Freenode ops take control of 700 channels | Hacker News Reader

Freenode ops take control of 700 channels

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604 pointsLambdaComplex944 comments

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)

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.

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.

They've learned nothing from classic films.

The would-be empire is tightening its grip, and more & more channels are slipping through their fingers.

It seems to be the act of a loner. RIP freenode.

More like LEEnode now. The network is dead and will never recover, even if Andrew steps down.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Seems it's just a troll account. Spoonerise their username.

>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.

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.

<sinister tone> It could also be a genius way to prune out the radical, agitator segment of the userbase in one fell swoop

Yes. Radicals like # nethack. /s

https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd...

The founder of Private Internet Access and also… the Crown Prince of South Korea it seems. XD

> 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.

Fake it till you make it

I believe his 'official' title is now Fresh Prince of Korea.

you have been banned from /r/pyongyang

...the OC just doesn't understand...

freenode is the communities, it just renamed itself and moved hosting

Perhaps they have; you're just thinking of the wrong films. I keep wondering if this is a The Producers situation, with the caveat that I can't imagine this being as wildly successful as Springtime for Hitler. Frankly, they are running service so badly that I can't think of any reason other than purposeful sabotage.

Speaking from my own experience during my stint as a network admin on a national IRC network 2 decades ago, this fits the psychological profile of certain people I encountered quite well. No intent to sabotage is needed, various things about IRC just bring out the worst in some people, and my guess is that this mostly begins with the channel modes; socially acceptible privilege and power over fellow humans which can be had by networking with the channel owner. At the network operator level, concurrent user numbers become an issue of pride, total registered user counts, total active accounts likewise... The more people view the network as a worthy entity for itself instead of just a tool for communication, the worse it gets.

In this whole thing, one thing in particular is interesting to me since freenode was not just an IRC network, but an IRC network with a focus on FOSS projects: Freenode / rasengan seems to insinuate by his actions that a project does not have the right to choose an official realtime communication forum for itself; that it is freenode which brings the users to the project channel instead of the other way around.

i too remember the k3wl d00d5 and the chanops takeover mobs

What exactly does "hijack" mean though? I don't speak IRC so it's not clear what they're actually doing to the channels.

Looks like they’re replacing the channel mods with Lee’s people the moment Libera is mentioned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288590

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.

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.

Wow, that seems incredibly hostile to everyone involved.

It is incredibly hostile.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

I guess I always assumed that IRC was decentralized; one server could drop, or go rogue, with no ill effects.

But that's probably an anachronism, given the age of IRC.

It's not one server, he's obtained control over the whole Freenode network.

It's decentralized to a degree. Running an IRC server isn't much more complex than running a HTTP server so just about anyone can do that. Of course when a server (or in this case a whole network of servers) gets hijacked all the people using that server need to find a new server, or decide to be okay with the new government.

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.

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.

I was unaware not putting all your eggs in one basket was "crapping" on the first basket...

I think you misunderstood the comment you're replying to. They're saying Andrew Lee is the one crapping on the channel owners by hijacking their channels.

Good on your for clarifying and not being another useless downvote!

HN should remove the downvote button, but the hivemind might lose its cohesion then

I'm disappointed it seems nobody thought of the "Don't go to irc.libera.chat, freenode.net is much better!"-Topic joke yet.

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.

> 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.

I wonder what happens if you want to talk about Liberace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I'm not up to speed, could you expand on what happened?

See these links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27208422

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207734

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.

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.

Global Liberation Army will never recover from the Scunthorpe attack.

> 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.

Ah, but you retain more users if you prevent the users from seeing that anything is going wrong!

How’s that working out for them?

And they'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that pesky internet!

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

All of this is actually pretty good publicity for irc.

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.

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.

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."

>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?"

> 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.

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.

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.

There's not really much more to say - I posted the logs (not much) on Twitter. They're pretty similar to everyone else's.

https://twitter.com/philpem/status/1397453537936805895

The whole world still runs on IRC and not everyone realizes how fickle IRC users can be.

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.

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.

Forgot? Or are too young to have ever known? ;)

The internet growing on IRC doesn't mean that the internet runs on IRC – those are two very different things.

