders and asked
| us to leave the channels open, and allowed us to indicate
| that they are now unofficial channels. Instead they just
| revoked our access to them and overwrote the channel topics.
|
| Beyond that, yes, they are supposed to let projects decide
| where they want to be.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Freenode could have done things differently, 'channel
| founders' (as if that denotes some kind of status) could
| have done things differently.
|
| Seems like one side provoked a fight, the other side
| responded, and now the initiators of the fight are calling
| foul.
| cmsj wrote:
| What should I have done differently?
|
| I chose to move the official IRC channel for my FOSS
| project to a different server, so I registered the new
| channel on the new server, and updated the topic in the
| old channel to say it was no longer the official channel
| and where the new one is.
|
| There's nothing provocative about that.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Your actions seem reasonable (though, I question the
| motives), and Freenode's actions seem reasonable.
|
| The only issue is people are upset that Freenode
| responded to their actions. If you're leaving Freenode,
| then leave, don't expect them to keep your empty channel
| with a pointer elsewhere intact.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > don't expect them to keep your empty channel with a
| pointer elsewhere intact.
|
| ...except that has been the written policy. And then
| _after_ channels were forcible taken over, they changed
| the policy to remove any mention of this.
| linuxftw wrote:
| "The policy!" As if it's some holy relic to be revered.
| Things changed, the policy changed. Where is the sense of
| entitlement coming from?
| daenney wrote:
| They could've reached out to channel owners, informed
| them of the policy (change/reinterpretation) or reminded
| them of it, and ask that they change the topic. Set a
| clear expectation, like 48hrs to resolve it, and then
| act. They could've even used a server wide notice for it.
| A little courtesy goes a long way and would've helped
| build up a bit of trust in the new staff.
|
| None of that happened. Whether they believe they were in
| the right or not doesn't matter at this point. Trust in
| the new team was already low. Based on what we know, this
| also wasn't staff action, but just Lee. These actions
| also further cement the stories ex-staff has told, which
| only serves to damage trust in the new team further. What
| little trust there might have been is now gone and it
| seems to have galvanised those who remained to also
| leave. Which in itself completely defeats having
| ownership of the network.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Yeah, and the 'staff' that quit could have not quit and
| tried to resolve things amicably.
|
| > None of that happened
|
| You don't know that, you assume that.
|
| > Whether they believe they were in the right or not
| doesn't matter at this point.
|
| On what planet? I think the actions were reasonable given
| the circumstance. Taking a position of outrage because
| some perceived red-tape wasn't followed, that's
| unreasonable.
|
| Nobody suffered any real harm. None of this is a huge
| deal, but people want to play victim.
| daenney wrote:
| > You don't know that, you assume that.
|
| I don't have to assume that at all. We've got hundreds of
| accounts of open source maintainers and communities of
| what happened. Their channels were taken over for
| mentioning Libera in the topic. No warning was given or
| possibility for redress before the takeover would happen.
|
| If that didn't happen like they said, then congrats
| you've discovered a massive conspiracy there. But then
| again, it should be trivial for anyone including the new
| staff to provide logs to the contrary.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > Nobody suffered any real harm. None of this is a huge
| deal, but people want to play victim.
|
| Do you honestly think that all the maintainers of 250+
| open source projects all "want to play victim"? _Really?_
|
| You need to come to terms with "I was both in my right to
| and had reasons to do what I did" does not mean everyone
| has to be a-ok with it and play along to accomodate your
| decisions. What Lee did was monumentally stupid and
| short-sighted from the perspective of anyone caring about
| a project-related community they maintain on IRC. _Why_
| should they keep using freenode? Because nobody suffered
| any real harm _yet_ (fwiw, you don 't know that, you
| assume that!)?
|
| Google could tomorrow bounce all emails to free gmail
| accounts that do not come from gmail and demand payment
| for letting them through. They would be fully in their
| right. It might sound like a great idea for making some $
| numbers go up this month. People would not be "outraged"
| because Google stopped doing something for free that they
| had no obligation to do. People would be "outraged"
| (read: baffled, and scrambling to cut the service out of
| their lives) because it would be an incredibly braindead
| move.
| macintux wrote:
| > ...don't expect them to keep your empty channel with a
| pointer elsewhere intact.
|
| That's how IRC has always worked, and that's how open
| communities in general work.
|
| The marginal cost to Freenode is effectively zero, and
| the benefit is that users are not cast adrift without
| warning.
|
| Clearly Freenode is no longer an open platform.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Except the other side "responded" against bystanders, not
| the instigators. If I was a bystander, I would leave.
| gowld wrote:
| The fight was started when Andrew Lee hijacked Freenode.
| croon wrote:
| I come from a time when IRC servers (inside each network,
| Freenode being one) were usually sponsored by universities,
| ISPs, foundations, etc. This mindset of "competitors" and
| business cost of hosting some IRC chatter as if it's on a
| 2021 datacenter scale is quite frankly absurd.
|
| I doubt there are more IRC users now than in 1997, and in
| 1997 no one would care if an efnet channel linked to a dalnet
| channel.
|
| My $0.02.
| cmsj wrote:
| You must be new to IRC - channels moving servers is not at all
| new. It's pretty unusual for server admins to actively resist
| it though.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I left IRC almost a decade ago. Channels moving servers
| honestly, rarely happened in my day. The networks were all
| pretty much set up. You may get smaller communities changing
| from smaller networks but that was it and that was generally
| a friendly affair if it wasn't the channel was forced closed
| by the network admins.
|
| Most of the channels moving have never moved before. And
| those that did, did 10-20 years ago. It is a rare event.
| cmsj wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I've been on IRC since the 90s and a number of channels
| I've been part of in that time, have renamed, fractured
| into multiple channels, moved to other public servers,
| moved to private servers, etc, etc.
|
| This is the first time I've encountered IRCops trying to
| stop it from happening.
| daenney wrote:
| Staffers might not have paid for the domains, but most of them
| have spent huge amounts of their time managing the network and
| turning it into what it was.
|
| To pretend this is a bunch of staffers having a temper tantrum
| related to ownership of the Freenode domain name feels very
| disingenuous, and a rather odd conclusion to come to based on
| the events to far.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| This is 100% a bunch of middle-class privileged people having
| a massive temper tantrum. They literally went around saying,
| "Assume Freenode is under the control of a malicious actor"
| just because they wanted to get other people to help out.
|
| If you read both sides of the story, you can decide where the
| middle ground is. The staffers have a right to decide they
| want to split off and do their own thing. But going around
| saying the data is unsafe and there are malicious actors at
| play seems nothing but a grown-up having a temper tantrum.
| Crying about a sponsor having a logo on the website is beyond
| words.
| imtringued wrote:
| They are just volunteers, not employees. They can always
| quit and that is not a temper tantrum.
| hvdijk wrote:
| Maybe that was the wrong way to phrase it, maybe we
| shouldn't assume Freenode is under the control of a
| malicious actor as there's no need to question rasengan's
| intentions. What it boils down to is that his actions now
| are indistinguishable from malice, intentions aside, and so
| we should react accordingly.
| lolinder wrote:
| The fact that the new ownership perceives Libera as a
| "competitor" (your word) is exactly why the new ownership
| should be considered a malicious actor. That is an attitude
| belonging not to a FOSS network but to a business that is
| planning to monetize its userbase, all the while trying to
| reassure everyone that their communities are safe.
| Lazare wrote:
| ...but Freenode is now behaving maliciously, banning people
| without good cause, and interfering with tools that open
| source projects use to coordinate and to provide support
| for users.
|
| Yes, I know, "Freenode is under the control of a malicious
| actor" is really melodramatic and honestly sounds a bit
| unreal, but it also seems to be an accurate statement of
| facts. Reality is not required to adhere to your
| understanding of what makes the best narrative.
|
| > If you read both sides of the story, you can decide where
| the middle ground is.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
|
| I have read both sides of the story, and I have formed an
| estimation of which side is telling the truth and is in the
| right, yes. And it's not Lee.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > ...but Freenode is now behaving maliciously, banning
| people without good cause, and interfering with tools
| that open source projects use to coordinate and to
| provide support for users.
|
| > Yes, I know, "Freenode is under the control of a
| malicious actor" is really melodramatic and honestly
| sounds a bit unreal, but it also seems to be an accurate
| statement of facts.
|
| I would disagree that denial of service is malicous. I
| would say that making that assertion is entitlement. You
| get what you pay for and if you pay nothing expect
| nothing. The funny thing here is all the people acting so
| entitled are the same people crying about people acting
| entitled about their open source projects.
|
| > I have read both sides of the story, and I have formed
| an estimation of which side is telling the truth and is
| in the right, yes. And it's not Lee.
|
| I think both are telling the truth, it's just they're
| telling their side. This isn't a fallacy it is just how
| telling stories works. People don't tell a story in which
| they look bad. They smooth over that bit.
|
| Your use of Argument to moderation is incorrect since
| this is not the truth between two positions, it's the
| truth of a story.
|
| If you're going by who has the moral high ground, I would
| say the people fleeing Freenode are right. it's their
| hobby, their free time and if they would rather spend it
| on a new network that is their right. But if you're
| talking about what really happened, I think everyone is
| telling the truth and you piece together things and what
| I pieced together mainly from the staffer's side of the
| story is they're entitled adultchildren throwing a hissy
| fit because they didn't get there way. It was clear they
| were extragrating. The bit that really glued it all
| together was the tidbit in Lee's story about them asking
| for the domains and then the troubles all started. Hence
| this is a hissy fit by adultchildren.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| This is a gross misrepresentation of what is taking place. I
| don't want to pick sides in the current chaos, but it's not
| "paid for the domain", it is "managed to get the domain
| transferred to them". I do not believe any of the current
| libera staff would object to paying the few dollars/year for
| the domain registration (or even the DNS infrastructure).
|
| There is also something called "being decent". For a network
| that is (was) essentially a chat network for tons of FOSS
| projects, taking over the channels because people wanted to
| have a smooth transition from one network to another is not
| decent. This is a shitshow, especially for this kind of
| infrastructure.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > but it's not "paid for the domain", it is "managed to get
| the domain transferred to them
|
| It was said, I believe, by multiple of the people who quit to
| create their new network that the domains were sold to Lee by
| someone who was given leadership of the group. This means
| they domains were paid for. I'm sure they wouldn't mind the
| few dollars for renewal but a domain like freenode probably
| got sold for a few thousand.
|
| > There is also something called "being decent". For a
| network that is (was) essentially a chat network for tons of
| FOSS projects, taking over the channels because people wanted
| to have a smooth transition from one network to another is
| not decent.
|
| I think it's not decent to expect that a group that has been
| bad mouthed repeatedly support the smooth transition for the
| new network. That honestly, the only part I have trouble
| with. I think there is a bunch of entitlement but if it
| wasn't for everyone being pissy that Freenode isn't just
| rolling over is just disgusting in my opinion. Reminds me of
| bullies at school who would say and do whatever they want to
| you but when you hit back you're the villian.
|
| > This is a shitshow, especially for this kind of
| infrastructure.
|
| To be fair, it's been a shit show from the start. Seriously,
| how many I quit letters were flooded on to this paltform and
| others like it? The one announcement was all that was needed.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| > I think there is a bunch of entitlement but if it wasn't
| for everyone being pissy that Freenode isn't just rolling
| over is just disgusting in my opinion.
|
| It certainly nudged everyone still undecided to move to
| other networks. And it is not OK to suddenly change the
| terms on which channels are managed, freenode was chosen by
| the projects on its merits (history, being a haven for all
| the other projects, its staff, spam handling, and most of
| all trustworthiness), and if that changes and the only
| reason you cannot move is because there is now a new policy
| telling that you can't do a graceful move, it is bad.
|
| This is not VC-funded startups competing for the spot on
| "best smart hairdryer of the week" and using shady
| practices to get the audience, this is a volunteer-run open
| network supposed to cater for the FOSS space, and
| aggressive lock-in is generally not what is expected here.
|
| (heck, I have seen plenty of projects adding "this has
| moved to gitter/matrix/discourse/etc" in the topic during
| 15 years I have been on it, without seeing any action
| taken)
| lolc wrote:
| Ok, let's look at Freenode's users as customers. They would not
| see it that way, but when you choose that perspective, consider
| how a business should act: If customers are leaving, do not
| kick them in the butt. Other patrons will notice your lack of
| grace. (Edit: With customers I mean projects that maintain a
| channel.)
|
| I've so far been bemused by this drama I'm not involved in. Now
| I can just say that Freenode is burned even if they manage to
| wrangle that guy from the controls.
| cmsj wrote:
| Yup. I started off being mildly dismayed by the drama, but it
| didn't feel like it needed to affect me or my channels....
|
| ... now I am convinced I want nothing to do with freenode
| anymore.
| tvaughan wrote:
| I have a couple of repos on GitHub that point to their new home
| on GitLab. Would it be ok if GitHub took over these projects
| for the same reason?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Yes. And to think otherwise is acting entitled. GitHub is a
| for-profit company providing you services for free. It is
| outrageous to think that they must keep your repository up
| that is advertising a competitor. The entitlement from the
| tech scene honestly just stinks.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Providing free services doesn't give someone the right to
| be an asshole when users want to leave.
|
| It doesn't give them the right to suddenly seize a
| channel/repo that someone has put a lot of work into
| building up and then not take flak about it.
|
| Sure, the motivation for profit & retention is there, but
| capitalism != morality.
| Lazare wrote:
| Github has every right to do that (subject to the term of
| their user service agreements and applicable local laws,
| etc., of course).
|
| It'd also cause the utter destruction of their current
| business model. They do NOT do this, because they recognise
| it is utterly incompatible with their goal of being a
| trusted hub for open source collaboration, which in turn is
| a key step in their larger strategy of achieving fat
| profits and market dominance.
|
| > GitHub is a for-profit company
|
| Yes, and they want to make a profit, so they don't do dumb
| stuff that, to pick a random example, a rich guy funding a
| small volunteer organisation as a hobby might feel
| comfortable doing.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| At this point open source is not a major part of their
| business model. Open source doesn't make you money.
| Enterprise makes you money. And developers don't make
| purchasing choices at enterprise, there is an entire
| department for that.
|
| Now if you want to put it into context, if 75% of the git
| repos redirected you to GitLab, they would make that
| choice. This isn't 1 or 20 channels, if it wasn't they
| wouldn't be doing it would they? So lets be serious if
| this was happening on the percentage scales it is
| happening with freenode -> libre. GitHub 100% would do
| it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I get why you think this. But that's not how it works.
|
| Github is in an implied contract with its users - it
| provides free infrastructure for people to store their git
| repos, and in return it is considered the most prominent
| place to store git repos. Part of that contract is that
| what you store on Github belongs to you, not Github.
|
| If it breaks this contract, then it loses that prominence,
| and the paid accounts go away with that, too. The entire
| business model relies on Github being the place everyone
| goes to, and that is based on this implied contract.
| Breaking the contract breaks the business model.
|
| Same with Freenode. The communities do not belong to
| Freenode, despite being hosted there. If Freenode breaks
| this implied contract, then it loses all legitimacy and the
| communities will leave (as we're seeing happen).
| imtringued wrote:
| Github has the right to kick out people but people also
| have the right to leave and they will.
| gowld wrote:
| Is anyone tracking the migration from Freenode/Leenode to Libera?
|
| The numbers must be amazing to see.
| erk__ wrote:
| The best tracker is probably
| https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
| xena wrote:
| Here's the graph out of my prometheus:
| https://i.imgur.com/iUkkqAK.png
| globular-toast wrote:
| I already disconnected from Freenode since receiving a large
| amount of spam a few days ago. I've been idling in #gentoo on
| libera.chat as soon as it was announced.
|
| It saddens me to disconnect from Freenode after all these years.
| But, ultimately, it's just a name. The spirit will live on.
| Although it might be weakened.
| beermonster wrote:
| If everyone jumps ship it will be the same community in all but
| name. I was going to wait until the weekend to jump, but all
| these stories hitting HN have made me get my arse in gear :)
| techrat wrote:
| This submission is not a dupe, however, there is more discussion
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285774
|
| and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285802
| kortex wrote:
| For anyone out of the loop, "Liberia Chat" has nothing to do with
| Liberia (the country).
|
| Also, I found it amusing when I typed "freenode" into the search
| bar, "freenode drama" was the first suggested phrase.
|
| https://libera.chat/
| blendergeek wrote:
| > For anyone out of the loop, "Liberia Chat" has nothing to do
| with Liberia (the country).
|
| Please note: The new chat system is _Libera_ Chat, not Liberia
| Chat.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Liberia Chat" or "Libera Chat" ? :-)
| raverbashing wrote:
| Reality comes at you fast.
|
| Good that the "freenode" maintainers are displaying their
| intentions upfront and that the projects are moving quickly.
| rasengan wrote:
| This should have been communicated better and for that I
| apologize. We published a draft policy update and worked with the
| community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the
| community's wishes.
|
| The policy was updated today to make clear that inappropriate
| advertising was unacceptable. As many of these channels were
| simply wildly unmoderated and closed, yet by protocol standards,
| "open" under a primary (#) namespace while in "official
| capacity", we felt it was best to redirect users to an unofficial
| off-topic (##) namespace.
|
| I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is entirely
| my fault, and I take all the blame for that.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| > to understand the community's wishes.
|
| I think that "stop treating an old free software community
| shared by hundreds of other people like a property" would be a
| good start at understanding the community wishes. Right now, it
| seems to me that you're treating Freenode with a wrecking ball
| as a part of a demolition squad, and only stop to say "sorry
| about the new policies!" now and then before continuing to
| destroy it.
|
| The things that are being implemented now aren't the
| community's wishes, they are your wishes, and they are hostile
| to the community that once inhabited Freenode and its channels.
| donatzsky wrote:
| Considering how much of this mess is supposedly due to "poor"
| communication, don't you think it's high time to start working
| on that aspect?
|
| While I might have given you the benefit of the doubt before,
| the long list of heavy-handed, "poorly communicated" actions,
| make you look more and more like an inept, authoritarian jerk.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Yeah, you should have. I was on your side before you pulled
| this bullshit.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| > We published a draft policy update and worked with the
| community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the
| community's wishes.
|
| Who specifically are the "we" who published a draft policy
| update? As in, which people voted on it, and what were the
| votes?
|
| Similarly, which people made the decision that advertising
| another network was "inappropriate advertising"?
|
| Finally, having listened to the feedback from the Freenode
| community in the channel you made to do so, what have you heard
| from it, and what changes will you be implementing as a result?
|
| Given that Freenode is a community that had, at least until
| recently, successfully self-governed for years, this is just in
| the interest of transparency, so we can each make a fact-based
| judgement about whether or not the policy changes were
| implemented in the manner best for the Freenode community, of
| which you are currently one member.
| xenihn wrote:
| Disclaimer: I haven't used IRC regularly in years, and I was
| not following the freenode drama.
|
| What you've done here is going to result in some variation of
| the Streisand effect. People who had no opinion on this or were
| simply unaware are now going to be turned against you. This was
| an incredibly bad move.
| raydiak wrote:
| You want to take the blame for something? _Your_ selfishness
| and greed have shattered a beloved cornerstone of the FOSS
| community, leaving the people who created, nurtured, and
| provided for it since you were a schoolchild to pick up the
| pieces. This is not the fault of the former staff who have been
| steadfast for well over two decades, nor the fault of the
| relocating projects. This is your own mess. Do you really think
| people are persuaded by the blatantly transparent
| disinformation campaign we 've been watching you traipse around
| the internet like a used car salesman with a "special deal just
| for you"? Your twisted self-serving half-truths hold no sway in
| the face of the numerous publicly available logs. Take the
| blame for the real issue; your comment is a specious facade of
| a personality. If you cared one bit about the cooperative
| community of creators you just trampled and steamrolled with an
| arsenal of lawyers that volunteers can't afford to match, you
| wouldn't have brought us to this point. You would have realized
| that freenode was a precious thing more important than your own
| ego and greed. Instead, your actions have spoken undeniably to
| the extreme contrary.
|
| And now you do everything in your power to stymie the peaceful
| relocation of legitimate project communities simply trying to
| provide forwarding information in their topics during the
| transitional phase away from the epic disaster you created,
| while simultaneously slandering all of your victims? Did you
| put all those millions up your nose, or what? Hope you saved
| enough for some _really_ good security; you just made enemies
| of an enormous number of the most relentlessly independent
| intellects in the modern world. You 've furthermore sealed your
| own fate on a personal level: the only people who will have
| anything to do with you after this are the puppets mindless
| enough to believe your lies, and the leeches after your money
| and power. A cold, bleak existence indeed, but you've earned
| it.
| kadoban wrote:
| You killed a good thing for no reason. Enjoy your empty shell,
| I hope it gives you all the comfort you deserve.
| jmvalin wrote:
| > This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that.
|
| You shouldn't be blaming yourself, it was the best thing to do.
| Some people may have been confused over who the "good guys"
| were in this mess. By taking over all these channels you made
| everything perfectly clear. No amount of arguing could have
| made things clearer than your actions.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There is no disconnect or misunderstanding that I see. There is
| absolutely no way this could have been communicated that would
| have resulted in it being taken any better.
|
| Freenode spent over 2 decades as a mostly open platform for
| tech and other communities where you could be kick banned for
| being a nazi or a spammer but where your community wouldn't be
| subject to interference solely to serve anyone's commercial
| interests. There was never any concept that it was disallowed
| to discuss the competition and if it had been expressed it
| would have been wildly unacceptable.
|
| After you sprung it on people it remains wildly unacceptable
| and its the moment when you absolutely jumped the shark. If by
| next year you are left with ashes and dreams and you want to
| pick a moment where this became inevitable its this moment when
| you decided you could stop people from switching to Libera by
| censoring freenode. If you had a time machine there is no notes
| you could offer to your prior self save STOP!
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Imagine using PrivateInternetAccess and trusting this guy with
| your logs.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| If anything removed any doubt about whether we should have
| moved to libera, this is it. There is no going back now, you've
| erased any trust that I or any project members had for
| "freenode".
|
| Our channel was still moderated by all of our original project
| staff while recommending other members move.
|
| To say that "many of these channels were simply wildly
| unmoderated and closed" to justify an indiscriminate automated
| action is ridiculous.
|
| Communication wouldn't have saved you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is
| entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that._
|
| (Disclaimer: I have no stake in this drama, though I spent a
| chunk of my life chatting on Freenode.)
|
| Here are some facts: through both your actions and the reaction
| of the volunteer staff, you have a _huge_ PR problem. The kind
| of people that use IRC, that form your target audience, see you
| as the bad guys now. You will continue to receive strong
| pushback on anything you do with Freenode.
|
| Since you're reaching out and apologizing, I'm going to
| tentatively assume that the issue isn't as black-and-white. I
| have no stake in this, and I know from experience that just
| because someone gets outraged, doesn't mean they're right. So,
| if you _actually care_ about the community and the values it
| represented, stop doing anything you 're doing and start
| communicating _openly and honestly_. If you want to be seen as
| the good guy, you need to start acting like one.
|
| What that means is:
|
| - Address all the accusations raised against you by the
| volunteer staff that recently resigned. No corporate bullshit,
| no PR filtering, just like one technologist to another.
|
| - Give proper and detailed explanation for the actions you've
| taken. What you wrote here is an acceptable first paragraph.
| What you need is something like a post-issue analysis[0].
| Describe what you wanted to do and why, step by step. Then,
| what actually happened. List the mistakes, lessons you're
| taking from them, and concrete steps to prevent that from
| happening again.
|
| - Give proper and detailed explanation for your future plans.
| IRC isn't a company, and communities are not made of employees
| and subcontractors. If you want to keep people around and have
| them trust you, you have to communicate openly, in advance,
| give people chance to voice feedback (even if you aren't going
| to act on it). You can't count on network effects, because IRC
| is already such a pain in the butt that half of the people on
| it are secretly looking for ways to ditch it. That's why the
| other half is so afraid of this drama - killing Freenode
| communities is an existential threat to continued use of IRC
| _in general_.
|
| - You're a for-profit operation that took over a non-profit
| one. You need to be _very clear_ and _very detailed_ about
| outlining how you want to keep the profit interest and
| community interest separate, and actually follow through on
| what you promise.
|
| - Want to score some points with the people? Put some resources
| into improving IRC as a protocol and set of technologies. Note
| that you're starting from position of "bad guy", so whatever
| you do, it cannot have a single string attached, lest people
| will (rightfully) call it out as "embrace, extend, extinguish".
|
| Regaining trust takes time. You have your work cut out for you.
|
| (And, if you actually _are_ a bad guy, then just be up front
| about it too. People will be able to see it anyway, and
| continuing the charade only wastes time of everyone involved.)
|
| EDIT:
|
| Want to do a quick thing to show some good will? Fix [1]. Give
| them control of their channel back, and let them finish their
| migration.
|
| --
|
| [0] - See e.g. https://github.blog/2020-03-26-february-service-
| disruptions-... for the level of detail I'm talking about.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287039
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > You can't count on network effects, because IRC is already
| such a pain in the butt that half of the people on it are
| secretly looking for ways to ditch it.
|
| How so? I really like IRC for what it is. It's much quicker
| and higher-density than Matrix. Try opening a hundred
| channels in Element and see if you can still stay on top of
| what's going on :)
| mjg59 wrote:
| > worked with the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to
| understand the community's wishes.
|
| The community's wishes were largely not in favour of this
| change, and your last comment on this in #freenode-policy-
| feedback was that you were going to hold off on these changes.
| fapjacks wrote:
| I've been trying hard to keep people from making rash decisions
| about moving, since I have read enough to know that there is
| some amount of duplicity on both sides of this split, and we
| were playing a waiting game for the truth to come out and help
| us make a more informed decision. I do not support morality
| police, and all we had to do was wait out the momentum. There
| was some censorship on libera, but what you have done here has
| made all of my efforts to aid Freenode totally indefensible.
| You have made a grevious strategic error.
| [deleted]
| fapjacks wrote:
| I am genuinely curious: Was this at least partially in response
| to the bots over the weekend spamming "JOIN #LIBERIA ON
| LIBERIA.CHAT"? Because that probably didn't come from libera
| staff or even from the libera network, for that matter.
| wut42 wrote:
| No. It's a response to people trying to leave. The spam bots
| wave were probably done by the same people doing that for
| ages (the pedo spam and so on).
| fapjacks wrote:
| You can't answer that question any more than I can. This is
| a question for Andrew Lee.
| grayhatter wrote:
| You felt it was best? Did you stop to consider or talk with any
| other channel ops? Did you consider warning channels? Did you
| consider talking to ops? Did you consider any options that
| doesn't make you look like a butt hurt shit bag?
|
| I wasn't convinced leaving freenode would be a good idea, i
| didn't want to fracture the community. But you've convinced me
| freenode is an enemy of it's users. I'll miss it, but I wont
| miss the user hostile dumpster fire you turn a once beloved
| network into.
|
| Thanks for nothing!
|
| > I am pleased to announce, the plan to destroy freenode has
| failed!
|
| Let me guess: you'll keep trying until you do finally kill it
| huh? Looks like you starting to win this war already!
| marcusramberg wrote:
| I think you should apologize for attempting to fracture and
| disrupt the choice of communication channels for 100s of open
| source projects instead. You are making life harder for
| maintainers, who volunteer their time to give people software
| and support for free. Please stop doing that.
| someone_else_ wrote:
| If you dream about decentralized IRC and the IRC Foundation the
| last thing you should do is to pick a fight against a new
| member of the IRC ecosystem.
|
| There is no inappropriate advertising in discussing or moving
| between alternative implementations in the decentralized world.
| You should embrace it and build on top of it, as Fediverse
| does. You should build bridges, build common policies, setup
| possibilities for easy migration between servers, come up with
| the agreement on reuse of the same names for the same channels
| and so on.
|
| So far the only version of the "decentralization" we have seen
| is you trying to take full ownership of the network on your own
| terms fighting against competitors, and really not
| understanding what you are doing. This is not how it works.
|
| I am not sure if it is even possible to repair what you have
| broken now, but you can still try.
| jcranmer wrote:
| As far as I can tell, what was done was to shut down any
| channel that mentioned libera in its topic, whether or not the
| channel had decided to actually move to libera, in the process
| banning anyone lurking in the channel from the # or the ##
| channels.
|
| For the channel I was affected by, we hadn't decided whether or
| not to move. Indeed, the most recent conversation may itself
| have been on the freenode side. It's clear to me that there was
| absolutely no attempt made to determine whether or not the
| channel was "wildly unmoderated and closed." Indeed, I read the
| policy statement to find what clause we could have violated and
| couldn't find anything matched.
|
| If you were truly sorry, and you truly wanted to apologize,
| what you should do is restore the affected channels back to
| their original state immediately, and without waiting for
| anyone from those channels to come and grovel to you for
| restoration. However, it may be too late for people to believe
| your sincerity at this point. You have burned away so much
| trust with so few actions that it may be impossible to ever
| recover it.
|
| As I've put in other comments, we hadn't yet decided whether to
| move from freenode to libera yet. But your actions have made
| the decision for us.
| vesinisa wrote:
| How come you think you will have any community left? A chat
| network is entirely composed of and founded on the trust of its
| users. Trust that you have irreversibly severed.
|
| If there is no trust, there are no users. Where there are no
| users, there is no community. Without a community, there is no
| chat network - people just migrate elsewhere and there's no
| trick you can pull to stop it. You have destroyed freenode and
| there is no recourse.
|
| My question to you is: How did you actually think this would
| turn out? It all seems like a pointless exercise, and a person
| with half a brain should have seen this coming miles ahead.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| In fact, he was explicitly warned of this exact outcome by me
| and undoubtedly various others, back when we were still
| hoping that this could be solved with diplomacy. I think it's
| in the published logs, even.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| To repeat some advice I once got: Find something you're not
| good at, and don't do that.
|
| You're not good at operating an IRC network. So, don't do it.
| Do something else with your life.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| A copy from my other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286536
|
| Look, I've found Freenode to be insularly run for the longest
| time and was no fan of the old staff. That said, this is
| bullshit. Being frustrated about having topics call out a new
| network is frustrating, surely, but you should not seize
| channels with no notification from their owners and move them
| to the off-topic namespace. You've hurt so many more than just
| the staff. Grow up.
|
| Update: Think about the hours wasted in people's lives and
| important projects for nothing. Indeed it is your fault.
| na85 wrote:
| Maybe it's time to admit defeat and relinquish control of
| Freenode. I don't see how you can possibly salvage this.
| vehementi wrote:
| I've been away from IRC drama for so long. The idea of people
| fighting over IRC channels, trying to strongarm maintain
| ownership of them is just so cringeworthy now (nuking
| channels that advertise an alternative network, holy hell).
| Sad little king of a sad little hill.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's no different than any other similar drama, when
| ownership and control of a shared resource is contested.
|
| You may find IRC channel dramas silly, but I used to run a
| Hackerspace that (back then) communicated mostly via IRC,
| on Freenode, and I'd be _really pissed_ if I saw this
| happening then. Conversely, I find similar dramas over
| Instagram or Twitter handles silly, but that 's because I
| have no attachment to these services.
|
| And structurally, when a bunch of executives get into a
| dispute over company ownership, from the outside it often
| looks just as sad and silly as this IRC drama - except with
| more money at stake. But again, for some people on the
| inside, it's personal.
| kragen wrote:
| You'd be really pissed if you saw what happening?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This whole drama. Sudden mass resignation of volunteer
| stuff, corporate interest assuming direct control. We'd
| likely leave Freenode immediately, and... most likely
| migrate to one of SaaS chats. A lot of people in the
| community didn't like IRC and wanted to use something
| more mainstream. I was one of those arguing for staying
| on IRC, and the argument was much easier when status quo
| was a Freenode channel.
|
| I suspect quite a lot of IRC communities exist only
| because staying is easier than switching, and if you
| disrupt their channel, they'll end up fracturing and
| migrating to Discord or Telegram or some other corporate
| network.
| immibis wrote:
| FYI, there are other IRC networks than freenode. It
| appears hackint has "hackers" as a focus, including
| hackerspaces.
| q3k wrote:
| Also FYI for others reading this, hackint forbids any
| Matrix bridging [1], which might exclude some
| communities, as it did our hackerspace.
|
| [1] - https://hackint.org/archive#20181028_Matrix_Bridgin
| g_Sunset
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Admins/Operators taking over legitimate channels and
| removing migration references to allegedly capture and
| unknowing audience doesn't seem like a "ceingeworthy"
| issue. The popularity/coolness of the medium shouldn't
| matter.
| vehementi wrote:
| It seems my comment was misleading. I meant the admin
| trying to wrest/exert control, being jealous of
| "advertising" is pathetic.
|
| Certainly the damage that idiot has done to all those
| communities is real and bad.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| An empire of dirt.
| cmsj wrote:
| This happened to me. I maintain a pretty small macOS open source
| application and our IRC home was on freenode. I decided to move
| it to Libera, so I updated our website/docs accordingly and set
| the topic on the freenode channel to point at Libera.
|
| At ~5am UK time today both myself and the other channel founder
| were removed from the ACLs and the topic was set to one like that
| shown in the LWN article.
|
| I was able to get founder access back by asking nicely (through
| gritted teeth) on #freenode-services and now I am trying to work
| out how I indicate to users that they should look elsewhere,
| without freenode taking any further action.
| yesco wrote:
| Maybe just make a pastebin or something that explains the move
| and link users to that instead?
| Exuma wrote:
| Postgresql simply just links to their site which mentions
| Libera, and that community is enormous.
| p_l wrote:
| Put in a bot that responds to every user who has spoken for the
| first time in X timeframe with NOTICE about moving to new
| location?
| cmsj wrote:
| I don't have a source I can cite, but I'm hearing indirectly
| that freenode's current policy is that a bot doing something
| like that is not allowed :/
| p_l wrote:
| Any method of mentioning that the channel isn't an official
| channel anymore is illegal by new policy
| cmsj wrote:
| Oh good grief, really? I had gone for the "Unofficial Foo
| Channel, see http://foo.org/blah" :/
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Ironic that the network's name has the words "free" in
| them.
|
| The way Andrew Lee is acting, he sounds like he's more
| the North Korean version of Korea...
| jackson1442 wrote:
| You mean the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?
|
| Yup, sounds about right.
| Vektorweg wrote:
| its times like these when you ignore the rules
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And it's time like these where you immediately get banned
| for ignoring said rules.
| arpa wrote:
| Eggdrop with auto-greet message?
| sputr wrote:
| Eggdrop is still a thing?
|
| Damn. It's been for ever.
| kristofferR wrote:
| We're talking about IRC here, after all...
| stormcode wrote:
| .... Haven't been active on IRC since 1996.
|
| .... Can still understand exactly what is being talked
| about here.
| [deleted]
| jerf wrote:
| "For an explanation of why nobody is here, see
| https://blahblahblah."
|
| I'm not an IRC guy but I'm sure URLs are fairly common in
| topics. A human might still get offended but this will get past
| a bot.
|
| Heck, even something like "For information about channel
| etiquette, see https:/blahblahblah" would do. It just turns out
| that "channel etiquette" is to move to a different channel.
|
| It only has to hold for a little while anyhow. I'm sure there's
| going to be a long tail of people logging in for the first time
| in months and wondering what happened, but by now the majority
| probably already know, if not the vast majority.
| izacus wrote:
| > I was able to get founder access back by asking nicely
| (through gritted teeth) on #freenode-services and now I am
| trying to work out how I indicate to users that they should
| look elsewhere, without freenode taking any further action.
|
| Why do you need to do that though? Freenode and all other IRC
| servers are full of channels where people hang out and talk
| about projects without maintainers owning them and pushing
| people around. This is, after all, the main plus of IRC.
|
| Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your
| website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people deciding
| to stay on Freenode alone.
| darkarmani wrote:
| > Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your
| website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people
| deciding to stay on Freenode alone.
|
| Because it looks like an official channel? Having a topic
| telling people where they can find the official channel is
| not bothering people: most people don't know where to go and
| are only on freenode because thats where they think they
| should be.
| izacus wrote:
| Of course, having a topic is all good. But what some
| channel owners did is to prevent people from talking on the
| channel via bans, tried to block discussion and forcefully
| make people move over. That, in my book, is not ok.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The position you advocate is ridiculous.
|
| If the official channel is moving, prohibiting that channel
| from telling thier users where the new official channel will
| be is incredibly user hostile.
|
| I can't believe any project would ever want to stay on
| Freenode after behavior like this.
| cmsj wrote:
| In the long term, you are absolutely right. It's perfectly
| reasonable for people to want to have a #gentoo or #ubuntu or
| whatever, channel on Freenode. I also think it's reasonable
| for projects to have some time to disambiguate where the
| official one is.
|
| For my project specifically, our IRC traffic is very low -
| there are a dozen or so lurkers and then people who come in
| briefly after seeing the channel mentioned on our
| website/docs, to ask questions. I've updated all of those
| things, but I want to leave a message in the channel topic
| for people who already have it in their IRC client, to see,
| so they don't think I've completely abandoned them.
|
| My solution for now is to have the topic say that it's an
| unofficial channel in which people are welcome to discuss
| things, and then a URL to the section of our website that
| details how to get help, which links to Libera :)
| blihp wrote:
| Set up a support / resources landing page on your web site and
| set the IRC topic to point to that. People who connect to
| freenode will figure it out pretty quickly. Generally a good
| idea to always have a pointer to a page you control like this
| any time you're using someone else's server/service. You never
| know when something like this is going to happen and it
| provides you a way to communicate when/if it does.
| darkwater wrote:
| What about setting the channel topic to a link to your own
| documentation where it states how you should access the IRC
| channel? And maybe also a bot as someone else suggested, that
| reminds you to... read the channel topic. If they are going to
| scrape every single link in the channel topics and look for
| libera.chat links then there is not much you can do, people
| will eventually migrate.
| praptak wrote:
| > If they are going to scrape every single link in the
| channel topics and look for libera.chat links then there is
| not much you can do
|
| There's a lot you can do, there's a bunch of anti-scraping
| techniques like printing the "libera" using JavaScript.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| IRC channel topics are plain text. They don't parse
| JavaScript.
| praptak wrote:
| I know. GPs solution was to point them to a URL which you
| control, with a suggestion that FN owners would go as far
| as to scrape these.
|
| Edit: they are obviously already filtering the topics
| themselves.
| [deleted]
| thanatosmin wrote:
| The response on the freenode website is wild.
|
| https://freenode.net/news/for-foss
| account42 wrote:
| Welp, as someone that was still waiting to see how this turns
| out, this is all the confirmation I need that the time to move
| has come. Well done Andrew, you could not have made a better
| advertisement for Libera if you tried.
|
| RIP freenode 1995-2021
| [deleted]
| koheripbal wrote:
| Why are people still using IRC? It has no encryption, no privacy.
| Even if your client uses encrypted comms, the other clients are
| not, so everything is easily surveilled.
|
| I'm surprised people are still using IRC at all.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Why do you post on HN? It's not encrypted either. In fact, it's
| very explicitly publicly available. IRC is the same. It is and
| always has been public. And for many use cases that's a benefit
| not a drawback.
| capableweb wrote:
| People generally use IRC for public conversations, not for
| private ones.
|
| IRC is a open protocol, has a ton of different clients for
| different needs, almost every big FOSS project has it's own IRC
| channel and it requires minimal resources to run (and if you
| really need to, the protocol itself is really easy to
| implement).
|
| What's not to like with IRC? I'm surprised people are using
| Slack and Discord instead of IRC for development talk.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| This is false. Many, many IRC clients implement encryption,
| both in one-to-one and group (channel) forms. That's the beauty
| of IRC. The client can support almost anything it wants to. And
| if you don't like one client... there's another one for you to
| try!
|
| You want to see everyone's memes inline? Clients can do that.
| You want to see emoji? Clients can do that. You want to have
| encryption, or voice, or send files? Clients can easily at the
| very least negotiate that over IRC.
|
| Edit: And by the way, most servers offer a mode that allows you
| to require that everyone joining be using TLS, or of course you
| could run your own server and simply have it only listen for
| TLS!
| mcherm wrote:
| Ok, now I'm done with this "controversy". There is no longer even
| the slightest doubt in my mind who has the higher ground now.
| brnt wrote:
| Europeans: let's all GDPR bomb Freenode and request deletion.
| medstrom wrote:
| Does the GDPR apply?
| brnt wrote:
| To any EU citizen anywhere and anyone in the EU.