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.

Yeah no. IRC was often jokingly referred to as “I Repeat Class” because it was an unproductive distraction from study.

Freenode, OFTC, and probably others that I can’t think of off–hand are a bit different from general–purpose IRC networks. They are geared strictly towards providing a place for users and developers of open source and free software to talk about the software. I’m sure you could distract yourself from your studies by going to #nethack or #erlang or #emacs, but most of the conversations being had there are much more productive than any discussion of pop culture.

First, discussion of pop culture is not inherently unproductive, especially if you are in a creative industry. Being productive about over-engineering an automated deployment cluster isn’t inherently more valuable than learning about the rise and fall of trends or the animation style of popular shows and games.

One of the biggest channels on freenode/open projects back in the earlier lilo days was #bay-oh, which, while populated with a bunch of proto-devops people, was almost wholly social.

Even purely social interaction is productive and valuable, the career success of many people after the first dot com crash relied on being friends with everyone they knew from Ironport or whatever.

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....

Self-censorship is the wrong response. Libera is the real Freenode community, just under a different name now.

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/

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.

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.

Well then the community moves somewhere else. Networks are cheap and interchangeable.

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/...

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.

> Now none of us can speak on #newsboat

But now #newsboat has a pointer to ##newsboat, can you talk there?

Just mention base64 encoding lol.

At least the answer what to do should be clear now.

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.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee... seems to have a pretty simple summary

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.

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.

> 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.

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..

> 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.

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.

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 café, they're the café staff.

So just to continue extending the analogy chain, it's closer to there being a café 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 café business, and wants to drastically change how it's run. The staff all walk out and work on starting a new café down the street, and several of the book clubs follow because they like the atmosphere.

> 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.

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).

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.

> Some untrustworthy entrepeneur bought Freenode.

In 2017

> Network staff quit in response and started Libera.

In 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

removal of per-channel staff/per-channel owners and replacement with network owners.

like removing a subreddit's creator/moderators and taking over it.

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.

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".

Dude bought an NFT in 2017, and has now decided the NFT was a proof of ownership.

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.

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.

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.

I’d characterize more as an entity was created ex-post-facto in 2017 and then sold to an asshat.

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...

Hackaday had a good write-up:

https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-sta...

The Arch Wiki still has 48 pages that mention freenode, though most of them are about other software's servers or non-English articles.

Yeah, I should have been more specific. I meant the Arch Linux IRC channels article.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_IRC_channels

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.

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.

Maybe everything goes according to Lee's plan, who knows.

If his plan is

1) kick all users out and destroy reputation

2) ???

3) profit!

then probably yes.

is 3) necessary? maybe he needs to show a loss for tax purposes?

I doubt that they are stupid, so one must conclude that the purpose was to silence speach, not profit from it.

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.

> 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 agree that one will end up on top, and also that Freenode will likely die completely - but even when it comes to large FOSS-related networks, there were two active ones before this: Freenode and OFTC.

Eh, to be honest the most obvious answer to this is just that Lee is an idiot.

Never underestimate how dumb people can be.

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.

It does not make any sense. What will Lee actually own and how would he make money from it?

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).

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.

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.

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.

I mean, what do you expect of someone who posts a social-media-style PR article as a PDF.

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

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?

this has been extensively covered over the last week or so

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.

One of many articles: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-source-...

Thanks, that helped a lot.

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...

Thank you.

You’re welcome :)

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).

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.

This looks like Culture War.

From "The Freenode Resignation FAQ" at https://gist.github.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.

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.

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.

AFAIK, the only thing Andrew unambiguously had legal ownership over was the domain names.

Those questions came after people started leaving, and after Lee made changes to freenode policy removing mentions of racism and such.

This article also has some interesting background info on Lee and his motivations: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-sta...

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.

if he wanted to destroy freenode he would turn off the servers

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.

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.

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)

How disappointing. I halfway expected to see a mustache twirling picture.

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

That's some strong salad ...

Wait. He’s the crown prince of South Korea it seems. XD

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

> 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.

> 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 :)

> 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.

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.

> 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.

"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.

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.

That's not what happened, but that's what the Republican news media at the time pretended had happen.

Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Louis Philippe realized that the way forward for the monarchy was to restyle himself as King of the French (implicitly including the nation itself into the monarchy). Napoleon III was a monarch who appealed to the populace for his support. To try to turn back time to a absolute monarchy as of 1815, even in as small a matter as the flag, was indicative of being utterly out of touch.

> 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.

Wow arch is bleeding edge even for wiki URLs.

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!

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.

I like how you think if you should want to register leenode.net and forward it to freenode its available.

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.

"Leenode IRC network"?

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?

I was curious about that myself. It doesn't make sense.

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.

The admins knew this was going to happen, people need to stop spreading misinformation pretending that they were caught off guard.

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?

I would expect anyone knowledgeable enough to work on bitcoin that wanted to keep a secret wouldn't be talking about private things over IRC of all places.

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.

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.

What does he get out of all of this. I can't understand his motive?

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...

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.

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

This is mostly what happened, yeah. Gathered a lot of information on this since a week or so (I am an outsider too).

Logic and emotions are almost diametrically opposed, as far as our intellectual understanding of them can be concerned.

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.

This could explain the overall situation pretty well. Could be more or less some shortcuts, but in the end, it matches.

Ah that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

I mean, stupidity, I assume. I think he’s rather out of his depth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> but IRC is still unencrypted in transit

TLS is an option, not ideal but better than no TLS at all.

Seen a few people pushing it.

That said I keep having the good old plain data link

Nothing is better than IRC.

Indeed!

http://bfinn.com

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.

Most modern servers use TLS so it isn't any worse than imessage.

This is incorrect. iMessage is E2EE, which IRC is not.

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.

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...

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.

Yes, several, they mostly all work in security and actually read the Platform Security Guide and made a decision the inconveniences were outweighed by the strengths of not storing that key.

Remember also that subpoenas rarely permit “fishing expeditions”, so if they want your iMessages, can convince the judiciary you have potentially committed a crime, your key not being stored and the E2EE nature doesn’t always mean a judge is going to let LE go after Bob, Joe, Bill and everyone you have messaged with and demand Apple hand over all their iMessages (if they have backups enabled).

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.

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.

> IRC is inherently non-private because anybody can join

Servers and channels can have passwords. Channels can also be invite-only.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

You can also run your own IRC server. Risks are the same either way.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

That's good to know! Thanks

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).

Stupid, light, fast

I got used.to discord but it's not the same

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

> 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

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.

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/

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.

Point taken. For smaller incidents, Chat or Meet are regularly used. But larger (cross-team or maybe infra related) are handled in IRC.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 :/

Any method of mentioning that the channel isn't an official channel anymore is illegal by new policy

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...

You mean the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

Yup, sounds about right.

its times like these when you ignore the rules

And it's time like these where you immediately get banned for ignoring said rules.

Oh good grief, really? I had gone for the "Unofficial Foo Channel, see http://foo.org/blah" :/

Eggdrop with auto-greet message?

Eggdrop is still a thing?

Damn. It's been for ever.

We're talking about IRC here, after all...

.... Haven't been active on IRC since 1996.

.... Can still understand exactly what is being talked about here.

"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.

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.

> 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.

IRC channel topics are plain text. They don't parse JavaScript.

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.

Maybe just make a pastebin or something that explains the move and link users to that instead?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 :)

Postgresql simply just links to their site which mentions Libera, and that community is enormous.

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

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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 :)

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.

> 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.

The same head of staff that sold Freenode. So there being drama does in anyway hint at the libera staff being untrustworthy.

Dahlskjaer not being involved makes Libera more trustworthy, not less. They are the one who precipitated this entire mess.

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."

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_PrivateI...

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.

The forming of a business entity post fact has a lot to do with how bitter this event is.

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.

Because prawnsalad basically says to do what you're doing: not trust anyone. ;)

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.

I'm hoping more people will move over to Matrix instead

Looks like they are, as they are running the libera.chat Matrix homeserver bridged to the IRC server

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?

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.

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.

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.

Archived link, in case of cowardly edits: https://archive.is/LGsY2

Very unbecoming of someone in his position. Seems people were right to be concerned.