| zatertip wrote:
| Freenode Ltd is a UK corporation, so I'd think so.
| mjg59 wrote:
| Freenode Ltd is a UK company. The EU GDPR no longer applies
| as a result of Brexit, but the EU GDPR requirements have
| separately been incorporated into UK law. I don't see any
| reason why it wouldn't apply.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| The GDPR applies regardless of where the company is, so long
| as the requester is an EU resident.
| lcabral wrote:
| I was pretty unaware of this drama(not a freenode user) So I
| found me this summary to fill me in on the details (hopefully
| mostly true) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-
| irc-has-bee... This together with the freenode main page/blog (a
| very defensive one side view of the occurrences) leads to
| understand the freenode infrastructure/entity is compromised. I
| see this as turning into a worst case scenario of a free service
| that gets taken over and you can no longer trust it to secure
| your data.
| [deleted]
| SilverRed wrote:
| What data were you trusting with freenode? It's almost all
| public and often logged to a public web server. So you had PMs
| and your irc password on there. IRC has never been a place for
| secure communication.
| avereveard wrote:
| yeah worst case was when freelists was acquired and then all
| the groups emails where suddenly indexed and made public in
| their tentative to become a web hub. those had a supposition
| of privacy, albeit minimal as it was not a specifically
| secure server, it was definitely not public.
| wut42 wrote:
| This happened to #elixir-lang too, and they decided to move to
| libera.chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288673
| sampo wrote:
| Here's a possibly charitable interpretation: Like the post says,
| some channels moved over to Libera and left behind a "zombified"
| channel on Freenode [1]. A channel where nobody can talk, and
| only function is to have a pointer to the Libera channel in the
| topic. I can understand how the new Freenode doesn't want to get
| half-filled with such zombified channels. So they wrote a script
| to take over these channels, to let their users talk again. But
| they're not too experienced, and the script took over also non-
| zombified channels. Maybe their script only looked for a Libera
| pointer in the topic and they assumed the rest, not always
| correctly.
|
| [1] > It should be noted that the Ops never gave up control over
| their channels, they simply removed everyone's voice and changed
| the topic, a perfectly valid thing to do.
| janc_ wrote:
| If they would want to remove "zombie channels" after 6 months
| or so, that would make sense, but doing this while they still
| have a function (informing people about the move) is simply
| against the stated purpose of the Freenode IRC network (=
| supporting open projects).
| joepie91_ wrote:
| > I can understand how the new Freenode doesn't want to get
| half-filled with such zombified channels.
|
| Then maybe they shouldn't have done a hostile takeover, and
| actually worked with the community instead.
| kadoban wrote:
| That's too charitable. At some point when someone keeps showing
| you who they are, believing them is the right course of action.
| [deleted]
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I see they are learning from the best of the Silicon Valley
| social giants.
|
| "The topic is in violation of freenode policy", but no mention of
| the exact clause, and when you click the link you don't find
| anything that you have plausibly violated.
| immibis wrote:
| Based on the "discussion" on #freenode-policy-feedback and
| #freenode-services, they are considering it as "inappropriate
| advertising" and "spam"
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Well that clears things up. Channels might not be sure where they
| want to end up, but now they know where they cannot stay.
| swiley wrote:
| At least you can switch networks. With apps like discord you
| don't even have that option when the admins misbehave.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| You still can, it's just that you have to switch apps too.
| Which undoubtedly creates more upheaval, and I am guessing that
| a lot more people would get left behind in the process. But
| still, it's not like communities that don't use IRC are
| helpless.
| mbreese wrote:
| However, this does reinforce the idea that:
|
| protocols > programs
|
| But you can't get funding for managing a protocol.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Comes down to UX. If your frontend isn't ergonomic, you're
| doomed. OSS chat protocols suffer from too much choice.
| Users don't want to go app hunting, they want one stop
| shopping and be told what to use. Having a centralized
| platform is making the choice for the consumer and they're
| happy to oblige.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > they want one stop shopping and be told what to use
|
| Until that app becomes unusable / bought by Andrew Lee
| and they wish there was an alternative they could easily
| migrate to.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Protocols are better than programs because they give users
| power.
|
| Programs are better than protocols because they don't give
| users power.
|
| It's a matter of perspective.
| mbreese wrote:
| You're right, of course. But I think that if your goal is
| to build a robust system, protocols win.
|
| If you want to monetize your users, then you absolutely
| need that walled garden and ease of use that a program
| provides. If you have a protocol based application, then
| you can only really monetize the service, not your users.
| For example, only a few email providers have enough users
| to sell ads (Gmail). There are far more providers that
| sell the service as opposed to advertising to users.
|
| Although, I will admit building a robust protocol is
| difficult. It is much easier to iterate a feature set if
| you only have to worry about one implementation.
|
| But this is a trade off between short term gains at the
| expense of the long term.
|
| Email for all its warts will still be around in 10 years.
| Can we say the same for Slack?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| There's also an ease of use thing. "Slack" and "Discord"
| can both be thought of as monolithic entities. For less
| technical communities, that helps with the onboarding. You
| don't have to worry yourself about the details of networks
| and servers and clients and nickservs and whatnot. Teaching
| someone to use irc is a rather thornier issue, and even
| some tech people might bounce off of it unless they have a
| compelling reason to burn time on RTFM.
|
| Depending on the values of the community, those practical
| concerns may or may not outweigh other considerations.
| There's a lot to be said for open protocols, but there's
| also a lot to be said for UX.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Discord is really IRC with a prettier skin. All the weird
| technical stuff you'll see on IRC you'll also find on
| Discord. Discord has some additional features, but those
| are _on top_ of the existing IRCisms, making it actually
| harder for a newbie to get on board.
|
| But you know, people aren't _that_ stupid, they figure
| things out -like they did in the 90s with IRC- because
| they want to join the community.
|
| Back in late 90s/early 2000s, netcafes were full with
| non-technical people who used Internet just because of
| mIRC (many called it just "mIRC") to chat with others.
| We're talking about people who barely knew the difference
| between a file and a folder and yet became proficient
| enough with mIRC to simultaneously chat in several
| channels.
|
| The #1 issue isn't technical, it is social. People do not
| join Discord because it is better than
| IRC/Matrix/whatever, they join it because the communities
| they want to be part of are on Discord.
| dralley wrote:
| It isn't, though... connecting to a new Discord group is
| basically a one-step operation. Connecting to a new IRC
| server might require some setup of the server, and
| possibly registration with Nickserv, which is a bot
| pretending to be a user that you interact with via /msg.
| And you need to connect to individual channels, and
| there's often no good way of sorting them by purpose
| rather than by what server they're present on, something
| that _most_ users probably don 't care about.
|
| I use IRC every day, but I'm not going to pretend it's
| straightforwards compared to the alternatives. It
| absolutely is not.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| None of those things are showstoppers or really anything
| more than tiny issues - if they are issues at all. You do
| not need to register with nickserv (it is optional if you
| want to be a regular and not have someone else take your
| name) and the commands aren't any different than all the
| commands that Discord has (some are even the same) -
| hell, pretty much every other Discord server/channel has
| IRC-like botcommands that begin with a ! like you'd find
| on IRC in 1996.
|
| Also i'm not pretending that IRC is straightforward, i'm
| saying that Discord is as complex as IRC is and adds
| additional complexity on top of that - sure, some parts
| might be simpler (though connecting to a new server is
| not necessarily among them as most IRC clients register
| the irc: handler with browsers so you can click on any
| web link to join a server and enter a channel) but those
| do not negate the complex parts it adds.
|
| And the most important part: the vast majority of people
| do not use use Discord because it is easier (or harder or
| whatever) than IRC (or Matrix or whatever), they use it
| because the communities they want to be part of are on
| Discord.
| swiley wrote:
| >Teaching someone IRC
|
| You mean handing them xchat/colloquy/kiwichat and telling
| them to come up with a name and click this text box to
| send a message?
|
| Sure irssi is hard to use but unlike Slack and Discord
| you're not stuck with a single terrible client.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Try going to https://libera.chat/guides/clients and
| reading through that page, and keep track of how many
| words a non-technical user would not understand.
|
| Here's my list:
|
| client IRC SASL authentication graphical clients terminal
| clients bouncers
|
| From the very beginning there's jargon. The page does do
| a good job of explaining the jargon though, so they get
| points for that. However, if you're a new user, the
| difference between this 365 word wall of text full of new
| words and strange client names is striking compared to
| e.g. Slack's obvious "TRY FOR FREE" button.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _keep track of how many words a non-technical user
| would not understand._ "
|
| And it's not just the words on their own; the
| instructions and wider context are strewn with internal
| techo-details, there's no step by step path through them,
| no strong recommendations; given this is under "About
| IRC" it starts with "choosing a client" as if you already
| know what that is and why you want one. Paragraph 2 is
| about SASL. ("repository of instructions" - why not
| "instructions"?). You're a "connecting to IRC for the
| fist time", you click the link to the preferred
| authentication method. " _SASL is a method that allows
| identification to services (NickServ) during the
| connection process, before anything else happens -
| therefore eliminating the need to /msg NickServ
| identify_" - word salad. A way to eliminate the need to
| do a thing you've never heard of and don't know why you'd
| want to do it at all. Nope back to the main page.
|
| " _If you 're interested in ensuring the security of your
| connection_" - am I? Should I be? I don't know what "my
| connection" even is in any practical sense, or what the
| consequences of it being secure or insecure are - click
| the link; " _' is using a secure connection will appear
| in WHOIS (a 671 numeric)'_" ... what? " _In order to
| verify the server certificates on connection, some
| additional work may be required. First, ensure that your
| system has an up-to-date set of root CA certificates._ "
| nope back out of that.
|
| " _If you cannot install apps on your computer, you can
| use a web app_ " - I don't know if I can install apps on
| my computer. How can I use a (web) app if I can't install
| apps? Is this web app Google? Can I not use the web app
| at any other time?
|
| " _Kiwi IRC is a popular free web client that you don't
| have to sign up for_ " - the first time 'sign up' is
| mentioned is to tell me I don't have to do it. Then why
| mention it?
|
| " _a popular web client service that keeps you connected
| after you close the page..._ " - technobabble word salad.
| What's a "web client service"? It keeps me connected,
| what does that mean? It sends me notifications or
| something? Why do I want to be connected after closing
| the page, isn't closing the page my intent to leave? So
| it's an infection or something, does it hack my computer
| to stay there? How do I get rid of it?
|
| " _...and has a limited free plan_ " - what are the
| limits? Is it good enough? Presumably not - if the limits
| were enough you wouldn't mention them, right? You don't
| mention 'free plan' before or after, does all of this
| cost money? Any of it?
|
| " _Graphical clients - These are clients that you
| navigate primarily with your mouse cursor or touch_ " -
| what non-technical user thinks in terms of "navigating"?
| Graphical, if I want graphs? Graphics? Pictures? Those
| are good, yeah? Surely, surely the kind of semi-
| technical/poweruser who might be about to use IRC for the
| first time is the most likely to use keyboard hotkeys in
| GUI programs?
|
| " _They can be installed on your device directly or
| accessed in a web browser._ " - you just told me I had to
| use the web browser when I couldn't install a client, now
| one of the clients is in a web browser?
|
| " _Terminal or text based clients are clients which you
| primarily navigate with keyboard shortcuts. As these
| typically do not need mouse navigation, [...] WeeChat is
| a popular terminal client which has an experimental mouse
| mode option_ " - ???? I'm a new user to IRC, non-technial
| apparently, and I'm already into the experimental options
| in one specific TUI client. Steep.
|
| " _Bouncers are clients which act as a hub between other
| clients and the IRC network. They allow you to see one
| connection from multiple places_ " - ??? Words. About a
| thing. Bouncers guard the door and keep bad people out?
|
| There's a big pink call to action "connect" button in the
| top right, which is a surprise dropdown offering a TLS
| connection, a plaintext connection, a "How to Connect"
| option, but despite being a web page with web hyperlinks,
| none of them are links to web clients that actually
| connect to anything. Even knowing IRC, I'm surprised, I
| was expecting an instant CGI gateway link or something.
| (Remember, web clients are the things you use if you
| can't install apps, or if you want graphics, and you want
| graphics if you navigate with a mouse).
|
| The menu on the left has "Helping you connect" which has
| "Using CertFP" above "Connecting to Libera.chat", because
| creating a self-signed certificate using Cygwin (which
| isn't explained or linked) is more helpful than the
| address of Libera chat?
|
| It must be possible to run this kind of page past a
| hundred "non-technical" users via Mechanical Turk or
| similar, and have them circle the places that are
| confusing or they don't follow?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| And tell them how to register the nickname, and tell them
| how to log in, and tell them how to list rooms and join
| them. Then teach them about op codes.
|
| (Lack of) Ease of use is a big reason for IRC's loss in
| popularity.
| welterde wrote:
| Registration is a bit of a sore point (and is being
| worked on in the IRCv3 WG), but login, ops, channel
| listing, etc. afterwards isn't - that's all handled quite
| well by modern graphical IRC clients.
| swiley wrote:
| You don't need to register a nickname (I didn't when I
| used freenode)
|
| In the clients I mentioned listing and joining rooms
| works the same way it does on discord and slack: you open
| the list and click the ones you want to join.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Discord/Slack already has a bunch of those things- how to
| mute channels is a big one, as well as how to change ones
| nickname, how to get a role, and managing permissions for
| various channels.
| mbreese wrote:
| UX isn't really a function of the protocol though.
|
| With email, you see a lot more diversity in UX
| experiences between clients.
|
| IRC chat has historically been a CLI interaction, with
| limits what you can do, UX-wise. And even the GUI clients
| tend to emulate much of what you'd have in a CLI or TUI.
| There is a lot that could be done to make it more
| friendly to a new user.
|
| But, that extra amount of complexity that's involved with
| a protocol approach (which program should I use? which
| server do I connect to?) is definitely a UX issue. But, I
| think these are issues that could be solved w/in the
| community. For example, Libera. Chat has a nice set of
| pages that start with "Which client should I use?". I
| could completely see a set of "How to use IRC" pages to
| help new users get started.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Average Joe and Sally want Web 3.0 UX shiny, they don't
| want nerdy CLIs or overcomplicated setups. The HN crowd
| has blinders on when it comes to this because we're power
| users, the complexity doesn't bother us but it's a
| complete non-starter for normal people.
| [deleted]
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Maybe not completely, though. The guide is definitely
| helpful, but a lot of people don't want a list of 10
| different options to have to trudge through. Even if
| you're more than skilled enough to understand and digest
| a guide like that, going through it and making a choice
| still takes mental energy that busy people don't
| necessarily want to expend.
|
| What sites like Slack and Discord offer that, to the best
| of my knowledge, no IRC network does, is a one stop shop.
| A "go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting"
| experience, all hosted right there in one place, together
| with free and zero-configuration apps for both desktop
| and mobile with push and perhaps even email notifications
| and all sorts of goodies like that.
|
| Which I personally think is fine. Maintaining that kind
| of tightly integrated experience costs money. Corporate
| money. Which, as this freenode kerfuffle illustrates,
| isn't necessarily something I want getting quite so
| tangled up in my IRC networks. But I'm also fine with
| communities that have different values or are trying to
| cater to different audiences choosing an option that
| feels better to them. I'm not sure it serves anyone's
| interests to be a busybody about these things.
| swiley wrote:
| >go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting
|
| Kiwi chat does this. In fact IRC offers this better than
| slack and Discord because it doesn't require creating an
| account (which is why so many of my friends stick with
| imessage and mms.)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think you're missing my point.
|
| With Slack, an organization can put a link on their
| website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less
| straight to that organization's chat.
|
| With irc, yes you can post a link to Kiwi, but then, to
| actually get connected to that organization's chat, you
| need to navigate a somewhat confusing configuration
| dialog that includes, among other things, two different
| server selection controls, one of which is a dropdown
| list of maybe 200 different options, and a number of
| buttons with jargon names, none of which is, to an
| uninitiated IRC user, obviously the one to take you to
| the chat, and some of which are prone to doing flat-out
| nothing when you click on them. The one they do want,
| which they probably won't click because the UI is laid
| out to make it look like it's only for advanced users,
| tends to give useless error messages if you get some
| configuration wrong, anyway. Which someone new to IRC is
| likely to do, because the form is confusing and provides
| no guidance or validation.
|
| So, not only is it quite a few more steps than "go to
| webpage, click button, now you're chatting", but several
| of those additional ones are liable to cause people to
| give up.
|
| A now-deleted comment in this thread said that they like
| irc because it keeps less technical people away, which
| they felt improved the quality of discussions. Regardless
| of one's opinion of that sentiment, I think that the
| effect in question is undeniably real, and it perhaps
| creates a situation where avid IRC users have a tendency
| to lose track of what counts as acceptable user
| experience for the rest of the world.
| swiley wrote:
| >With Slack, an organization can put a link on their
| website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less
| straight to that organization's chat.
|
| This is not at all my experience with slack.
|
| >yes you can post a link to Kiwi,
|
| It's been a while since I tried setting it up but IIRC
| you can post links to kiwi with parameters which skips
| the configuration dialog and just asks for a nickname
| then dumps you into the channel. It's not really possible
| to improve on that.
| marcodiego wrote:
| This!
|
| Skype users had no choice after microsoft take-over.
| Whatsapp users had no choice after facebook take-over.
|
| Proprietary software is a choice you impose on yourself;
| proprietary protocols and formats a choice you impose on
| the others too.
| tallanvor wrote:
| It's been 15 years since I've used IRC, but what changed with
| the apps? All the apps I used to use let you choose what
| domains to connect to.
| swiley wrote:
| iOS isn't designed for apps that connect to servers not run
| by the App Author.
|
| Push messages must be signed by a key registered to the
| developer and there is _no_ mechanism to delegate that (for
| example.)
| apexalpha wrote:
| I don't understand. What stops people from switching to Slack
| from Discord or whatever?
|
| Can people connected to Freenode join your channel on Libara?
| If not, what exactly is the difference?
| progval wrote:
| To switch from Discord to Slack (or between any two
| protocols), you need to learn how to use the new app, set-up
| new integrations, rewrite your bots, and hope you did not
| depend on a feature Slack is missing.
| chapium wrote:
| Both discord and slack have web based versions which are
| far superior to the associated apps in my opinion.
| tw04 wrote:
| The difference is one motion requires users to install and
| learn a completely new application that likely has a
| different feature set.
|
| The other requires them to simply update their server list.
|
| If someone has been using IRC for a decade they likely have
| some automated workflows built out. If they had put in that
| effort with slack bots or _whatever_ - being forced to
| abandon or start over from scratch is a PITA.
| apexalpha wrote:
| I agree that it might be harder to switch if you have Bots
| or some other automation running. Although since it's just
| text it should work the same after changing read/write
| API's.
|
| The other points seem a bit exaggerated. The "new app" to
| install is just a browser usually.
|
| I used IRC a lot in the past but being a protocol also
| means it's barely been updated in the past. There's so much
| functionality in Discord / Slack and others compared to IRC
| that dwarf the negative aspects of "learning an entire new
| app" whenever you want to switch.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm part of a Discord community that has many, many bots
| handling idle tasks. We play an obscure video game, and
| these bots help keep track of various player's ranks,
| skills, which platform (Switch, PS4, PC, XBox) they're
| on, etc. etc.
|
| The thing about chats-with-automation is that the
| automation part is strongly tied to the chat.
|
| All these Discord bots will be a pain-in-the-ass to
| switch over to IRC, and vice versa.
|
| --------
|
| Even on the Freenode #C++ community, they had a FAQ-bot
| to spam newbies with links whenever a common question was
| asked (or which pastebins to use, or whatever). A huge
| part of IRC (and Discord) is about automation / bots, and
| the APIs are just not compatible.
| snu wrote:
| #blender got hit too, tho interestingly enough, not any of the
| sub-channels (none of which had 'libera.chat' in the topic) were
| hit.
|
| This seems like it is very bad timing on the part of freenode
| staff... with many communities already on the knife edge about
| switching, this is likely to push plenty of people over.
| dlsa wrote:
| The topic is in violation of policies? For being offtopic? Or for
| advertising?
|
| I hate it when I'm left to guess the reasoning for administrative
| actions. It causes me to assume "just because we say so".
|
| I'm an op for multiple things and always quote the specific
| portion when kicking or blocking or whatever. Helps when you
| number each part, but to quote my old mentor, "Fortunately, I
| keep my feathers numbered, for just such an emergency." Ah
| foghorn!