“And any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all.”

He can comfort himself being a true prince nonetheless /s

Another relevant quote from the same show: "There's no cure for being a [expletive]".

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.

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...

What was the topic before the bot changed it?

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?

Because he wants to control all of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

> 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.

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).

https://i.imgflip.com/5b0hgl.jpg

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Matrix is still far ahead of IRC while still being open.

You can run an IRC client in really limited machines. You can have a client even with Netcat and SH.

But we shouldn't held UX ransom by such hardware. Martix has TUI clients too.

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.

weechat-matrix should be pretty great, given the TUI is... well, weechat, which is a pretty great IRC TUI?

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.

>which is a pretty great IRC TUI?

Catgirl, or some patched mpu irc.

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.

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

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.

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.

Fair point.

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.

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.

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.

> 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"

There's also an older Lua version: https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

>Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?

Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.

>And if you are running weechat anyway, something like weechat-android might be an better option for you?

You're missing the point. I already run weechat-android but it's not about me. It's about people who have grown up accustomed to more modern and mobile-friendly applications. If the only way to get multi-device sync with push notifications is to run weechat in a tmux on a shell and install/sign up for Pushbullet, that's awful UX. Too much friction, to say nothing of the idea that the best way to use IRC is to sign up for a third party shell account.

I hate discord but it's a breeze to onboard people to your server.

> Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.

Yeah that mobile networking is completely broken is a bit unfortunate. But at least the staying connected in the background part works just fine for me (Also works fine with my jabber client).

Not sure why you still need pushbullet if you are already using weechat-android though (and not saying that I would recommend that for everyone.. something like IRCCloud is more suitable for non-technical people I would say). Or is it weechat-android specifically that has the problem of not being able to run in the background for you?

Weechat-android might not drop because it's a relay client. But try running a non-relay client and see how it goes.

Anyways it's like you're intentionally missing the point. I'm not here for tech support with my setup. I'm trying to explain why IRC's user experience is inferior to Discord for most users.

I tried with a normal IRC client on Android. And like I said it also works with my Jabber client, which I have been running for years now and never had problems with missed notifications or anything there, despite it also requiring a open TCP connection to work.

The only thing is it's less nice for the _other_ irc users in the channels if they don't have filtering setup to get rid of those extra joins/quits if you are in a bad connectivity area (unless you are running a server that itself hides them). But for onboarding that makes no difference at all.

However the sore points come a bit later with most servers having no server-side history, integrated bouncer, etc. (which would all require a bouncer or tmux+weechat, which I totally agree is not for everyone)

If you want all that you are limited to exactly one ircd currently (Oragono) that has integrated bouncer (so no need to run weechat/znc to stay "connected"), server side history (same history on all your devices and also not loosing anything on disconnect) and multi-session support (being online with multiple clients using same nick). Some of those features are slowly diffusing to other ircds and from there to irc networks, but that takes time.

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.

That's great until discord changes their business model and reduces or removes the free plan.

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.

The past and recent changes show they have been adding more paid features, rather than moving features to paid plans.

Message persistence is provided by irc log services.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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 :)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Could you expand on XMPP being over engineered? (Just curious) Thanks

Sorry just seen this. It's been a long time since I've touch XMPP so I might get some of the specifics wrong, but IIRC it was XML heavy. Everything was an XML file. Every message. I know XML will have it's fans but for an instant messaging app that create a hell of a lot of overhead. But in fairness to XMPP, it was created in the era when XML was basically the go to if you needed a strict schema.

Joining to servers was a pain as well. XMPP was intended to be federated but in practice it didn't really work well. A large part of that reason was because XMPP described a base protocol but then different servers could support different extensions off that and if your server didn't support the same extensions then you couldn't join. These extensions could vary from the "well that should have been part of the base standard to begin with" to the absurd.

There was also a lack of decent clients for XMPP. To be fair, this isn't XMPP's fault but rather the lack of adoption. But because XMPP was something that Google or others would use as a base to build their own IM network from, all of the good XMPP clients were locked into specific networks rather than like with IRC or Matrix clients that are designed to run on any network.

A lot of the tooling for XMPP wasn't particularly noob friendly either. It was very much built by engineers for engineers rather than intended for your average nerd to set up a private servers. I remember one XMPP daemon was written in Haskell and all the config was hardcoded so you had to edit Haskell source to bring the server up. Which isn't the easiest thing to do given how alien Haskell looks to non-Haskell developers.

> IIRC it was XML heavy. Everything was an XML file. Every message. I know XML will have it's fans but for an instant messaging app that create a hell of a lot of overhead.

The "overhead" is minimal, especially with the features XML brings. A message looks something like:

  <message to="user@example.com" type="chat">
    <body>Hello world</body>
  </message>

In a world where people stream HD video over their mobile data connection without a thought, I'm pretty sure XML is not an issue. There are binary bindings (EXI), but they never really took off outside some niche IoT systems. It just hasn't been a problem. XMPP has even been deployed over unreliable high-latency HF radio links: https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/naval-xmpp-roadmap.html

> Joining to servers was a pain as well. XMPP was intended to be federated but in practice it didn't really work well.

The large active network of federating XMPP servers would disagree with you. E.g. https://blog.prosody.im/2020-retrospective/

> A large part of that reason was because XMPP described a base protocol but then different servers could support different extensions off that and if your server didn't support the same extensions then you couldn't join.

This isn't quite accurate. Every extension in XMPP is designed with backwards-compatibility in mind. Two servers not being able to federate is not really a thing - federation is in the base protocol. On top of the base protocol various things can be negotiated. None of these are mandatory. Two servers not being able to federate due to differing extensions is a myth.

> There was also a lack of decent clients for XMPP. To be fair, this isn't XMPP's fault but rather the lack of adoption. But because XMPP was something that Google or others would use as a base to build their own IM network from, all of the good XMPP clients were locked into specific networks rather than like with IRC or Matrix clients that are designed to run on any network.

For the record Google federated with the open XMPP network, and allowed third-party XMPP clients to connect. Other providers of XMPP were not so open (Facebook never federated, for example).

Opinions of what constitutes a "decent client" vary widely. Being an open ecosystem, XMPP has a wide and diverse range of clients, and many people quite happily use modern XMPP clients such as Conversations, for example.

The biggest problem is that most clients are "just" open-source projects backed by volunteer efforts. It's very hard to find real sustainability (e.g. funding) in open-source, let alone open decentralized ecosystems, so resources are more limited compared to proprietary competitors.

I wrote a bit about this at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/

> It was very much built by engineers for engineers rather than intended for your average nerd to set up a private servers.

I don't know which Haskell server this was (surprisingly), but I've been working on making XMPP server setup easier since starting the Prosody project back in 2008. More recently I'm also working on Snikket, which takes things to a whole new level - you can have a private XMPP server up in just a few minutes without any technical knowledge of XMPP: https://snikket.org/service/quickstart/

> The "overhead" is minimal, especially with the features XML brings. A message looks something like:

Yeah, something like that. Just with a hell of a lot more metadata and closing tags to accompany it. I'm all for strict schemas and the first to criticise IRC's protocol for being dated, but XMPP is an overreaction. It's too far the other way. But I do get why XML was chosen -- frankly there wasn't any better options in 90s. But that still doesn't mean it isn't noisy and the, in my personal opinion, wrong choice.

> In a world where people stream HD video over their mobile data connection without a thought, I'm pretty sure XML is not an issue.

Smart phones weren't invented when I was running XMPP and the kind of bandwidth you're boasting about is a very recent development in the grand scheme of things.

> The large active network of federating XMPP servers would disagree with you.

That's also a recent development. Plus look at the graphs: even now it still hard to argue that you're even close to reaching that same kind of critical mass as the major IRC networks currently have (let alone had in their heyday) and that's without addressing the elephant in the room that is Matrix and it's far steeper uptake climb than XMPP. I mean, sure, you have a small and loyal fan base but chat protocols depend on that critical mass in the same way that social networks do and I can't see XMPP ever achieving that because it's already missed its opening.

It's now 10 years too late to be talking about XMPP and yet that's when all the advances you keep bring up were started. The protocol was already > 10 years old at that point and many engineers like myself had tried it and given up.