| immibis wrote:
| "Advertising" is when someone comes into a channel and says
| "hey y'all join my other unrelated server". Advertising
| official project spaces by official project members has always
| been fine. Think of all the channel topics that have project
| websites in them - that's technically advertising, too!
|
| The real reason is that freenode is desperate to stop the
| bleeding. And in the process, they just destroyed their
| reputation. They are now the network that tried to build a
| Berlin Wall to keep the users in.
| infogulch wrote:
| > They are now the network that tried to build a Berlin Wall
| to keep the users in.
|
| If the free speech of official project channels is off the
| table, then the community has already been destroyed. How the
| result of these actions were not painfully obvious to Lee is
| beyond my comprehension.
| phire wrote:
| As far as I can tell, their policies say nothing about the
| contents of the #topic.
|
| But as of 8 hours ago, the policies do say that if a primary
| channel closes access to users then freenode _will_ close the
| #primary channel and forward to the ##topical channel.
| vraid wrote:
| We had an unregistered channel with 5 users left that got the
| same treatment. The topic (which was free for anyone to
| change..) contained irc.libera.chat
| grayhatter wrote:
| He's butt hurt, freenode's "policy" is just a red herring. Tt
| feels dishonest to me to pretend any other explanation makes
| sense.
| intsunny wrote:
| Maybe this is all for the better. Helping to kill off what the
| community no longer wants.
|
| I remember the XFree86 licensing controversy of 2004. That change
| effectively killed XFree86, gave rise to X.org, and new life to
| the world of open source X11.
| SilverRed wrote:
| This will probably just kill IRC entirely. Freenode was keeping
| IRC alive and now that it has fractured, there will be little
| reason not to use Matrix or Discord as the new wave of
| developers do not care that you can't talk on Matrix via
| netcat.
| anthk wrote:
| Eh, no. Libera.chat is doing it well.
| erk__ wrote:
| I would bet that the biggest irc network is twitch, although
| that is a very different kind of community than what is
| usually associated with irc.
| croon wrote:
| Matterbridge (and probably similar) exists. If some old farts
| (myself included) want to keep using irc hosting your own
| isn't bad, and having a bridge between that (and other
| services/protocols) and discord enables everyone to use
| whatever client they want. At least that's what I'm doing for
| a few groups.
| deknos wrote:
| well there's also oftc and hackint
| tyingq wrote:
| The Streisand effect is in full force now. The Google results if
| you search for "freenode" are now almost all about the drama. As
| is the freenode Wikipedia page.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Same thing happened to Wikimedia. They are _not happy_.
| speeder wrote:
| Allegro too. They didn't had moved to libera at all, now they
| have.
|
| https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...
| [deleted]
| gnastygnorc wrote:
| Ubuntu too
|
| https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2021/05/26/announcing-ubuntus-move...
| marcodiego wrote:
| And that is why free-whatever (society, software, people...)
| needs immunity from arbitrary take-over from companies and
| governments too.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Easier said than done.
| marcodiego wrote:
| FSF, GNU and wikipedia come to mind. They may not be that
| easy but certainly possible. Actually, sometimes simply
| making the content easily available is enough. No image was
| lost from openclipart because they were all previously easily
| available.
| Biganon wrote:
| What about RMS's recent scandal? He was certainly the face
| everyone associates with the FSF, and even though he can be
| removed, it still hurts the foundation's reputation
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What about it? Nobody said anyone could be immune from
| having their reputation hurt, that's not what we were
| talking about.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| It is a scandal in the eyes of people that want to be
| offended in my opinion. He called Epstein a rapist. The
| witch hunting did cost much more reputation and I fear
| that isn't recoverable.
| marcodiego wrote:
| You're right. But I still can git-clone gnu nano, all of
| its dependencies and compile it on my own hardware. If
| fsf ever goes belly-up one still can do so with any
| source they ever made available. Users of software
| supported by FSF are immune from any kind of FSF
| takeover.
|
| But indeed, FSF has to consider if RMS does more harm
| than good or put him in a position where he can do no
| harm.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Well you need some kind of formal structure which owns
| critical assets (such as domain names, brands) and allows for
| your desired model of governance. Individual people owning
| things largely increase the risk of a hostile takeover.
|
| A non-profit where members elect the "leadership" (which can
| have very few actual responsibilities) seem to work fine. Of
| course that means you need to find someone willing to take
| that position (usually on a volunteer basis)
| phire wrote:
| I was mostly ignoring this freenode drama until now, I didn't
| have enough fucks to care. At the very least I was hoping for
| things to settle down before making an informed decision to move
| or not.
|
| But this kind of behavior really calls into question the
| suitability of Andrew Lee to be a leader/owner of a project like
| freenode.
| immibis wrote:
| It happened in stages. Each stage a bigger red flag than the
| last. Seems this red flag was big enough for you. I wonder what
| the next flag will be.
| trenchgun wrote:
| He is not the leader/owner of the project freenode. Freenode
| the project has moved to libera.chat.
|
| Lee owns Freenodes servers and user data - althought
| illegitimately. You can't buy the ownership of a volunteer
| project like that.
| immibis wrote:
| I'm hearing he didn't even own the servers, which were mostly
| run by volunteers.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The servers aren't owned by volunteers but provided free of
| charge by a number of companies (mostly not related to Lee)
| All they get in return is a small acknowledgement on the
| MOTD and the acknowledgement page.
|
| They are managed by the volunteers though, and the
| sponsoring authorities don't get operator rights on the
| network.
| [deleted]
| grayhatter wrote:
| Calls it into question? I'd suggest a mass resignation would
| call it into question. This just proves they were right to
| resign.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How to destroy your reputation in a few easy steps!
|
| It's over for Freenode. The biggest channels have already moved
| to Libera. The Arch Wiki for example doesn't even mention
| Freenode anymore. Hopefully it won't take long for everyone else
| to move as well.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Are there articles available that sums up "this Freenode
| drama"? I've just seen the headlines, and haven't really
| bothered before now that I see they are acting up as (even
| bigger?) assholes.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Hackaday had a good write-up:
|
| https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-
| sta...
| [deleted]
| bennyp101 wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-
| bee... seems to have a pretty simple summary
| tzs wrote:
| All quotes below are from that Ars article.
|
| > Contract or no contract, staff and developers of Freenode
| maintain that it wasn't actually possible to sell the
| network--the staff is all volunteers, and the
| infrastructure itself wasn't owned by Dahlskjaer in the
| first place.
|
| So who did own the infrastructure, and where did they stand
| on all of this?
|
| > Freenode has been the world's largest IRC network since
| 2013, with roughly three times as many users as its closest
| competitor, IRCnet.
|
| ...
|
| > A week after Lee's effectively public announcement of
| ownership and de facto dictatorial operation of Freenode,
| the staffers who resigned from Freenode created Libera.chat
| as a replacement.
|
| Is there something wrong with IRCnet? Usually when the
| largest X does something that gets a lot of users to leave
| they go to X's largest competitors since those are already
| up and running and experienced. In this case, though, it
| seems like the brand new Libera.chat is where most are
| going.
| Macha wrote:
| Freenode's largest competitor is likely OFTC, not IRCNet.
| IRCNet is a general purpose IRC network, Freenode is more
| open source and surrounding topics, as is OFTC. OFTC
| however is more strictly on-topic (off topic channels
| must be +s, which means they don't show up in channel
| listings).
| danaris wrote:
| The reason they're going to Libera.chat is because the
| former Freenode staff set it up--moving to another
| existing IRC network would mean, essentially, abandoning
| your own house and coming to someone else's and asking to
| be allowed to set up in there, while what they're doing
| is trying to build their own new house.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > while what they're doing is trying to build their own
| new house.
|
| I'd say they're just trying to rebuild their old house.
| Once all the dust settles in a few months, I expect
| Libera Chat will be pretty much the same as FreeNode was,
| with all the same channels being run by the same people,
| with the exception that I'll have to register a new
| account with NickServ.
| rubin55 wrote:
| That latter aspect, registering your account with
| NickServ does seem to sucks somewhat.. Apparently there
| have been some bots active which have registered a whole
| bunch of nicks which previously existed on FreeNode.
| #libera is full of people (including myself) who are
| asking if staff can do something about this nick
| squatting. Understandably that will take time and I've
| simply registered another nick, but man, you get attached
| to a 15+ year old nick you've been using on OFTC,
| FreeNode and a bunch of other ye olde IRC networks..
| danaris wrote:
| > I'd say they're just trying to rebuild their old house.
|
| I guess that gets into a semantic (or even existential)
| question: if it's in a different place, and the original
| house is still there (if damaged and usurped), even if it
| is built identically, is it the old house, or a new one?
|
| But yes, that's also a perfectly reasonable way of
| analogizing Libera.chat, as I understand the situation.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| A house is the wrong analogy. We're talking about
| communities of people here, not a building. (This is
| another good example of why analogies rarely clarify, and
| usually just end up in a discussion over how accurate the
| analogy is.)
|
| A better analogy would be: Let's say you've been going to
| the same book club for 15 years now, but the cafe you've
| been meeting at has closed. So the group picks a new cafe
| and the book club continues. Not much has really changed;
| it's still the same people, meeting up regularly for the
| same person.
| danaris wrote:
| I think part of the difficulty here is that there's two
| separate rebuildings going on: There's the various
| communities that used Freenode as their IRC location--
| which I would say _are_ analogous to the book club--and
| there 's the staff of Freenode itself, who are (by and
| large) migrating together to found Libera.chat. That
| definitely does _not_ fit, because aside from the raw
| infrastructure, they 're not relying on anyone else's
| support for this--they're not in someone else's cafe,
| they're the cafe staff.
|
| So just to continue extending the analogy chain, it's
| closer to there being a cafe where lots of book clubs
| hang out, with a hands-off owner or some kind of employee
| cooperative actually owning the business itself, but
| through legal shenanigans, someone else gains control of
| the cafe business, and wants to drastically change how
| it's run. The staff all walk out and work on starting a
| new cafe down the street, and several of the book clubs
| follow because they like the atmosphere.
| lonjil wrote:
| > So who did own the infrastructure, and where did they
| stand on all of this?
|
| All hardware was owned by various organizations acting as
| "sponsors". But at this point most of it might have been
| replaced by servers owned by Lee.
|
| One of the sponsors, whose server hosted freenode's email
| server, pulled out shortly after the volunteers left.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Some untrustworthy entrepreneur bought Freenode. Network
| staff quit in response and started Libera. The new Freenode
| staff then proceeded to give users every reason to migrate to
| Libera.
| thechao wrote:
| I'd characterize more as an entity was created ex-post-
| facto in 2017 and then sold to an asshat.
| sampo wrote:
| > Some untrustworthy entrepeneur bought Freenode.
|
| In 2017
|
| > Network staff quit in response and started Libera.
|
| In 2021
| chha wrote:
| As far as I can tell he bought it in 2017 and promised
| not to change the operating model or interfere with the
| staff. In 2021 he started doing just that.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| As far as the community is concerned in 2017 he bought
| something called "freenode limited" which doesn't own the
| network, doesn't own the servers, and had no operational
| control beyond owning domain names.
|
| This would be like if you found out the local little
| league basball had been sold. It's a community resource
| that only exists through the continued donation of time
| by the members. It's not something that should ever be
| "owned".
| masklinn wrote:
| Dude bought an NFT in 2017, and has now decided the NFT
| was a proof of ownership.
| dmurray wrote:
| More like if Little League Baseball, the umbrella
| organisation, changed hands. Let's say the new owner
| intends to officially keep the charitable structure, but
| to monetize it by partnering with his own media company
| and televising the games.
|
| If he didn't change anything for the users (kids and
| parents across the US), but cleaned house in head office
| and installed his own management team, the local teams
| would continue running as they always had. The owner
| really would benefit from the goodwill of the community
| and really would "own" it in a meaningful way. Some
| grumbling idealists would start a new "really truly non-
| profit" competitor, but for most people the friction of
| switching would be too great. But if he interfered too
| much and made the players' experience worse, people and
| teams would find it attractive to move to the new
| competitor.
| Macha wrote:
| In 2017 said entrepeneur and then freenode head of staff
| downplayed what happened to the public and the rest of
| the staff. Otherwise this drama would have occured in
| 2017.
| Zak wrote:
| The legal entity purchased in 2017 isn't the Freenode
| _network_ and wasn 't intended to be able to assert
| control over the network. In 2021, it started to do so.
| tialaramex wrote:
| And indeed it appears the thing they _wanted_ ownership
| of wasn 't a thing you can own, which is doubtless very
| disappointing but too bad.
|
| Communities consist of people, and you aren't allowed to
| own people, so you cannot own a community.
| macksd wrote:
| The recent resignation letters indicate they have become
| aware of how much technical control the owner has and
| intends to exercise.
|
| Edit: that said, I was unaware of the statements from Lee
| that are linked to by an arstechnica article linked
| elsewhere in the comments. Honestly really not sure who
| to believe. For all I know (which is nothing first hand)
| this could be another group sabotaging things to boost
| their own new network over personal disagreement. Which
| I'm not suggesting is the case, but as someone not
| personally involved, all I see is conflicting hearsay.
| rubin55 wrote:
| Totally agree with that. But that "other group" needs
| about the highest level of ops you can get (i.e., staff
| level). When your new Andrew-approved staff then starts
| de-opping ops in ~700 channels, sets up a new #freenode-
| services channel where you can beg to get your ops back,
| where they first tell you NO because the channel that was
| previously yours violates some new instated FreeNode
| policy which prohibits referencing via topic (and
| including talking about?) other networks like Libera..
|
| That's when people on all sides pack up shop and leave.
| macksd wrote:
| Well I don't even know what "de-opping ops" means, so
| I'll err on the side of believing commenters on Hacker
| News (and I know that sounds sarcastic but that really is
| the better source to tip the scales here, IMO).
| Especially comments in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287750.
| ev1 wrote:
| removal of per-channel staff/per-channel owners and
| replacement with network owners.
|
| like removing a subreddit's creator/moderators and taking
| over it.
| SSLy wrote:
| https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4.
| ..
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The Arch Wiki still has 48 pages that mention freenode, though
| most of them are about other software's servers or non-English
| articles.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, I should have been more specific. I meant the Arch
| Linux IRC channels article.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_IRC_channels
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I figured, I wasn't assuming you were trying to be
| deceptive just the comment made me curious if someone had
| completely wiped reference to freenode from the wiki.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I genuinely wonder how stupid one has to be to think that this
| was a good strategy.
|
| Has the person who came up with this idea ever met people? This
| kind of thing regularly blows up private platforms, on an open
| protocol like IRC this was guaranteed to trigger a swift mass
| migration.
| blibble wrote:
| presumably this is an example of a rich person (used to
| deference) having to interact with a community that doesn't
| care at all that he has money
|
| meanwhile the sycophants on his payroll are no doubt telling
| him he's doing a grand job
| pdimitar wrote:
| Can you give a bit more background on this? Who is the new
| owner, how did the takeover even happen? Wasn't Freenode a
| non-profit org?
| cpach wrote:
| TL;DR: A while ago some dude with questionable motives
| and ethics gained control over Freenode and recently he
| started to actively destroy it.
|
| This could be a good starting point for further reading:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix
| =tr...
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you.
| cpach wrote:
| You're welcome :)
| blibble wrote:
| this has been extensively covered over the last week or
| so
| pdimitar wrote:
| I mean OK, but I don't live in HN (or any news outlet for
| that matter) so it's not such an unfair question.
| r721 wrote:
| One of many articles:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-
| source-...
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thanks, that helped a lot.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| This looks like Culture War.
|
| From "The Freenode Resignation FAQ" at https://gist.githu
| b.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
|
| > [The new Freenode owner] Andrew was repeatedly asked in
| the "policy discussion channel" whether slurs, racism and
| transphobia are now permitted on Freenode. No answer has
| been forthcoming.
|
| The new owner either will not answer, or will not take a
| side, in the Culture War. In response, a number of users
| have taken his non-answers as an answer, and are leaving.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Not at all
|
| This is about ownership and control. Andrew is trying to
| seize legal control over an organization run by
| volunteers. The volunteers (and everyone else) aren't
| happy with the way this was handled or the way Andrew is
| using his power to silence dissent.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Andrew Lee has had legal control over Freenode since
| 2017. He gave assurances to the volunteers that he would
| not try to assume operational control. He affirmed that
| commitment as late as a few months ago. Now he has gone
| against that.
| shkkmo wrote:
| AFAIK, the only thing Andrew unambiguously had legal
| ownership over was the domain names.
| lonjil wrote:
| Those questions came _after_ people started leaving, and
| _after_ Lee made changes to freenode policy removing
| mentions of racism and such.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Andrew Lee is the co-founder of one of the biggest VPNs,
| which he sold for $95 Million. After that he was involved
| in the mobile app of Mt Gox (the now defunct bitcoin
| exchange)
|
| He was also declared crown prince of Korea by a member of
| royalty (no, Korea doesn't have Emperors anymore, it's
| meaningless for practical purposes).
| hatsunearu wrote:
| lmao, read up on this "member of royalty" Lee Seok, he's
| kind of a prick. Basically goes around and swinging his
| "heritage" and generally being unpleasant to everyone
| around him.
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| Maybe everything goes according to Lee's plan, who knows.
| rebolek wrote:
| If his plan is
|
| 1) kick all users out and destroy reputation
|
| 2) ???
|
| 3) profit!
|
| then probably yes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| is 3) necessary? maybe he needs to show a loss for tax
| purposes?
| inshadows wrote:
| I doubt this strategy means taking over Freenode. No one can
| be this stupid. At this point it seems like he's deliberately
| trying to destroy what's left of Freenode, for some reason.
| There can't be much profit to be made for IRC and the little
| he can make he obviously destroyed.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| if he wanted to destroy freenode he would turn off the
| servers
| inshadows wrote:
| Right. There must be some more nefarious scheme going on.
| Let me get my tin-foil hat. Or maybe he's just really
| that naive to except to generate revenue out of IRC
| network.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Don't underestimate how tone deaf or out-of-touch some
| people can be. You see this kind of stuff all the time, and
| it really is people who are making unbelievably hare-
| brained decisions.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Someone in another thread posited that purging existing users
| is the intended outcome, perhaps leading to some kind of
| business move, re-branding of Freenode, VC funding, etc.
| praptak wrote:
| It does not make any sense. What will Lee actually own and
| how would he make money from it?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| An IRC network without its users is worth nothing though.
| Anyone can trivially spin up a new IRC network for the cost
| of a domain name and a VM to host it on. The hard part is
| getting anyone to care (and thus to use it).
|
| If you run FreeNode into the ground and cause all the users
| to flee, there's nothing left, just a name with negative
| brand value (like Enron).
| coldpie wrote:
| After ~15 years on Freenode, I was taking a wait-and-see
| approach. Despite reading like four explainers, I didn't
| really understand what the drama was or why the new owner was
| such a disaster. I kind of expected the drama to die after a
| few weeks/months, and then Freenode would go back to being
| just another IRC server. Then I woke up this morning and saw
| this. Bye, Freenode.
| rubin55 wrote:
| So much this. Yesterday I did a walk through the ~44
| channels I frequent on FreeNode and came up with about
| 20ish that where moving to either OFTC or Libera. I left
| those channels, keeping ~24 channels that were not likely
| to move off of FreeNode.
|
| Fast-forward today. All those channels are moving now, none
| left! Yesterday this could be considered a 55/45% split and
| had new FreeNode staff taken a win-trust-dont-rock-boat
| approach, I'm sure the network would've been fine.
|
| Yesterday I was staying on FreeNode, because I don't really
| know the thinking behind all parties involved and could see
| the possible reasoning on both sides. Today I'm
| disconnected from FreeNode and on OFTC + Libera.
| jeltz wrote:
| Same here. I expected some channels to move and some to
| stay and that I would just have to connect to one more
| server once the dust had settled.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Has the person who came up with this idea ever met people?
|
| For sure he has absolutely no idea about what people uses IRC
| regularly. I can picture him thinking about "users" in a
| general way, like "Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp ad-clicking
| users", so he's now struggling to keep them tied to the
| platform at any cost. Well, no. Thanks to his ignorance that
| is second only to his greed he's now going to rapidly lose
| everything. I'd bet a pizza that he'll likely sell at a loss
| in less than one year.
| numeromancer wrote:
| I doubt that they are stupid, so one must conclude that the
| purpose was to silence speach, not profit from it.
| simias wrote:
| I think it's much simpler than that, they just panicked and
| handled the situation poorly, and then they keep doubling
| down and digging a deeper hole.
|
| Seeing the situation from the outside, it's obvious that
| what they're doing is self-defeating, but I suppose that
| they saw that they were hemorrhaging channels and users and
| saw the writing on the wall and decided to enact desperate
| measures in order to save the network.
|
| Given the health of IRC in general there's probably not
| enough room for both Freenode and Libera to strive. One of
| them was bound to become irrelevant, and the momentum
| favored Libra even before this desperate move.
|
| I'm afraid that we're just witnessing the death throes of
| freenode.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Never underestimate how dumb people can be.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Eh, to be honest the most obvious answer to this is just
| that Lee is an idiot.
| aasasd wrote:
| I mean, what do you expect of someone who posts a social-
| media-style PR article as a PDF.
| pg_bot wrote:
| I mean the guy has had a cartoonish life based on his
| wikipedia page. So yeah, I can totally see him not "getting
| it" at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur)
| dylan604 wrote:
| How disappointing. I halfway expected to see a mustache
| twirling picture.
| pg_bot wrote:
| He could make an appearance on the "Minnesota State High
| School All Hockey Hair Team".[0][1]
|
| [0] https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/korean-prince-
| andrew-lee...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDeBAYhKO0
| rsync wrote:
| That's some strong salad ...
| fellellor wrote:
| Wait. He's the crown prince of South Korea it seems. XD
| dylan-m wrote:
| Of course, it's important to note that Empire of Korea
| (and the imperial family) has been defunct for over sixty
| years. My understanding is at this point they're
| basically a fashion brand. Andrew Lee isn't even remotely
| related to any of them, as far as I can tell, although
| I'm curious if someone with more knowledge happens to be
| around.
|
| Which is kind of hilarious when you compare it to this
| spectacle :b
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Of course, it's important to note that Empire of Korea
| (and the imperial family) has been defunct for over sixty
| years
|
| The Empire of Korea has be defunct for 110 years (which
| is, sure, over 60, but it is weird to describe it that
| way.)
|
| > My understanding is at this point they're basically a
| fashion brand.
|
| The Royal Family Association seems to be something
| somewhat more substantial than that (but _not_ an actual
| monarchy, nor does it seek restoration), but its worth
| noting that the person who named Lee heir and crown
| prince is _not_ the person recognized as the current head
| by that association, but a competing claimant, who is
| also a monarchist seeking restoration.
| dylan-m wrote:
| > The Empire of Korea has be defunct for 110 years (which
| is, sure, over 60, but it is weird to describe it that
| way.)
|
| I figured it was _extra_ defunct after Korea was
| liberated in 1945 and Korea 's first president made sure
| the monarchy wasn't going to come back by seizing their
| assets. Before then I figure there was a vague
| possibility that things would bounce back in their
| direction, although I'm probably wrong about that since
| my knowledge comes mostly from interpretive signs and
| Wikipedia :)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > He's the crown prince of South Korea it seems.
|
| No, he's not. South Korea is a democratic republic, not a
| monarchy (not even a Constitutional one.)
|
| Lee is the adopted "heir" to a fictional and aspirational
| crown invented by a Korean monarchist who claims it for
| himself and wants to Korea to be a monarchy based on his
| (disputed; he is not the person recognized in that role
| by the association that has been the main custodian of
| the ex-royal house; he was one of two alternate claimants
| at the time the former head of the house passed, the
| other of which has since died without, AFAIK, any
| successor making a claim to inherit from her) claim to be
| the legitimate heir to the last emporer deposed in 1910.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| He's a pretender to a defunct throne. There are a few of
| these types running around, such as for the Hapsburg and
| French thrones, but generally everyone thinks they're a
| bunch of weirdo has-beens.
|
| The Bourbon pretender is hilarious though, because he
| inherited his ancestor's complete inability to read the
| room.
| gerikson wrote:
| "The Bourbons have learned nothing and forgotten nothing"
| - Talleyrand.
|
| My favorite tit-bit from 19th century French history is
| that the Count of Chambord had a legit shot at becoming
| Henry V of France but blew it because he insisted (among
| other things) that the white flag of Bourbon France
| replace the tricolor.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Honestly, one has to wonder if there's a Bourbon
| tradition of concussing every child in the moments after
| birth. It's practically the only thing that would explain
| why they've been so consistently tone deaf and
| incompetent since Louis XIV.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > He's a pretended to a defunct throne.
|
| The _designated heir_ to the pretender, etc. And not even
| the most accepted pretender among those who think the
| lineage of that throne means something, but he is the
| only one actively seeking restoration after 110 years of
| the throne being defunct.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Wow arch is bleeding edge even for wiki URLs.
| mabbo wrote:
| Surely by now Mr Lee can see that he's made a mistake, right?
| Like, how bad do things have to get before he can say "Maybe it's
| me and the actions I've taken?". What kind of goals could he even
| have where this is the outcome that was desired or expected?
|
| At this point, to not recognize an error has been made would take
| a level of narcissism and sociopathy that I cannot imagine.
| wut42 wrote:
| Tried to talk. I'd have been better by pissing in a violin.
| Foxboron wrote:
| The network operators are calling project owners "brainwashed"
| in the #freenode-services channel.
|
| I think they are at the moment following titanic all the way to
| the bottom.
|
| Edit with full quote:
|
| > 14:44:44 lionman@ : LeShadow: We dont support
| adverts/invites/spam for networks we don't affiliate that force
| users to move even they want to stay with freenode. The users
| have been forced by many people and ops (brainwashed), even
| they didn't want to.
| fundamental wrote:
| Taking a look around their remaining service level channels
| it sure seems like trolls have taken over. Either that or
| people have such a strong disconnect with the events that
| they cannot actually understand why people would have
| concerns or objections.
| Foxboron wrote:
| I think it's a strong disconnect along with the staff
| selling lies wholesale. It's weird.
|
| I do wonder when Andrew is going to realize that the 68K
| users he has is mostly idle connections or small private
| irc channels.
| dethos wrote:
| Is it a good time to move chat to a federated setup? Something
| like Matrix.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Could you elaborate more on your statement/question? Isn't IRC
| _already_ federated by design?
| speeder wrote:
| So, I just woke up, came to say good morning on IRC to my friends
| and...
|
| Find this instead.
|
| https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...
|
| WTF rasengan!
| craftinator wrote:
| Maybe he'll go back to evangelizing PIA under it's new shady
| owners, and leave freenode to rot.
| depingus wrote:
| Are you talking about Private Internet Access the VPN? If so,
| got anymore info on this?
| craftinator wrote:
| Yes, that VPN. I don't have any hard info, links and such,
| but after reading a number of discussions on HN and
| actually debating with Andrew a bit about it back in 2019,
| I ended up dropping them because I no longer had faith in
| their trustworthiness.
|
| From what I remember of it, PIA hired Mark Karpeles as
| their CTO. Mark has a somewhat sordid history, and was
| involved with Kape (KAPE maybe?), which has a history with
| malware and privacy violations. The whole thing was murky,
| but I got the impression that Andrew was really dodgey
| about it, kept spewing canned PR statements about how Mark
| is a "really great guy" and how they were all so excited,
| and I believe the company actually changed hands. This is
| completely heresay on my part, I never did any real
| research, just got some bad impressions about the whole
| thing and switched to Mullvad.
|
| Actually, did dig up a relevant link:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
| speeder wrote:
| The same Mark Kerpeles that almost went to jail because
| he stole MtGox customers money to buy a castle for his
| mom?
| wearywanderer wrote:
| > _Mark has a somewhat sordid history,_
|
| 'Somewhat sordid' is amusing understatement. Mark
| Karpeles is only slightly less criminal than Bernie
| Madoff.
| craftinator wrote:
| I've only done the lightest of research on it, and don't
| know any of the internal details, so I'd prefer to err on
| the side of being overly gracious. But from what I have
| heard, he doesn't have much in the way of scruples or
| morals.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| A lot of the affected projects have registered their trademarks.
| Could this be grounds to sue Freenode?
|
| I'm not much into IRC these days, hadn't I seen this topic I
| would have easily been fooled into thinking that the affected
| channels still represent their respective projects.
| immibis wrote:
| Doubt it. ## channels have always been unofficial. Nothing
| stops you making a ##windows channel or whatever
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| It's the # channels that are affected. If I understand
| correctly, ending up on the ## counterpart when you try to go
| to # is Freenode's doing, not the projects themselves. I
| guess that makes ## channels official now.
| ldavison wrote:
| With so much drama on I-R-C, Freenode is now trash thanks to
| L-E-E
| gowld wrote:
| This is just Freenode applying Apple App Store policy regarding
| mentioning competitors. Freenode is creating a walled garden
| where they can control the user experience, and the new owners
| need to protect the value of their financial investment in the
| platform.
|
| It's also a hostile takeover.
|
| Hooray for capitalism.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Programmers who use IRC seem like a hard group to build a wall
| around.
| superkuh wrote:
| Uh, I'm not sure it was actually 700. Not every channel with
| libera in the topic was taken over. It was mostly just those with
| a single #.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The new policy says "Primary channels are required to stay
| open. If a primary channel closes access to its users or is in
| violation of freenode policies, then it will be closed and
| forwarded to a topical channel."
|
| So I assume that advertising Libera is not (yet) enough to be
| taken over. Taking over channels that declare themselves closed
| (and redirecting them to an unofficial channel about the same
| topic) seems reasonable, tbh.
| ybloviator wrote:
| Nope, they nuked a local user group's channel simply for
| having Libera in the topic.
| kadoban wrote:
| You assume incorrectly, unfortunately. Advertising
| libera.chat is enough to get taken over.
| Ndymium wrote:
| But they did take over channels that merely had the mention
| of Libera in their topic, no matter the context. Mistake or
| not, it happened.
| rekado wrote:
| Exactly. #guix was not closed and merely mentioned that the
| community had moved to Libera.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Channels that hadn't even moved were taken over, such as
| #elixir-lang. They only had a mention "Also see <channel>
| on <network-that-shan't-be-named>" in the topic. Well,
| they have moved now.
| esarbe wrote:
| I'm not sure if that is a good defense of the actions.
|
| "I didn't beat all of them, just the ones that I thought showed
| /real/ disrespect?"
|
| It's a abuse of trust. That's it. Any (other) commercial
| company trying to do the same thing would be in deep trouble.
| superkuh wrote:
| I am certainly not defending the actions. I just know that
| that 720 number was found by searching netsplit.de's list of
| Freenode channels for "libera". It is not a list generated
| from known takeovers. And I know that Andrew Lee created a
| new set of rules (after the fact) for this act which center
| around primary channels (single #) as a cover for his (still
| obvious) bad behavior.
|
| So, definitely not in defense, just pointing out where the
| numbers came from. The ##* channel I've op'd for many years
| with hundreds of users has had "libera" in the topic for a
| while and has not yet been taken over. But we are moving
| regardless.
| esarbe wrote:
| Ah, I was mislead by the wording. Ah, thanks for the
| clarification!
| nathias wrote:
| I hope he set all the topics to: t4k30v3r by l33
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| People are starting to call it "Leenode" to honor Freenode's
| legacy. RIP one of the epic IRC servers.
|
| It's strange that the downfall of the server is very similar to
| the downfall of a business. It's eerie how similar the
| mismanagement is. Or at least, what I saw at some past companies.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Is freenode having its sourceforge moment ? In 10 years
| abandoned and then revived by normal people?
| pluc wrote:
| If Game of Thrones were an IRC network
| newsclues wrote:
| Businesses are just organized groups of people, for the purpose
| of profit, the leadership and management dynamics apply to any
| human group
| duxup wrote:
| I think a lot of things attributed to 'business' or other
| things, are really just human nature.
| cmsj wrote:
| Speaking of business, the UK company that technically owns
| freenode (Freenode Limited) is currently in a state where it's
| likely to be forcibly dissolved, because it hasn't filed any
| paperwork in some time:
|
| https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
| techrat wrote:
| And Christel Dahlskjaer was (still is, the CCO) an employee
| of Lee's company, Private Internet Access, when she sold
| Freenode Networks to Freenode Limited.
|
| It wasn't hers to sell, even in her capacity of head of
| Freenode Staff at the time.
| phobox360 wrote:
| Lee ows PIA? That explains a bit. I have an interent
| distrust of big VPNs whose ads are so prolific all over the
| place. Same reason I won't use Nord.
| Macha wrote:
| He did own PIA but not for a few years, he sold it to a
| different (but with its own shady past) company in 2019
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Any recommendations today for hosted vpn?
| Macha wrote:
| I don't use any such services, so you'll need to ask
| elsewhere.
| blibble wrote:
| would be most amusing if after all this he ends up forfeiting
| Freenode to the British Crown (real one, not pretend one),
| simply because he neglected to complete his paperwork on time
| chaorace wrote:
| What I find more interesting is how singlehandedly Libera ate
| Freenode's lunch. You might expect all of these FOSS
| communities to splinter apart, but they all seem to be
| gravitating toward the same place. I wonder what the story
| behind that is?
| daenney wrote:
| There are some projects that are also moving off IRC entirely
| now, which likely would've stuck around for a while longer if
| not for the Freenode debacle. Unfortunately some are also
| moving to entirely closed source platforms like Discord.
| omegote wrote:
| > Unfortunately some are also moving to entirely closed
| source platforms like Discord
|
| From an openness point of view, yes, that's unfortunate.
| But discord channels are arguably way more useful than IRC
| nowadays. The mere message persistence is something that
| tips the scale in favour of Discord.
| _jal wrote:
| Moving away from IRC means a lot of more casual open
| source types will not follow. I not going to install some
| random chat app I'm never going to use again and go
| through signup bullshit just to see if there's someone
| who can give me a hand on something - to big of a
| barrier.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Discord works perfectly fine as a simple webpage with a
| basic email/password user account. In that sense it's
| actually significantly more accessible than IRC, which is
| not web-native and does require the use of either a
| client or some web bridge.
| _jal wrote:
| It is friction. No matter how little you think it
| matters, adding friction always loses people. In this
| case, they're the old-hands types; if you think your
| project would benefit from losing those in favor of
| newbies, sure, you can make that choice.
|
| Like I said, messing around with someone's email
| verification nonsense probably with a captcha and stupid
| questions on top is likely more than I want to spend on
| seeing if someone who might help me with a transient
| issue is even available, so I am unlikely to do so.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| > _Discord works perfectly fine as a simple webpage_
|
| It has a webapp, but it does not work "perfectly fine" in
| my experience. The UX is bewilderingly complex; it took
| me several minutes to figure out how to make it stop
| ringing more bells and whistles than a las vegas casino.
| I had a hard time even figuring out what symbols were
| meant to be buttons that get clicked; even _finding_ the
| settings screen was a pain in the ass. It 's truly awful.
| gerikson wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what IRC client do you use?
| wearywanderer wrote:
| Formerly xchat, now hexchat. I also leave weechat idling
| in a tmux session.
|
| My take on discord is that it's been designed for the
| zoomer/gamer demographic; the sort of people who also get
| sucked in by gacha games. Lots of sounds and colors that
| leave the user dazed and intoxicated.
| robjan wrote:
| That's great until discord changes their business model
| and reduces or removes the free plan.
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| This is what I fear will happen, as it seems to be the
| cycle. I do however need to give some credit for not
| selling out to Micro$oft.
| foobar33333 wrote:
| Matrix is still far ahead of IRC while still being open.
| anthk wrote:
| You can run an IRC client in really limited machines. You
| can have a client even with Netcat and SH.
| SSLy wrote:
| But we shouldn't held UX ransom by such hardware. Martix
| has TUI clients too.
| welterde wrote:
| Currently playing with Matrix a bit and I have to say
| that most of the TUI clients are pretty terrible still.
| The desktop clients are not much better, they either have
| mobile UI but on desktop or are quite buggy still. And
| what they all have in common is that they are quite slow
| as well, despite local homeserver running off an nvme
| ssd.
|
| None of the ones I have tried come even close to UX of
| pretty much any desktop IRC client.
| Arathorn wrote:
| weechat-matrix should be pretty great, given the TUI
| is... well, weechat, which is a pretty great IRC TUI?
| welterde wrote:
| That had some weird interactions with some of the other
| scripts I was running. There were some known
| incompatibilities that were still being worked on - and
| now it's being rewritten in rust? In any case, I wasn't
| having a great time with the python version of it.
|
| So went with a more native TUI application (gomuks) and
| didn't really enjoy that either (scrolling broken, weird
| mouse behavior, unread messages got stuck on some
| channels and in other rooms it didn't show any unread
| messages at all, stuck room that I already left and some
| other issues that annoyed me).
|
| Then I thought I give some desktop applications a go
| (quaternion, spectral, nheko, mirage and last I tried was
| neochat) and they fell into roughly two categories: ok-
| ish UX but too buggy to be usable or work but have UI
| designed for mobile but on desktop (which is a no-go for
| me).
|
| That's where I am with my quest for a decent matrix
| client. I haven't tried _all_ desktop clients yet, but
| there are not that many non-electron/browser based ones
| left I think.
| anthk wrote:
| >which is a pretty great IRC TUI?
|
| Catgirl, or some patched mpu irc.
| coldpie wrote:
| It really doesn't. The best option is weechat-matrix, but
| that's already a dead project. The lack of good client
| diversity is what is holding me back from using Matrix.
| Macha wrote:
| Dead is overstating it. The maintainers are moving new
| feature development to a Rust rewrite, weechat-matrix-rs,
| but still accepting bugfixes/etc to the current Python
| codebase
| tialaramex wrote:
| Hmm. Given we got here by talking about people who can't
| (rather than won't) run heavyweight GUI clients, a Rust
| rewrite seems like it misses the point.
|
| That is, I'm sure it makes sense for them, and for most
| of their actual users, because Rust is nice, but if I
| have an m68k machine, too bad, there is no Rust for m68k
| (unless I'm reading the platform support chart wrong) and
| so this rewrite likely orphans me.
|
| Now, if for a Debian channel, even a Debian channel
| _about_ an attempt to port Debian to m68k, then I have no
| doubt your users all have something less stupid, maybe
| ARM or x86-64 or even PowerPC. They prefer a non-GUI for
| their own reasons but ultimately Matrix is an option.
|
| But if you're a channel for actual m68k "classic" Amiga
| you might actually have a non-trivial number of users for
| whom "it doesn't run on m68k" is a showstopper. They have
| an IRC client today.
|
| Rust doesn't target barely-capable archaic platforms like
| Motorola 68xxx or 80286 and I don't think it should
| start. But that means we have to accept that a Rust
| client won't support those platforms.
| Macha wrote:
| I'm not seeing classic Amiga on Python's supported
| platforms either: https://www.python.org/download/other/
|
| I doubt it would perform well even if you did get it
| running.
|
| So this isn't a change in platform support.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Fair point.
| Arathorn wrote:
| weechat-matrix is _really_ not a dead project. the
| maintainer works for Element, and is working on matrix-
| rust-sdk (and thus weechat-matrix-rs), but weechat-matrix
| is alive in well and in no way unmaintained or dead.
| coldpie wrote:
| Okay, but I'm not going to go through the effort of
| setting up weechat-matrix if I know I'm going to need to
| later throw all that effort away and switch to weechat-
| matrix-rs. I'll just wait for the latter. It is, for my
| purposes, dead.
| curryst wrote:
| Machines that can't run Matrix is a pretty small subset.
| There's a Matrix plugin for Weechat, so you should be
| able to connect from anything with roughly the power of a
| Raspberry Pi. Probably slightly less than that; but yeah,
| you're probably not going to have a good time trying to
| use an ESP32 as a client. I don't see that as a huge
| drawback.
| progval wrote:
| > There's a Matrix plugin for Weechat
|
| There are two:
|
| * https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix is in
| maintenance mode, and in beta according to
| https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix/
|
| * https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs is a "work
| in progress and doesn't do much yet"
| na85 wrote:
| I like IRC a lot but I don't see this as an advantage of
| IRC. To a first approximation, zero people are connecting
| to IRC via netcat.
| anthk wrote:
| It's an example on the trivialness on using it, you can
| get a client anywhere, like gopher.