> Two servers not being able to federate is not really a thing - federation is in the base protocol. On top of the base protocol various things can be negotiated. None of these are mandatory. Two servers not being able to federate due to differing extensions is a myth.

Maybe now, but I never managed to get it working properly ~15 years ago. It might have user error or such like but I'd ran private IRC networks, bounces, written 2 different IRC clients, a multitude of bots for different chat services (ie not just IRC) and run a whole plethora of other internet facing services and literally the only thing I could never get working quite right was federated XMPP. So I have a tough time accepting total blame for not getting it right.

And the shear that you can call it a "myth" suggests enough other people ran into the same or similar problems as myself for it to become a problem that people talk about in the first place. Which adds weight to the argument that perhaps it's not entirely fair to blame the users.

> For the record Google federated with the open XMPP network, and allowed third-party XMPP clients to connect. Other providers of XMPP were not so open (Facebook never federated, for example).

Yes I know. And for the record, you're literally making the same point I made.

> Opinions of what constitutes a "decent client" vary widely. Being an open ecosystem, XMPP has a wide and diverse range of clients, and many people quite happily use modern XMPP clients such as Conversations, for example.

Once again you missed the part where I mentioned it was a long while ago when I used XMPP.

> I don't know which Haskell server this was (surprisingly)

Me neither. tbh I can't even remember which hosting provider it was I was renting rack space from, it was that long ago.

I'm glad to see the state of XMPP has improved somewhat. But it's too little too late now because the industry has already moved on.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Out of curiosity, what IRC client do you use?

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.

If they need that, they can use Matrix. There is really no reason to move to a closed ecosystem.

> 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?

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.

Businesses are just organized groups of people, for the purpose of profit, the leadership and management dynamics apply to any human group

I think a lot of things attributed to 'business' or other things, are really just human nature.

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...

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.

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.

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

Any recommendations today for hosted vpn?

I don't use any such services, so you'll need to ask elsewhere.

I made a choice based on one thing: the ones that advertise are all peddling complete bullshit. They make claims anyone that know anything about computers understand are borderline lies. They are owned in weird structures in jurisdictions nobody knows much about.

I chose one in my home country (which is 18 eyes or something like that, but that matters less to me) Sweden.

I use Mullvad. I have been very happy. I have gotten good support, almost no overhead on a 200mbit/s connection and very little traffic disruption.

I am not involved with them in any way other than being a satisfied user.

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

If Game of Thrones were an IRC network

Is freenode having its sourceforge moment ? In 10 years abandoned and then revived by normal people?

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.

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.

you might consider updating your hn profile. ;) (it currently lists oftc & fn)

Good catch! Done.

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.

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.

I see discord links in a lot of places you would once have seen irc links.

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).

That's a lot of open sockets for one host

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-...

I'm technically on both but really only using Libera.

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...

Good point. It’s way too easy for techies to underestimate the importance of “soft” skills. Do this at your own peril.

This is not about soft skills. It is about ideology and values.

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.

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.

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

Soft skills are how ideology and values get transmitted.

This toxicity is not just a lack of "diplomacy and human skills" - it is actively taking one side of the current political divide.

A code of conduct doesn't prevent situations like this in any way.

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.

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.

I'm hearing he didn't even own the servers, which were mostly run by volunteers.

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.

Calls it into question? I'd suggest a mass resignation would call it into question. This just proves they were right to resign.

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.

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.

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.

Believe it or not, this kind of thing is a fascist tactic, applied on a small scale.

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.

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!

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.

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

He's butt hurt, freenode's "policy" is just a red herring. Tt feels dishonest to me to pretend any other explanation makes sense.

"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.

> 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.

> They are now the network that tried to build a Berlin Wall to keep the users in.

Are you sure that wall is not to keep them out? /s

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.

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...

If you think that's unhinged...

https://www.irc.com/lets-take-irc-further

It's sad that he destroyed the very thing he cherished above everything else. That is, if he is telling the truth.

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.

I suspect that he is. It is pretty sad to see delusional people like this.

> I will do unto others as I would like done to myself.

Too bad he didn't follow through on this statement.