|
| SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem.
| Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari
| or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway?
| No issues again.
|
| You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is
| broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix
| utilities? Go on.
| na85 wrote:
| >SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No
| problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a
| 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router
| with a gateway? No issues again.
|
| >You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is
| broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix
| utilities? Go on.
|
| I understood what you meant. But when would any of those
| scenarios occur and you don't have your phone, and thus
| access to Matrix/Discord/whatever?
|
| IRC has awful UX on a phone, and I say this as a guy with
| a sophisticated weechat+Pushbullet setup going on. The
| benefits of being able to get on IRC from your NetBSD
| toaster aren't really benefits at all because you always
| have a phone. Users want slack/discord-like presence.
| They want push notifications on hilights. They don't want
| to have to futz about with znc or tmux+irssi.
|
| IRC failed to keep up with the tastes of modern users and
| that's why it's been slowly hemorrhaging users for 15
| years.
| welterde wrote:
| > They want push notifications on hilights.
|
| Huh? Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?
|
| And if you are running weechat anyway, something like
| weechat-android might be an better option for you? That
| connects back to weechat using the weechat relay
| protocol.
| gowld wrote:
| Message persistence is provided by irc log services.
| Zak wrote:
| Kids these days, who should get off our lawns, do not
| like that user experience.
|
| If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd
| use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than
| IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user
| experience that should be familiar and comfortable to
| users of Slack and Discord.
| welterde wrote:
| Maybe I am alone in this, but not everyone likes the UX
| of slack or discord and might prefer a more information
| focused/less distracting desktop application and prefer a
| native desktop application over something
| electron/browser based.
|
| And for those people the current options for Matrix are
| all very much a work in progress to put it mildly.
| Zak wrote:
| I've been using nheko (well, the fork of it that's
| actually maintained). There are a couple areas in which
| it's a bit of a WIP, but it's a pretty good experience so
| far.
| welterde wrote:
| Giving Nheko a spin right now and while it is somewhat
| better than some of the other matrix clients I have
| tried, the UI is still much too close to discord/slack
| for my taste. And doesn't have enough knobs to disable
| features I don't want(*) (hopefully that will change over
| time). It feels quite a lot snappier than the other
| clients, which is good.
|
| It wastes quite a bit of vertical space per message, but
| it's still somehow hard to see for me which lines were
| said by which person. Something with relative placement
| of avatar, nick and message is throwing me off.
|
| (*) Granted, it may be a bit odd that I simply want to
| disable _all_ matrix features (avatars, replies,
| displaying images, honoring redactions, large multiline
| messages/embedded texts, typing notifications, etc.).
| Zak wrote:
| There's more than one way to do it, and I definitely look
| forward to clients becoming more varied and configurable
| as Matrix (I hope) grows in popularity.
| welterde wrote:
| Totally agree that not everyone wants the same UX.
|
| And same applies to IRC as well, there are clients that
| go more in the slack/discord direction (which I also
| won't touch), but it's great to have options, so everyone
| can be happy in the end :)
| goodpoint wrote:
| Matrix's architecture has significant privacy issues.
|
| It leaks metadata on users activities in channels and
| their read receipts.
|
| The data is published to the whole Internet.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I
| 'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than
| IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user
| experience that should be familiar and comfortable to
| users of Slack and Discord._
|
| I've been trying Matrix on-and-off, and found it
| ridiculously complicated to figure out bridging (which is
| probably Matrix's top selling point, and was important
| for my communities) on the "official" servers.
| Zak wrote:
| Bridging seems like a big selling point if you're
| migrating an existing chat channel to Matrix. It seems
| less compelling if you're starting a new one.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Given how some (open-source-esque) communities work,
| there'll be people who prefer using their preferred
| platform (e.g. IRC, Discord, Telegram) even if it doesn't
| have first class support.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That only solves half the problem. There's no easy (read:
| 1 click) way of quoting an older message. No easy way of
| handling notifications (read: not PMs but when someone
| mentions you in a channel like @handle in other chat
| services), no easy way of handling roaming, etc.
|
| Yes, ZNCs solve some of these problems, but they're not
| easy to set up, the channel mentions isn't even remotely
| as intuitive as that in Slack et al and the playback
| history isn't as user friendly as the history in other
| chat services because it replays _n_ messages
| irrespective of whether you saw them or missed them while
| DCed. Which can make roaming a PITA at times.
|
| I say all this as a someone who loves IRC. I've built IRC
| clients in the 90s, numerous IRC bots, ran ZNC services
| and even use IRC as my primary IM back in the early days
| of Android (and thus seen first hand the frustrations of
| using IRC on the train and getting frequent disconnects
| to my bounce).
|
| IRC as a concept is amazing however IRC as a protocol
| sucks by modern day standards and while all the little
| workarounds are fun to hack together, ultimately they
| still fall short of what products like Slack and Discord
| are doing. So I can totally see why some people don't
| bother with IRC any more.
|
| I've not (yet) played with Matrix. Maybe that's the
| spiritual successor to IRC. It sure as hell can't be any
| worse than XMMP (I _really_ wanted to like XMMP but just
| couldn't get past how unnecessarily over-engineered it
| was)
| tffgg wrote:
| Could you expand on XMPP being over engineered? (Just
| curious) Thanks
| Zababa wrote:
| I think Zulip is a good alternative. It's FOSS and has
| persistance and threading. I do dislike the fact that you
| have to sign up and can't see the discussions without it.
| lokedhs wrote:
| If they need that, they can use Matrix. There is really
| no reason to move to a closed ecosystem.
| mariuolo wrote:
| > Libera ate Freenode's lunch
|
| The part that leaves me perplexed the most is that said lunch
| is two crackers with cream cheese.
|
| How much money could there be in running an IRC network?
| blihp wrote:
| _If_ you could slowly dial up the ads while retaining most
| of the users, probably a decent amount as a small business.
| However, this approach has been tried and failed
| repeatedly. Strangely, open source folks often see this
| stuff coming and scatter / relocate before the 'profit'
| stage is ever reached.
| haasn wrote:
| This is not true, many are moving to OFTC. But the obvious
| answer is, Libera is run by the ex-freenode staffers, and
| runs on the same software. (Unlike OFTC)
|
| So Libera is basically Freenode's spiritual successor with a
| different name.
| est31 wrote:
| While you are right that Libera is ran by former freenode
| operators, it's not 100% the same software. When you
| connect to freenode the server tells you it's running ircd-
| seven-1.1.9, while libera tells you it runs on
| solanum-1.0-dev. OTC says hybrid-7.2.2+oftc1.7.3.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Freenode was in the process of migrating to Solanum but
| this was one of the projects that Lee halted (and in a
| very underhanded way too). So it makes sense that Libra
| runs Solanum
| marcan_42 wrote:
| AIUI the old freenode folks had been working on solanum
| for a while now, and this was the perfect time to switch
| to it. So it's not the same software, but it's the
| spiritual successor too.
| c0l0 wrote:
| I don't see that (some communities opting for libera.chat,
| some for OFTC) as a problem, though. Recent events show
| that _some_ amount of IRC network diversity can only be a
| good thing.
| varispeed wrote:
| If users can just switch to another platform, then acquiring
| something like this is pointless. Years ago company I know bought
| a service - something like Instagram, but it was built on some
| open source project. The former owner setup a new platform and
| had most users moved over after the sale. So the company
| essentially got left with dead accounts and a spaghettised open
| source project...
| mormegil wrote:
| Wikimedia IRC channels are moving from Freenode to Libera.Chat
|
| "Earlier we had planned on supporting the Freenode channels for
| longer with bridges across the networks, but supposedly "draft"
| changes to Freenode policies and recent actions by their new
| staff have pushed us to close our channels and fully leave their
| network."
|
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists...
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Migrating_to_Libera_Chat
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| The end of a certain Internet epoch, I should say.
| eloeffler wrote:
| This whole scandal actually makes me want to dive into IRC
| again after a long time just because it shows me how many
| commited people are active there and how much I was probably
| missing.
|
| I don't want to say it was a good thing that it happened, just
| that from my perspective it shed new light on IRC and some
| others might feel so, too.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Yup, there are lots of great communities still on IRC. :)
| rubin55 wrote:
| I can definitely recommend it. #algorithms, #haskell,
| #python, #java.. amazingly great + skilled communities. I
| learned so much from people there..
|
| A quick "hey, how would you do this in $language" gives you
| like 5 responses which give you an immediate deep
| understanding of what's possible, how you could go about it,
| which versions of the given language support such an aproach,
| etc.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I think after a few years of Discord and Slack, I am happy to
| get back to IRC (ok, I never left).
|
| Sure, different feature set and I like some of the stuff modern
| alternatives bring to the table. But they also bring a lot of
| disadvantages.
| vvpan wrote:
| I do not think the so. The URL did not make the era, the
| communities did. If a community is strong enough they'll just
| move. So everything is still on. It's like if software forks an
| renames it's still the same thing.
| zatertip wrote:
| Gentoo lost a large number of Freenode channels to rasengan
| overnight. Emergency relocation to Libera Chat ahead of schedule
| has been decided upon.
| wumpus wrote:
| That's what you get for centralization combined with a couple of
| decades of poor architecture choices.
|
| signed,
|
| the wumpus who gave the world EFNET
| sanqui wrote:
| Do you have an opinion on any particular technological
| successor to IRC?
| wumpus wrote:
| As those of you who frequent alt.irc.recovery recall, I quit
| IRC cold turkey a long time ago. But I'm fascinated by what
| Slack has done with the IRC concept -- it can be an amazingly
| positive cultural transition for a tech company to switch
| from mostly email to nearly 100% slack.
| bhaak wrote:
| Yes, Slack works for a company environment (where you only
| have one community open). But how does it feel if you have
| several different communities open?
|
| In an IRC client, there is no difference between two
| channels on the same server and two channels on different
| server. Switching between channels is seamlessly.
|
| Discord fails there pretty hard.
| croon wrote:
| As someone who has been on IRC since ~95 and still uses
| it, I view Discord as several self-hosted IRC servers
| (with voice/video features on top), and in that way it
| compares more favorably.
|
| I wont speak to the privacy issues/data issues, but as a
| user, Discord has honestly been fantastic and beyond my
| expectations. Its' API for making integrations has been
| great too.
| bhaak wrote:
| How do you handle the plethora of channels every Discord
| server has?
|
| Like, I usually are only interested in a few channels on
| a given Discord server but by default, I get everything.
|
| How do you switch between different servers or different
| channels? In my IRC setup, I can switch to the next
| channel with activity with the press of a key. Or get a
| list of channels with a search input to jump to.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm really hoping matrix is the long term solution to
| this, and the general vacuum of an open source base for
| communication protocols.
| feb wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what do you consider the worst architecture
| choices in IRC ? And what would be better solutions ?
| xref wrote:
| Hah, had to look you up
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
|
| Brings back memories of tcl/tk eggdrop bots, buying shell
| accounts to keep your nick held while you were offline, and
| automating server jumping so you wouldn't be banned for idling
| wumpus wrote:
| Good times! I wonder how many people were launched into
| infosec careers or learned coding or had some other positive
| result in their lives because of petty fights on IRC.
|
| I learned a lot from that era, not only about social skills,
| but also asynchronous programming from watching msa make the
| irc server code much more scalable.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Just like Andrew Lee (rasengan)!
|
| > Today, I'm strong. Today, I'm confident. Today, I am
| social. Today, I am patient. Today, I am accepting. Today,
| I have a cause. This would not be the case, if yesterday,
| for me, was not IRC.
|
| Do you also agree that "IRC, is a transcended level of
| humanity, that values you for all the other genes and
| experiences that make you, you - unlike the "real" world
| which is utterly focused on nothing"?
|
| Source: https://www.irc.com/lets-take-irc-further
|
| (Yes, he bought irc.com too.)
| wumpus wrote:
| Well, and then there are some people that I don't exactly
| want to consider how IRC "improved" them.
| wayvey wrote:
| Ironic how the very front page of irc.com mentions "No
| vendor lock in".
| enriquto wrote:
| > Good times! I wonder how many people were launched into
| infosec careers or learned coding or had some other
| positive result in their lives because of petty fights on
| IRC.
|
| I certainly did! After spending a couple of years (at
| 16-17) idling on IRC and picking stupid teenage fights, out
| of boredom I learned to code... in the mircScript language,
| to write silly bots and stuff. This is what motivated me to
| learn programming seriously.
| wumpus wrote:
| IRC bots are really a fascinating category of software,
| because you can inject them into situations where people
| didn't necessarily agree to use them :-D much easier to
| attract users of your code if it's not totally...
| voluntary.
| enriquto wrote:
| Have you ever seen a child using a telephone or a tablet?
| Its the same thing, but a thousand times over! They have
| software injected into them and they unwillingly suffer
| the effects of said software.
|
| Or any adult browsing a website with uncalled-for
| javascript for that matter.
| wumpus wrote:
| That wasn't what I was getting at, sorry to have been
| unclear. What I was saying is that you can write an IRC
| bot and then show it to your friends (on IRC) without
| your friends having to do anything in advance (like
| downloading an app.)
| Havoc wrote:
| A lesson in how to buy something and then make it worthless
| tinco wrote:
| If they would have simply done nothing, nothing at all then
| hardly anyone would have left. I wasn't planning on leaving
| freenode, there hadn't been any hard evidence of malice and I
| have no attachment to any staff.
|
| If there's enough users in an IRC channel to have a decent
| conversation, and there's someone actively banning spammers and
| trolls, then that's good enough.
|
| Now they went actively being aggressive about it, motivating me
| and probqbly most other previously disaffected people to make a
| decision. That user count will go down, he's an idiot for waving
| that banner so proudly.
| speeder wrote:
| This also just happened to Allegro. Also I am not part of Allegro
| core team but I DID contributed in the past (including just
| regular old bug testing).
|
| https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...
| moepstar wrote:
| The drops in the graphs speak volumes, i wonder how they'll look
| in a week or something...
|
| https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
| [deleted]
| kjrose wrote:
| Well. That's a good sign that whoever bought out freenode has no
| comprehension of group psychology or the fact that this behavior
| is more likely to lead to people leaving very rapidly. Barbara
| Streisand syndrome anyone?
|
| It is so clear that they thing the community owes them something
| when in reality the people who use the irc are the only reason
| freenode has any value. It's not that hard to spin up another irc
| server, it is hard as heck to get lots of people to join and use
| it.
| rasengan wrote:
| These channels were already already closed. We removed the topics
| and forwarded users to an off-topic channel with the same name.
|
| If your channel was incorrectly marked in this, please let our
| staff know and we'll remediate it asap.
|
| Thank you for your patience!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Look, I've found Freenode to be insularly run for the longest
| time and was no fan of the old staff. That said, this is
| bullshit. Being frustrated about having topics call out a new
| network is frustrating, surely, but you should _not_ seize
| channels with no notification from their owners and move them
| to the off-topic namespace. You 've hurt so many more than just
| the staff. Grow up.
| imode wrote:
| You're a disgusting pile of shit.
|
| Hope you're arrested and thrown in jail for that Mt. Gox shit.
| vifon wrote:
| > If your channel was incorrectly marked in this, please let
| our staff know and we'll remediate it asap.
|
| Ah yes, shoot first, ask questions later. Two of my channels
| just got hijacked this way and I'm not in a mood to jump
| through your hoops now.
| [deleted]
| wally4000 wrote:
| No they were not, our namespace was still on both networks. To
| accommodate for BOTH networks. Users were able to stay on
| either network.
|
| I was willing to give you a chance but now, that chance is
| gone. Thanks for nothing
| spicywasabi wrote:
| these channels weren't abandoned, chatting one minute and
| banned the next isn't "abandoned"
| Libcat99 wrote:
| You are burning down the network around you and complaining
| that others are starting fires.
| dave_universetf wrote:
| Just tried to do this to reclaim a channel you stole from its
| community. Your staff greeted me with nothing but silence. Your
| aim is very clearly to establish a fiefdom, and damn those who
| get in the way.
|
| "And you're, what, a petty thief with delusions of standing?
| Sad little king of a sad little hill."
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Man, I was one of the few people who tried to stick up for you:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236832
|
| It's like you went out of your way to make the worst possible
| decision at every step. All you had to do was nothing, and let
| the people go who wanted to go. But now people are going to
| actively fight you.
| [deleted]
| Ccecil wrote:
| Goodbye #reprap@freenode You will be missed.
| Tatarize wrote:
| We have deprecated the function "get_channel()" please use
| ".channel" instead...
|
| Deprecated eh, you mean abandoned. Deprecated function removed
| immediately!
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| The official go channel (#go-nuts) on freenode had in the topic
| "we're also on libera.chat, if freenode dies" (or something
| very close to that, quoting from memory, I don't log IRC) and
| yet it was shut down due to "policy violation", forwarded to ##
| namespace and the topic removed.
|
| I for one just wanted things to be quiet. I understand it's
| frustrating to have channels pointing to a different network
| and users on your network trying to get people to leave. Even
| assuming, for the sake of argument, your intentions are good,
| how on earth was that just now considered a good move? Any
| basis for arguing you're acting in good faith you've pretty
| much destroyed at this point.
|
| Your attempts to give this a positive spin on freenode.net[1]
| aren't very convincing either.
|
| Not a fan of old Freenode staff. But the best alternatives
| definitely seem to be libera.chat and oftc!
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210525231635/https://freenode....
| (archive link in case freenode.net gets edited)
| techrat wrote:
| By doing what you have just done, you have shown every FOSS
| project that you cannot be trusted, are vindictive and will
| retaliate against any project using your service for any
| perceived slight.
|
| You are everything you accused ex Staffers of being: An abusive
| operator with a massive chip on his shoulder. You are too
| immature to be trusted to run one channel, nevermind an entire
| IRC network.
|
| You are poison and everything you touch will die. Freenode will
| not be the exception.
|
| ---
|
| Decided to go through and grep my irssi logs.
|
| Andy, remember saying this in #freenode about ten days ago?
|
| 08:57 < rasengan> You ban abusively, and haven't really helped
| freenode at all until now. Freenode policies have been shaped
| for you and your posse to extract value and now you're holding
| it hostage while asking people to go to another network.
|
| Aged like fine milk, that one...
|
| Banning abusively... Haven't really helped Freenode... Freenode
| policies being shaped for you and your posse... Holding it
| hostage...
|
| I'd ask you if all of this is really what you want to be
| remembered for, but the more important thing is that we're all
| going to get on just fine without you.
| db48x wrote:
| Agreed. I thought last week that all this was a tempest in a
| teapot and I wasn't going to bother thinking about it.
| Today's drama is a pretty convincing demonstration that
| Freenode is not a stable place to hold discussions any more.
| There's plenty of other irc networks out there.
| neolog wrote:
| Off to Libera, the new home of the freenode community.
|
| https://libera.chat/news/welcome-to-libera-chat
| pmlnr wrote:
| I'd much rather like see people/projects running their own
| irc/xmpp/matrix under their own domain so that this situation
| can never happen again to them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The moderation workload providing a public platform,
| especially one that allows direct peer to peer communication,
| is _intense_. Spammers, trolls, 1337 h4xx0r scriptkiddies and
| other "for the lulz" types on one side - these make a ton of
| work as they're openly visible, diminish the value of the
| platform and are not shy of using some 10$ a hour rented
| botnet to essentially kick you off the Internet... and on the
| other side, criminals that want to fly "under the radar" for
| you and expose you as platform ops to some _serious_ legal
| risk: child abuse and warez.
|
| There's a reason why there aren't many IRC servers/networks
| left over... it's incredibly expensive and taxing to run
| them, with users leaving en masse towards closed-source walls
| like Discord and Slack (which both have brazenly copied IRC
| principles!).
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix is trying to solve this dilemma via
| https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-
| matrix... - we started writing the decentralised reputation
| stuff in earnest last week. https://github.com/matrix-
| org/matrix-doc/pull/3215 has some more details.
| neolog wrote:
| What are the risks that the biggest Matrix servers get
| acquired by hostile entities like happened to freenode?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Thanks for the write-up, however... there is one thing
| that pops out: assuming there will be externals, be it
| antifa, NCMEC or a government, who provide feeds of
| entity IDs associated with Nazis, child abuse, stalking,
| doxxing or pirated content - would not such a feed be an
| immediate confirmation "this is the real deal" for those
| _actively willing_ to search for such content?
|
| "Not wanting to play god" is an admirable position, but
| there are classes of content where staying somewhat
| neutral-ish is dangerous as hell.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Those are all important points, though I wonder: with
| registration required, tied to email accounts, and if we
| were all running thousands of small irc/xmpp/matrix servers
| instead of one big system that is indeed simple to attack,
| would the dangers still be that serious?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > would the dangers still be that serious?
|
| Well... if you're the person that the server, domain name
| or association leadership is legally associated with,
| _you_ are the person where the feds will knock on the
| door and raid if someone uses your server for pedo or
| warez content.
|
| A bigger entity like a foundation, corporation or
| university (hopefully) has financial resources to pay for
| lawyers, to institute compliance and screening procedures
| and other things, but average Joe Admin does not. This is
| something many German TOR operators had to discover the
| hard way - especially dealing with the stigma of cops
| showing up for a CP investigation...
| [deleted]
| 3np wrote:
| dang: rasengan's toplevel comment is dead/flagged, can this be
| undone as it's very central to the discussion?
|
| Hope it's OK I post it here in the meantime for users who aren't
| aware that they can still read it by enabling showdead:
|
| ---
|
| These channels were already already closed. We removed the topics
| and forwarded users to an off-topic channel with the same name.
|
| If your channel was incorrectly marked in this, please let our
| staff know and we'll remediate it asap.
|
| Thank you for your patience!
| em-bee wrote:
| here is a link to his message:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285980
| Liskni_si wrote:
| No, many of those channels were not already closed. #xmonad was
| still very much active on both sides as we were waiting for
| libera.chat staff to process our community registration, and
| there was just this tiny little mention at the _end_ of the
| topic that we're in the process of moving.
|
| Still, freenode kicked us out anyway this morning. Luckily the
| Libera staff were able to process our registration quickly
| afterwards.
| Fordec wrote:
| Honestly, this is kind of a blessing in disguise. Before there
| was ambiguity between where to go, what had legitimacy or
| continuity of service issues for certain channels weighing up
| switching costs. This sort of stuff puts a line under things.
|
| Move voluntarily in a rush or move chaoticly under duress when
| your channel gets hijacked without notice.
| jchw wrote:
| I think it's unambiguous: neither. Libera.chat hasn't done
| something this boneheaded, but given how this all went down we
| should simply not be supporting these networks.
|
| The prawnsalad farewell is probably the best evidence:
|
| https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...
| geofft wrote:
| I read that when it was posted, but I don't follow - what
| part of that evidence indicates that Libera.chat is
| untrustworthy or unworthy of support?
| josefx wrote:
| The "Spilling into IRCv3" is him accusing someone suggested
| for board membership of lying, the thread he links ends with
| the conclusion that there is no evidence to support his
| claims.
|
| Seems like he is the one spilling the drama he complains
| about into IRCv3.
| jeltz wrote:
| Agreed. It is obvious even from their own account that it
| was prawnsalad who let the conflict spill into IRCv3. I
| can't really agree with their view that they are a neutral
| third party. They seem deeply involved in the conflict.
|
| For reference I had no previous idea who any of the three
| parties are.
| capableweb wrote:
| > The prawnsalad farewell is probably the best evidence:
|
| As someone who uses IRC daily but has no part in the drama,
| why would the user's "prawnsalad" evidence be trusted above
| others? I'm trusting nothing I read right now, but I'm happy
| to hear why you think some should be trusted over others.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| Because prawnsalad basically says to do what you're doing:
| not trust anyone. ;)
| threatofrain wrote:
| He's a known community figure, develops important IRC
| software, and says he is Friends with the two parties in
| question, and the parties do not dispute the Continued
| friendship despite the drama.
| jchw wrote:
| prawnsalad was a true neutral party that had no bad blood
| with either side, and a great contributor to IRC in
| general, as the leader of kiwiIRC and someone who
| contributes to IRCv3. On the other hand, who are you?
|
| edit: Perhaps it is wrong of me to assume you are
| immediately discarding this evidence based on the message
| and thus my derisive tone is unwarranted here, but when I
| originally read your message the way it came off to me was
| "We're all moving to Libera.chat, and I really don't want
| to have to hear any dissent that maybe neither party should
| be trusted, so I'm just going to throw out suspicions
| without reading this." It's not like I personally know
| prawnsalad, but I am kind of flustered by this response
| because it feels so dismissive when it's clear many were
| happy to trust the Libera.chat owners at face value despite
| everything.
|
| edit 2: I would feel too dishonest changing the wording
| after the fact but I apologize for the rudeness.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm trusting neither Libera nor Freenode at this point.
| Libera I won't trust because it was launched and Freenode
| because they are currently actively silencing
| discussions. That's what I meant with "I'm trusting
| nothing I read right now". I'm currently at the stage of
| reaching some semi-informed decision but I haven't yet,
| so your additional piece of information is very welcome,
| thanks :)
| pferde wrote:
| Yes, both networks are starting with metaphorical
| trustworthiness level at zero.
|
| Libera, however, has a lot of implicit trust and goodwill
| because it is run by all the people who have been
| successfully running Freenode for all these years. These
| people have had a lot of time to screw users over for
| whatever reason, but have proven themselves to be
| honorable.
|
| Freenode, on the other hand, is right now accruing
| "negative goodwill" by the bushels almost every day,
| thanks to its heavy-handed actions and communication.
|
| Time will tell, I guess, but the optics are looking
| pretty one-sided, in my opinion.
| sampo wrote:
| > it is run by all the people who have been successfully
| running Freenode for all these years
|
| Not all: 2006-2021 head of staff, Dahlskjaer, resigned in
| February 2021. Some sources maybe hint that there was
| some drama involved.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| Dahlskjaer not being involved makes Libera _more_
| trustworthy, not less. They are the one who precipitated
| this entire mess.
| account42 wrote:
| The same head of staff that sold Freenode. So there being
| drama does in anyway hint at the libera staff being
| untrustworthy.
| pferde wrote:
| Fair enough, my wording was incorrect, and you are
| technically correct (the best kind of correct). :)
|
| What I should have said is "All of the people currently
| running Libera have been successfully running Freenode
| for all these years."
| tw04 wrote:
| Neutral party? KiwiIRC is "sponsored" by LTM - the
| company that acquired freenode.
|
| I'm not sure how you can call someone "neutral" that is
| being paid by one of the parties in question...
|
| https://kiwiirc.com/blog/Kiwi_IRC_gets_sponsored_by_Priva
| teI...
| jchw wrote:
| Neutral because they were friendly with both parties
| rather than one or neither. If it were neither, they
| would probably not have such relevant commentary. And
| that aside, while I see your point regarding how this
| impacts someone being entirely neutral, I think it's fair
| to say two things:
|
| - While being sponsored or employed by a given entity
| calls your neutrality into question, I think it's simply
| unfair to categorize it as an erasure of one's ability to
| be a neutral party, absent any evidence.
|
| - Simultaneously leaving your positions while releasing a
| statement is probably a good sign that you are not too
| concerned about the bridges you may be burning. There is
| no incentive to besmirch _both_ Freenode and Libera.chat
| leadership simultaneously, from the standpoint of someone
| not acting neutrally. Again, at least absent some
| evidence.
|
| My takeaway is that while I understand why people are
| taking a stance on libera.chat vs Freenode, I think there
| is now ample evidence that it's time to disperse from
| either. There are plenty of IRC networks still around
| that have not burned their reputation to the ground.
| Again, I get why libera.chat is trusted as the "former"
| Freenode operators. But the bigger picture is that ego
| ran over both sides and lead to a far more bitter
| conflict than necessary, over what was at the time very
| minor details.
|
| Were Libera.chat staff correct? At this point it does
| look like the Freenode owner is at least making some
| amateur mistakes even if we assume best intent. So maybe.
| But I have no idea why the split had to be this bitter.
| To me it feels like the hostile takeover rhetoric
| represents dishonesty. Making a big stink because you
| want to win a petty war, to create a moral imperative to
| leave the existing network. Given that it succeeded, they
| are clearly in the more favorable position. But to me,
| I'm eyeing other networks like OFTC. This doesn't pass
| the smell test for me.
| ddingus wrote:
| The forming of a business entity post fact has a lot to
| do with how bitter this event is.
| [deleted]
| wearywanderer wrote:
| KiwiIRC? Even if I were to ignore the association with
| LTM, why should _or would_ I give a damn about the
| opinions of the author of a client I have never and will
| never use?
|
| Also, claiming neutrality (or worse, friendship) with a
| party that has now hijacked hundreds of channels from
| FOSS projects is not a good look, to put it very mildly.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I'm hoping more people will move over to Matrix instead
| [deleted]
| Spunkie wrote:
| #killfreenode seems on point now. Kindly move your communities
| over to matrix, or I guess https://libera.chat/ if you _just
| must_ stick with irc.
| Seirdy wrote:
| I wrote my thoughts on IRC/Matrix wrt moving from Fleenode in
| the Libravatar mailing list:
| https://lists.launchpad.net/libravatar-fans/msg00330.html
|
| Pasting the message below:
|
| Personally, I don't have a big problem with either since both
| are open platforms with some degree of federation; I use both
| daily through WeeChat and Gomuks. However, I do have a
| preference for IRC for a number of reasons:
|
| 1. Given that so many other projects are on IRC, it makes sense
| to not require people to use a different client just for a few
| select communities.
|
| 2. Many people, including myself, prefer TUI clients to
| graphical ones. Right now, the only TUI Matrix client that
| isn't missing essential features is Gomuks. While Gomuks
| development seems to be progressing well, I wouldn't say it's a
| replacement for other graphical clients yet.
|
| 3. Issues with Matrix itself: I described these in a bit more
| detail in a blog post, "Keeping Platforms Open".
| https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html.
|
| Regarding features in Matrix that aren't present in IRC:
|
| Long-form and long-term discussion already happens in a mailing
| list, which is well-suited for the task; I'm not aware of any
| other open platform that allows nested discussion threads
| delimited by subject. Given the existence of a mailing list, I
| think a chat platform should focus on a niche that isn't
| covered by mailing lists: ephemeral, real-time chat with less
| structure.
|
| If a discussion needs marked replies and searchable history,
| it's probably better off happening in a mailing list. Given
| that these features aren't especially valuable given the
| existence of a mailing list, I'd say that IRC should fit the
| bill.
|
| Honestly, I don't think a Matrix-IRC bridge hurts the Matrix
| experience too much since join/leave events can simply be
| filtered out from most clients. Most of the issues come from
| the perspective of IRC users, mainly long-form messages turning
| into pastebin links instead of being broken up. That being
| said, I find excessive pastebin links preferable to not having
| IRC support at all.
| qiqitori wrote:
| Any good CLI clients for Matrix?
| Macha wrote:
| I think weechat-matrix is the most mature option
| brightball wrote:
| Well, that proves that the previous threads weren't an
| overreaction.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Actually, it's somewhat worse than the headline mentions. It
| seems that the script targets channels that merely _mention_
| Libera in the topic. The topic of an affected channel I was in
| said: "See also #foo on irc.libera.chat" (as we hadn't decided
| whether or not to move). And everyone in the channel was banned
| from both the #foo and the ##foo channels on Freenode.
|
| Needless to say, Freenode kindly decided for us whether or not we
| should move to Libera for good.
| johnklos wrote:
| I wonder what happens if you want to talk about Liberace.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's both a hilarious way to sabotage the IRC server you just
| paid money for, and a good way to help others sabotage other
| channels.
| dspillett wrote:
| They've learned nothing from classic films.
|
| The would-be empire is tightening its grip, and more & more
| channels are slipping through their fingers.
| henvic wrote:
| It seems to be the act of a loner. RIP freenode.
| duckfang wrote:
| And this should be a sign to every founder-wannabe and
| capitalist:
|
| You can buy hardware, trademarks, and DNS, and stuff.
|
| YOU CANNOT BUY COMMUNITY.
|
| YOU CANNOT BUY GOODWILL.
| foobarian wrote:
| <sinister tone> It could also be a genius way to prune
| out the radical, agitator segment of the userbase in one
| fell swoop
| phs318u wrote:
| Yes. Radicals like # nethack. /s
|
| https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f5
| 8bd...
| Strom wrote:
| > _YOU CANNOT BUY COMMUNITY. YOU CANNOT BUY GOODWILL._
|
| How much did they try paying people? I haven't received
| any offers, but I will happily idle in some freenode
| channels for a monthly fee.
| duckfang wrote:
| feel free to come into irc.libera.chat #reprap and offer
| to pay us to go back.
|
| I'll tell you where to put your money.
| Strom wrote:
| You seem clearly passionate, but also confused.
|
| First off, I am not affiliated with freenode or libera. I
| am just an unrelated guy who happens to use IRC. I am not
| offering any money to anyone for any IRC related things.
|
| Secondly, you claimed that it is not possible to buy
| communities or goodwill. This does not match what I have
| witnessed in life. Communities get bought all the time,
| e.g. Facebook buying Instagram. Goodwill also gets bought
| all the time, often by making a giant donation and then
| running a giant PR campaign to let everyone know about
| the good deed. Distributed organic communities like
| freenode aren't immune to this, as I showed by pointing
| out that I, a long time freenode user, would be willing
| to accept payment.
| sva_ wrote:
| >YOU CANNOT BUY COMMUNITY.
|
| This is false. Communities get sold successfully all the
| time (thing of tech giants buying up unicorns or
| whatever). But doing that with a (predominantly) FOSS
| community was definitely doomed from the start.
| handrous wrote:
| It's less that the communities were FOSS than that it was
| built on a widely-implemented, stable, open protocol.
| Moving to a new server means everyone takes 30 seconds to
| add the new server and join the new channel, but keeps
| using the same client. Maybe you have to change a line of
| config on some bots and restart them. Done.
|
| We see fewer of those developed now precisely _because_
| it forces providers (free or paid) to behave well or else
| be easily abandoned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c., do
| not want that, for obvious reasons.
| fellellor wrote:
| The founder of Private Internet Access and also... the
| Crown Prince of South Korea it seems. XD
| wearywanderer wrote:
| I believe his 'official' title is now _Fresh Prince of
| Korea_.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > the Crown Prince of South Korea it seems
|
| Alleged crown prince of the Joseon Empire. Which hasn't
| existed for ~110 years, and is based on an ennoblement by
| one of several contenders for the current head of the
| former imperial family, so it's an even weaker claim than
| most pretenders of former monarchies have.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Fake it till you make it
| bierjunge wrote:
| More like LEEnode now. The network is dead and will never
| recover, even if Andrew steps down.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| To quote a #freenode op "users were being forced to another IRC
| network because the channel was +m".
|
| So, instead, the various community groups are being forced to
| stay on freenode?
|
| And the post-structural turn was like 50 years ago.. they have
| jumped (off) the clue train.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > To quote a #freenode op "users were being forced to another
| IRC network because the channel was +m".
|
| And the channel I was in wasn't +m until freenodecom decided
| to hijack it and make it +m.
| tootie wrote:
| What exactly does "hijack" mean though? I don't speak IRC so
| it's not clear what they're actually doing to the channels.
| myself248 wrote:
| Imagine that someone takes over your domain name, puts up
| their own website that says it's now the support venue for
| YourThing, but locks you out of it.
|
| Now you've moved to another place but have no way to leave a
| signpost or redirect. And anyone who doesn't get that memo
| through some other means, will land in a confusingly-named
| place that looks official but is precisely the opposite.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Looks like they're replacing the channel mods with Lee's
| people the moment Libera is mentioned.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > What exactly does "hijack" mean though? I don't speak IRC
| so it's not clear what they're actually doing to the
| channels.
|
| In Reddit terms, imagine the Reddit administrators coming to
| your subreddit, deleting the moderators and then installing
| their own.
|
| Administrators always had this power. Sometimes, this power
| was used out of necessity. But given how much this power was
| used in FreeNode in the past week, a lot of the community has
| lost faith in the administrators.
|
| But yeah, if you control the server (the nature of being an
| administrator), you can do these things rather easily.
| nolok wrote:
| > Administrators always had this power. Sometimes, this
| power was used out of necessity. But given how much this
| power was used in FreeNode in the past week, a lot of the
| community has lost faith in the administrators.
|
| To be slightly more exact, the admins suing those powers
| properly for the past couple decades have been pushed out
| by the new guy, and said new guy has already abused those
| powers so much in a single week that nobody will ever have
| any faith in him
| [deleted]
| dspillett wrote:
| Basically removing the current ops (controlling users) and
| replacing them with their own people (who will stifle
| conversations the new top dog doesn't like).
|
| I'll not go into more detail as existing threads here cover
| it far better than I could.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288590
| klodolph wrote:
| IRC has a concept of "ops" or operator privileges, which are
| per-channel moderation priveleges. The exact privileges
| depend on the IRC software running, but it usually means that
| you can change the advertised topic message, mute / un-mute
| users, and kick users out of the channel.
|
| Hijack means removing those privileges from someone else and
| assigning them to yourself.
| masklinn wrote:
| Removed all existing ops (channel admins), set the channel to
| invite-only, set the channel to ops-only. Basically removed
| all the existing mod team then made the channel mod-only,
| which kicked all users.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Wow, that seems incredibly hostile to everyone involved.
| gwd wrote:
| For people actually moving, the last thing could be quite
| helpful. One of the challenges for a lot of communities
| will be making sure everyone knows the move is happening.
| If the new guys are kicking everyone off the old channels
| and making it impossible to join, that will prompt everyone
| lurking on there (and somehow unaware of all the drama
| going on) to seek the new channel.
| kjrose wrote:
| Honestly, there's an pretty solid rule you don't crap on your
| channel owners by using chanserv. That's the number one way to
| be clear that having your channel on their server is
| fundamentally unsafe.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I was unaware not putting all your eggs in one basket was
| "crapping" on the first basket...
| Grollicus wrote:
| I'm disappointed it seems nobody thought of the "Don't go to
| irc.libera.chat, freenode.net is much better!"-Topic joke yet.
| fvold wrote:
| "How to murder an IRC network in 12 easy steps", huh?
| nonbinarycat wrote:
| I heard a rumor that Freenode is planning to move to a
| subscription service, so those remaining channel operators will
| have to pay a small monthly fee to keep their channels intact.
| And that normal users will also be able pay for benefits like
| being able to add sponsorship messages to arbitrary channel
| topics, and things like that.
|
| Anyone know if this is true?
| Macha wrote:
| Seems totally unsourced and unlikely
| jsve wrote:
| You know, none of this can happen if you have a decentralized
| network such as Matrix.
| immibis wrote:
| Because you can move to a different server, right? You can also
| do that on IRC. Almost every client has good multi-server
| support.
| gassius wrote:
| Sheees this guy is really taking over channels because they
| mention and or are discussing an alternative??? Imagine any
| propetary platform doing that and the backslash will face
| qwertox wrote:
| So basically post a note into every channel with the
| recommendation to move over to Libera.chat?
|
| Freenode would end up with a clean server, what a relaxed way
| to start into a new future.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| A non-strawman version would be, basically let individual
| communities and their leaders decide for themselves what
| their future free-as-in-freedom comms platform is, without
| unsolicited technical interference from their current comms
| platform.
|
| Imagine if your e-mail provider learned you were considering
| switching to another provider, and without warning, locked
| you out of your e-mail account, and then used it to advertise
| a new e-mail account, created by them, in your name, that you
| have no control over, to all your acquaintances, saying that
| you aren't actually switching providers, and the new e-mail
| account is the real one.
|
| These are the actions of a sociopath.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Well, we don't have to imagine!
| gassius wrote:
| It might be, but I am not aware. Any reference?
| StavrosK wrote:
| I meant that Freenode is now proprietary as well, as the
| sibling comment mentions, yep!
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| Whatsapp blocked telegram.me links at some point (I think
| when it was acquired by facebook, inciting an other mass
| exodus)
| scrollaway wrote:
| How? WhatsApp messages are e2ee. Via the preview pings
| maybe?