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

It could have just been one spambot, they don't say from how many users the messages came.

we've received tens of thousands of messages of support. thanks, gary!

They just moved to a different domain name.

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.

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.

well there's also oftc and hackint

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.

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.

Eh, no. Libera.chat is doing it well.

Hmm..

    sed -i 's/freenode.net/libera.chat/' .irssi/config
    irssi

Switching is too easy.

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.

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.

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.

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."

This matches the story I got from Reddit on /r/haskell and /r/emacs.

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

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

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.

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.)

Well, and then there are some people that I don't exactly want to consider how IRC "improved" them.

Ironic how the very front page of irc.com mentions "No vendor lock in".

> 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.

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.

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.

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.)

Do you have an opinion on any particular technological successor to IRC?

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.

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.

I'm really hoping matrix is the long term solution to this, and the general vacuum of an open source base for communication protocols.

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.

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.

I mute most things I'm not interested in.

I admit it's less manouverable by keyboard only (or I haven't dug around enough), but maybe the likeness to self-hosted IRC servers is still to broad and every Discord server is more like an IRC channel, but with segmented topics you can hide (like muting everything regarding sports or spoilers or cars).

Are you asking for discoverability of unknown (to you) Discord servers? Because that would be the closest likeness to an IRC channel search for me, which I rarely used.

I discover the project/hobby/group I am interested in through word of mouth or web, and then find their IRC channel (or now Discord server).

The discoverability is bad with IRC servers as well.

But I really meant how to switch to channels on different discord servers you are subscribed to.

In my IRC mindset, channels aren't attached to particular servers. They exist all in the same bubble. Not so with Discord.

The Discord UI prevents me from seeing activity in the channels I'm interested in if they are on a different Discord server. Quickly jumping to another channel on another server is not possible AFAIK (there are keybindings for switching servers or going to the next or next unread channel on the same server though).

I think that is due Discord being tied to livestream gaming. When you livestream, it makes more sense that you don't switch to other channels during that session. You are more involved with that channel.

Ok, yeah I understand your issue now. I haven't been bit by this particularily since I seem to just use it a bit differently and don't jump a lot between servers at the same time.

I could definitely see a usecase for creating your own views though where you could tag in specific channels from various servers.

Out of curiosity, what do you consider the worst architecture choices in IRC ? And what would be better solutions ?

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.

I did the same after you said this.

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/

Some channels are also moving to OFTC. Alpine, cat-v, #freedesktop, #wayland, and others are examples.

#dhall is on OFTC too. The #nixos universe seems to have moved to Matrix.

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?

Bruised egos lead to bad decision making.

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?

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.

It's a microcosm of a lot of real-world politics.

Lee is a person unironically considering himself a prince. This explains a lot about his governance model.

Why leverage personal attacks? That's totally uncalled for.

Because this whole thing is about one person being sh*tty?

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.

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)

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.

It's not an attack, he literally claims he is the crown prince of Korea.

Being the pretender to a defunct imperial throne says a certain amount about somebody.

Typically, to be honest, that they are unhinged.

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?

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.

Gentoo lost a large number of Freenode channels to rasengan overnight. Emergency relocation to Libera Chat ahead of schedule has been decided upon.

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.

Do you happen to know what the topics were?

Seems to be any topic mentioning libera chat.

Topic: * libera*

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.

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

Well, we don't have to imagine!

It might be, but I am not aware. Any reference?

Whatsapp blocked telegram.me links at some point (I think when it was acquired by facebook, inciting an other mass exodus)

How? WhatsApp messages are e2ee. Via the preview pings maybe?

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.

For example, try referencing another platform or payment system in an iOS app ;)

Freenode is now a proprietary platform operated by Lee.

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…

I meant that Freenode is now proprietary as well, as the sibling comment mentions, yep!

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

I agree with you, with the exception of backlogs.

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.

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.

> 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.

So what? How come it should be my concern to include everyone, as if everyone was entitled to use my service?

A russian only IRC channel excludes everyone not speaking the language. A Playstation exclusive game title excludes Xbox owners. An OS only targeting x86_64 excludes people with only ARM and i386 machines. An Android only app excludes iOS users. An OS without certain drivers excludes tons of users and use cases.