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| If I remember, telegram.me links would not be identified
| as URLs requiring manual copy-paste. They didn't have
| link previews back then.
|
| The messages are E2EE only in transit. They can always
| tweak clients for things like this.
| forty wrote:
| For example, try referencing another platform or payment
| system in an iOS app ;)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Freenode is now a proprietary platform operated by Lee.
| xref wrote:
| Definitely can't reference other places to buy an item from
| your eBay or Amazon posting.
|
| Hell Amazon won't even let you sell at a lower price
| elsewhere, and they have web scraping automation setup to
| catch you and hide your listings if you do...
| fitzie wrote:
| if someone goes to libera and registers a bunch of channels and
| tells people to go to freenode, how would they respond? or if
| popular subreddits were shut down by their respective mods, you'd
| can be sure that the ops would come in an open it up again. I bet
| it would take less than a minute to get banned for bring up
| freenode on libera. if people want to leave freenode they should
| do that, its pretty rude to expect them to leave your abandoned
| channel as a memoral to your departure.
| darkarmani wrote:
| > I bet it would take less than a minute to get banned for
| bring up freenode on libera.
|
| I'm sure just about anyone will take you up on that bet. Go for
| it.
| SamBam wrote:
| Why don't you try and find out what would happen, instead of
| making spurious accusations against the Libera staff?
| horsemans wrote:
| > I bet it would take less than a minute to get banned for
| bring up freenode on libera.
|
| I'll take that bet. Give it a try.
| kjrose wrote:
| I'd anyone remains on freenode after this, they deserve whatever
| comes to them.
|
| Irc servers are not that hard to start up and libera is already
| in place. It's a matter of time now before they lose most of the
| users.
| est31 wrote:
| I think it's also admirable how quickly libera.chat has grown
| into a network of over a quarter of freenode's size (26%).
|
| freenode.net users as of 18:48 CEST 2021-05-25:
|
| > Current global users 69472, max 85052
|
| libera.chat users as of 15:06 CEST, 2021-05-26:
|
| > Current global users 18337, max 18338
|
| In particular, it's larger than OTFC now. Data as of 15:16 CEST,
| 2021-05-26:
|
| > Current global users: 18100 Max: 18101
|
| As for the trends, they look good for libera.chat and bad for
| freenode. On 2021-05-20, the values were as following for
| libera.chat:
|
| > Current global users 11126, max 11130
|
| And as following for freenode.net:
|
| Current global users 77159, max 83476
|
| So freenode lost 7.6 thousand users (9.9%) while libera gained
| 7.2 thousand users (39%) within the last couple of days.
| rektide wrote:
| you might consider updating your hn profile. ;) (it currently
| lists oftc & fn)
| est31 wrote:
| Good catch! Done.
| WJW wrote:
| Seeing the numbers spelled out like that really drives home how
| niche IRC has become. The largest network has less than 100k
| users on it. You can comfortably fit that many connections on a
| single server these days.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I see discord links in a lot of places you would once have
| seen irc links.
| est31 wrote:
| discord has 140 million MAUs. IRC as a whole has probably
| less than 1 million. Still not a fan of it for free
| software projects to use proprietary chat solutios as the
| official place for discussion (maybe inofficial).
| dminvs wrote:
| That's a lot of open sockets for one host
| WJW wrote:
| It is indeed a lot, but since Whatsapp manages to get 10
| million connections per box [1], 100k seems doable even
| without insane wizardry. A few years back, I wrote an
| article on my blog at
| https://wjwh.eu/posts/2018-10-29-double-hijack.html about
| keeping 65k connections open in a single Ruby process and
| that was a hackathon project written in 4 hours.
|
| https://medium.com/codingurukul/whatsapp-engineering-
| inside-...
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| The internet has moved to be mobile-first, media-rich, and
| optionally asynchronous. IRC didn't adapt, though I'm still
| hopeful for matrix.org.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Especially considering that probably most of the current
| freenode users are idling or even orphaned bouncers. IRC is
| such that connection counts do not mean an actual person is
| behind the connection. But obviously everyone who moved to
| Libera did so actively. 18K _active_ users vs 69K _total_
| connections is huge.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm technically on both but really only using Libera.
| kragen wrote:
| We should stop implicitly legitimizing Andrew Lee's power grab by
| referring to his dominion as "Freenode". Freenode is a quarter-
| century-old community that has changed its name to libera.chat;
| the thing being referred to here as "Freenode" is something else
| that has illegitimately acquired control of Freenode's old
| servers and user database, causing enormous inconvenience to the
| real Freenode.
|
| cheapie has coined the name "Leenode" for this abomination. Let's
| start using it!
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I like how you think if you should want to register leenode.net
| and forward it to freenode its available.
| nullc wrote:
| I complained vigorously about the acquisition to freenode staff
| at the time, due to rumors that Lee and Falkvinge had acquired
| freenode in order to attempt to surveil private security issue
| discussions between Bitcoin developers in order to further the
| high profile cryptocurrency scams they were participating in.
|
| I was consistently gaslit by freenode staff. The current story
| that this sale is all a surprise is a direct lie. At the time I
| got nothing but platitudes about how PIA just had freenode's
| best interest at heart, etc.
|
| I'm sure not every staff member was in on it but the claim that
| it was Christel is just not true. I don't see how anyone
| regards freenode staff as trustworthy at this point.
|
| The time for long time freenoders to defend freenode was in
| 2017.
| modshatereality wrote:
| The admins knew this was going to happen, people need to stop
| spreading misinformation pretending that they were caught off
| guard.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| You were gaslit through heavily controlled communication? Say
| it ain't so, that must have been awful.
|
| I can't believe someone would use money to take over a
| productive communication forum to manipulate the information
| there for their own gain. What kind of awful dishonest person
| would participate in something like that?
| techrat wrote:
| To further reinforce the fact that he intends for it to be his
| dominion... the incident the submission refers to?
|
| <rasengan> I apologize for the poor communication and few
| erroneous channels that were caught up, freenode. This was my
| mistake alone.
|
| He admits fault for the targeted dissolution of 700+ channels
| that, coincidentally, contained "libera" in the topic.
| [deleted]
| dspillett wrote:
| Maybe go with UK news' terminology for ISIS: "so called Islamic
| State (as the group called themselves that, but we're far from
| university accepted by Islamic communities and were not
| officially recognised as a state).
|
| So we now have the "so called freenode". Freenode in name only.
| danjac wrote:
| What I don't understand is what is Lee's motivation for doing
| this? He'll just end up in charge of a bunch of dead channels
| with all the staff and communities gone. I don't see a profit
| motive - is it pure vandalism?
| apple4ever wrote:
| I was curious about that myself. It doesn't make sense.
| zaarn wrote:
| I like the double speak of both "condemning cancel culture
| against users refusing to leave" while at the same time
| cancelling people who want to leave. Pick one, you can't have
| both.
| immibis wrote:
| Believe it or not, this kind of thing is a fascist tactic,
| applied on a small scale.
| dTal wrote:
| This isn't hyperbolic. The battle lines are a deeply
| fascinating "animal model" of real political tendencies. I've
| noticed a marked political split between those who stayed on
| Freenode and those who moved to Libera. You can probably
| guess which side is which - the side that stayed is the side
| afraid of change.
| linuxftw wrote:
| The channels being 'taken over' are the channels that were
| telling people to use the other network. There's no point in
| Freenode existing if all the channels point to some other
| place.
|
| I support Freenode's decision.
| zaarn wrote:
| Notice that in some cases, channels were banned for merely
| advertising that they _also_ run a channel on libera.chat.
| Not that they are moving to libera.chat, that they _ALSO_ run
| a channel there. It 's a very basic attempt at suppressing
| people wanting to leave and trying to convince others.
|
| And you're correct, there is no point to freenode existing.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The channels being taken over were ones wherein the community
| either was considering, or had decided, to move to a
| different comms platform.
|
| The self-proclaimed "Owner and Guardian of Freenode" has not
| yet put in the effort to earn himself a seat at that
| discussion table for a single one of those communities, much
| less all of them.
|
| The hardest thing for someone with NPD to hear is that they
| don't always get to be The Most Important Person In The Room,
| final decider of all things, and petty frustration at that
| lack of control over other fellow humans drove this power
| grab.
| linuxftw wrote:
| The 'staff' resigned, so it looks like a powergrab by them
| via starting their own network and disparaging freenode. I
| didn't see anything that was irreconcilable at the start of
| this, only that the 'staffs' demands of having DNS
| ownership were denied.
|
| > The self-proclaimed "Owner and Guardian of Freenode" has
| not yet put in the effort to earn himself a seat at that
| discussion table for a single one of those communities,
| much less all of them.
|
| That's just your opinion. I don't share it. I think
| Freenode is going fine, I'm fine with cutting bait with the
| outrage mob. If you want to go, go.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Announcing your bare opinion at someone, then dismissing
| their post as an opinion, is a weird way to try to
| convince the HN community that these unethical actions
| were ethical.
|
| It's also a weird way to try to get a seat at the table
| in one of the communities that was deciding between comms
| platforms.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I'm not here to convince anyone that dislikes freenode,
| I'm here to balance the echo chamber to outside observers
| aren't terrified to stay with freenode.
|
| > then dismissing their post as an opinion
|
| Yes, the vocal minority has expressed their opinion, and
| when I challenge it with an opinion of my own, it somehow
| doesn't measure up to your standards.
|
| > It's also a weird way to try to get a seat at the table
| in one of the communities that was deciding between comms
| platforms.
|
| As if I'm not part of communities that are on freenode?
| Is there something you believe gives your opinion more
| value than mine?
|
| You know what's weird, in all the channels I'm on in
| freenode, none of them have been disrupted. I guess it's
| because they just kept doing what they were doing and not
| trying to encourage others to abandon it. Funny how that
| works.
| [deleted]
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| >As if I'm not part of communities that are on freenode?
| Is there something you believe gives your opinion more
| value than mine?
|
| The real question is, is there something Andrew believes
| gives his opinion more value than the collective opinion
| of each individual community, as determined by that
| community, and not him individually?
|
| It's like I said in my OP: The hardest thing for someone
| with NPD to hear is that they don't always get to be the
| final decider of all things.
| linuxftw wrote:
| > It's like I said in my OP: The hardest thing for
| someone with NPD
|
| Is this a diagnosis from a professional that Andrew
| diagnosed, or are you just levying personal attacks
| against someone you disagree with?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| >Is this a diagnosis from a professional that Andrew
| diagnosed, or are you just levying personal attacks
| against someone you disagree with?
|
| I'm not following the first option you provided, but the
| second one is not the case. Hope this answers your
| question, but it wasn't very clear, so I'm available for
| follow-ups
| linuxftw wrote:
| Prove that Andrew has NPD. Otherwise, you're levying a
| personal attack. The only thing I'll accept as proof, and
| anyone should accept as proof, is a professional
| diagnosis that Andrew released, as that's the only
| ethical way to make that claim.
| danaris wrote:
| > I'm here to balance the echo chamber
|
| Y'know, the majority of voices criticizing one "side"
| when a major conflict happens doesn't necessarily mean
| that there's an "echo chamber."
|
| Quite often, what it means is that the side being
| criticized has actually done something bad, and deserves
| the criticism.
| linuxftw wrote:
| The only reason there's a major conflict as all is people
| around here made it a point to have one.
| BEEdwards wrote:
| This is an open space not a walled garden, if i wanted walled
| gardens i'd be on apple.
| masklinn wrote:
| > you can't have both.
|
| Of course you can. That's perfectly standard conservative (and
| more so fash) tactic: you have rights, "they" have duties.
|
| or in a more flowery langage
|
| > Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
| There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not
| bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not
| protect.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Edit: deleted
| watwut wrote:
| 1.) It would help if cops arrested rioters and not like
| journalists or random activists that done no violence at
| those riots.
|
| 2.) It also absurd to try to apply current American two
| party system dichotomy and right-left split on to WWI
| Russia. Nevertheless, claim that contemporary right wing in
| united states does X is not proven false by claiming that
| Bolsheviks doing that too in 1918 in Russia.
|
| It is quite normal for multiple anti-democratic movements
| using the same strategies, really, despite them otherwise
| having different ideologies.
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| Hypocrisy is not unique to conservatives. All mainstream
| politics is hostile zero-sum competition over the allocation
| of resources. Maintaining a narrative facade of some kind of
| moral legitimacy for this process often requires some kind of
| internal narrative inconsistency.
| ehvatum wrote:
| Alinsky Rules For Radicals rule 4: "Make the enemy live up to
| its own book of rules."
| Seirdy wrote:
| Adapted from a comment I made in the wrong thread:
|
| It's hilarious that rasengan is complaining about Libera
| "fracturing the FOSS community".[0]
|
| For example, #newsboat members decided to move by June 5th, and
| we've been deciding between OFTC and Libera. Then this happened:
| 20:05 --> freenodecom [freenode-placehol] (www.freenode.net)
| (~com@freenode/staff) has joined #newsboat 20:05 --
| freenodecom has changed topic for #newsboat from "We intend to
| migrate off Freenode. What do you prefer: OFTC or Libera.chat?
| Details here: https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1643"
| to "This channel has moved to ##newsboat. The topic is in
| violation of freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies"
| 20:05 <@freenodecom> This channel has been reopened with respect
| to the communities and new users. The topic is in violation of
| freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies 20:05 --
| Mode #newsboat [+o freenodecom] by OperServ 20:05 -- Mode
| #newsboat [+impsf ##newsboat] by ChanServ 20:05
| <@freenodecom> The new channel is ##newsboat 20:05 <--
| freenodecom (~com@freenode/staff) has left #newsboat
|
| Great. Now none of us can speak on #newsboat, making coordination
| to switch much harder. New users might get confused and join the
| wrong channel operated by a hostile party. The community is more
| fractured now.
|
| To everyone with a freenode channel: whatever you do, do not
| mention "libera" in your channel topic. That's the trigger for
| this action.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210525231635/https://freenode....
| tinus_hn wrote:
| At least the answer what to do should be clear now.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Or, maybe, you know, pick one and move already, then discuss
| later if people prefer the other one.
|
| Indecisiveness and excess democracy are things that make "open-
| source" slower.
|
| Edit: you're all responding like the actual choice they made
| didn't result in a bad situation for the members
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or, better still, pick one but create channels on _both_ -
| the other one just to tell people where the primary channel
| is. Or even to carry discussion on both simultaneously, until
| you reach the decision.
|
| Do that to prevent a hostile party from doing it before you.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Agreed. It will be easier to see which one people prefers
| as well.
|
| (I mean, it's an IRC channel, the servers might diverge in
| features and reliability but there's usually not much
| difference)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _(I mean, it 's an IRC channel, the servers might
| diverge in features and reliability but there's usually
| not much difference)_
|
| You'd be surprised. This actually strengthens the point
| you're making elsewhere: people can, and will, debate
| such choices endlessly. It's because they care about the
| community, about making things better for themselves and
| for everyone. This is textbook bikeshedding - there's no
| ill intent, just scope insensitivity. Debating important
| issues and debating trivialities takes the same amount of
| effort, and expands to fill available time of
| participants.
|
| I'm not sure what the _best_ solution is, but the one I
| know works is to put a time limit on such issues, to
| prevent them from consuming more attention and resources
| than they deserve. That is, if consensus can 't be
| reached in a short time, a preset choice must be made by
| default. If you reach that point and get strong pushback,
| you take the other option.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Thanks for the constructive comment and for explaining my
| point better!
| Seirdy wrote:
| That's what happened during the decision-making process,
| but then one got shut down. Now new users joining #newsboat
| will be directed to ##newsboat, which is completely out of
| control of the #newsboat ops. They won't be directed to
| libera.chat.
| grayhatter wrote:
| You're right, snap decisions are the best... don't bother to
| get input or even really consider your options. Just flip a
| coin and yolo it, right?
| raverbashing wrote:
| You're picking an IRC server, not your favourite kid.
|
| Bike shedding is real.
| detaro wrote:
| Because leaving X% of the channel that relies on Matrix
| bridges behind, rushing admins of bots etc, and making
| people feel like you didn't even give them a chance to
| say something about it are all _great_ things for a
| community.
| immibis wrote:
| Because staying on a network where nobody has control of
| their own channels is great for a community.
| edwardkmett wrote:
| This has been the major reason why #haskell didn't try to
| move more forcefully.
|
| We'd like to get some of the old logging bots moved over,
| etc.
|
| We have some number of users who connect from tor, from
| matrix, or from webchat that simply can't move right now.
| These are things being looked at from the libera.chat
| side, but that work isn't done.
|
| I very much value those users being able to continue to
| ask and get their questions answered.
|
| That said, we used to have like 3-4 server ops lurking in
| the channel, and 15-16 channel ops that were active on
| the server. We just don't any more. This makes me rather
| concerned from a spam perspective.
|
| On the other hand, there are < 80 people in the channel
| now, so perhaps spam is less of an issue now that we're a
| much smaller target.
| grayhatter wrote:
| It's not bike shedding to make sure interested parties
| all get heard. My community didn't switch before this
| cluster fuck because we were waiting for someone who's
| important but only online for a weekend every few weeks
| or so. Just because _you_ don 't care, doesn't make it
| unimportant.
| tehbeard wrote:
| > ...your favourite kid
|
| Parent of the year, everyone.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| FWIW, there is some merit to raverbashing's argument. I
| know first-hand that maintaining a community of
| enthusiastic techies is just like trying to herd cats. They
| can, and will, debate the pros and cons until heat death of
| the universe. I know because in communities I've been part
| of, we could and did debate options endlessly - until
| someone with enough time on their hands just unilaterally
| implemented one and then everyone begrudgingly accepted it.
|
| Some degree of "do-ocracy" may be necessary - when you
| can't get the people to decide, sometimes the best option
| is just to announce a choice and see if people follow you.
| If they put up resistance, you can revert the choice and
| pick the other option. But it usually turns out that the
| ones most eager to continue debating are the ones who
| actually care the least, and will accept whatever decision
| was made.
| neolog wrote:
| Self-censorship is the wrong response. Libera is the real
| Freenode community, just under a different name now.
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| Libera is run by the same staff as ran freenode for years,
| until Andrew evicted them last week. We care about foss and
| if foss projects want to move from freenode, we will support
| them.
|
| Anyone wanting to move their community/project can read how
| to do so here: https://libera.chat/chanreg#how-to-register-
| as-a-project
|
| Some background to the story: https://kline.sh/
| thinkingemote wrote:
| What's to stop, in 10 years, what happened to Freenode
| happening to Libera? Is there something concrete in place,
| or is it on trust? On trust is what happened with freenode.
| capableweb wrote:
| Who runs Freenode and how it was managed was never really
| 100% clear, until now. On the other side, this is Libera:
|
| > Libera Chat is a Swedish nonprofit organisation, feel
| free to read our bylaws. The organisation is run entirely
| by volunteer staff who are the members of, and have equal
| voting power in, the organisation. Libera Chat's purpose
| is to provide services such as a community platform for
| free open-source software and peer directed projects on a
| volunteer basis.
|
| You can see the bylaws here: https://libera.chat/bylaws
|
| So, as a common FOSS organization, Libera is governed by
| a non-profit instead of owned by a corporation. That step
| feels like a pretty good stopgap from enabling the same
| thing to happen again.
| immibis wrote:
| Well then the community moves somewhere else. Networks
| are cheap and interchangeable.
| progval wrote:
| In my opinion, the takeover happened for three reasons:
|
| 1. unclear ownership
|
| 2. the only official structure being a for-profit, with
| over 50% owned by a single person
|
| 3. lack of transparency
|
| The first two are solved by being a non-profit with equal
| stakes from all staffers. The latter is a work in
| progress: https://github.com/Libera-Chat/libera-
| chat.github.io/issues/...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm glad to see the Libera folks _finally_ holding
| themselves accountable to some form of documented
| agreement (the Bylaws), though sadly it took a major,
| harrowing event like this. One of my major gripes with
| the old Freenode staff has always been how capricious
| their judgements were and how insular they were with each
| other (e.g. measurably treating the requests of admins in
| the "in-group" differently than the "out-group"), and
| having no definition of what it means to be a "member of
| the community". I'm still a bit dismayed that there seems
| to be no set of guarantees of due process offered to non-
| member network users, but I guess this is a start. I've
| thought about commenting on their Github repo but I'm
| afraid of the retaliation as the staff seem like an
| extremely passionate bunch.
|
| And perhaps this is just an argument for a truly
| federated system, like Matrix. Rather than submitting to
| an operator, run your own infrastructure and federate
| with everyone else.
| rataata_jr wrote:
| Just mention base64 encoding lol.
| sampo wrote:
| > Now none of us can speak on #newsboat
|
| But now #newsboat has a pointer to ##newsboat, can you talk
| there?
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