If I purposefully want to target Desktop users, so what?

>> 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.

> So what? How come it should be my concern to include everyone, as if everyone was entitled to use my service?

You weren't talking about a service, you were talking about designing a protocol in such a way that it wasn't usable for mobile users. That's a very different thing.

I'm saying we shouldn't be designing protocols in such a way as to ensure folks can't implement it in certain settings. If you want to set up an IRC network with a ToS that says "no mobile users" go right ahead.

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?

> 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?

> 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.

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!

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.

Yeah, he didn’t need to buy and wreck FreeNode to do that. I do not buy this explanation.

Honestly, it screams impulse control problems to me, that or a catastrophic misunderstanding of how people actually think and act.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was inspired to write my thoughts about this: https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26

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.

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.

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...

#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.

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?

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".

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?

Silencing dissent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tried to talk. I'd have been better by pissing in a violin.

Well that clears things up. Channels might not be sure where they want to end up, but now they know where they cannot stay.

This happened to #elixir-lang too, and they decided to move to libera.chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288673

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

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!

Maybe he'll go back to evangelizing PIA under it's new shady owners, and leave freenode to rot.

Are you talking about Private Internet Access the VPN? If so, got anymore info on this?

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

The same Mark Kerpeles that almost went to jail because he stole MtGox customers money to buy a castle for his mom?

> Mark has a somewhat sordid history,

'Somewhat sordid' is amusing understatement. Mark Karpeles is only slightly less criminal than Bernie Madoff.

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.

Wow. Thanks for the info!

#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.

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.

Any good CLI clients for Matrix?

I think weechat-matrix is the most mature option

There's the smoking guns if you were on the fence about who is in the right on all this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

the problem is that it is the matrix.org team that can do the bridging, not the Libera folks

> 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.

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...

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?

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.

Yeah but if that's your goal why piss everyone off and torch your platform?

Most of freenode was public channels, no? Couldn't he just use a bouncer and store logs?

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

Same thing happened to Wikimedia. They are not happy.

Ubuntu too

https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2021/05/26/announcing-ubuntus-move...

Allegro too. They didn't had moved to libera at all, now they have.

https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...

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.

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.

Doubt it. ## channels have always been unofficial. Nothing stops you making a ##windows channel or whatever

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.

The end of a certain Internet epoch, I should say.

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.

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.

Yup, there are lots of great communities still on IRC. :)

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.

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.

Off to Libera, the new home of the freenode community.

https://libera.chat/news/welcome-to-libera-chat

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.

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!).

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?

> 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...

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.

What are the risks that the biggest Matrix servers get acquired by hostile entities like happened to freenode?

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.

Just got a similar email from zsh mailing list.

A lesson in how to buy something and then make it worthless

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.

This covers the gist (eheh) of it: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...

https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-sta...

"How to murder an IRC network in 12 easy steps", huh?

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.

If anyone is about to say that it is to make it easy for newcomers: it's gentoo. It'NEVER easy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just happened to #zig as well: https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1397388932367601665

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.

What changed? https://fosshost.org/news/freenode

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?

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?

Freenode users are far more technically savvy than than the vast majority of Slack/Discord/WhatsApp users.

And more strongly principled and aware/care about issues like security as well.

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."

If WhatsApp users want to switch en masse to a new platform, they have to manually reconstruct their chat groups and their contact lists, install an entire new app, learn how to use the new app, work around any features that WhatsApp had which are now missing on their new platform, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting.

If IRC users want to switch to a new server, just use the /server command. Done. Maybe you have to re-register your nick or channel. But the client is the same, the interface is the same, everything stays the same.

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/

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.

I think rasengan's actions are making everyone's decisions very easy.

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.

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?

Basically, yes. Here's a log of how that may look like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287039

Whoa, that’s interesting. Seems like they made a bot to do this anytime a channel mentions Libera

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.

Wow that’s crazier than I thought, thank you for the explanation!

> 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?

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.

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?

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.

"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.

Well, that proves that the previous threads weren’t an overreaction.

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.

Oh, #vim was also taken and closed. :O

Happened to #dragonbox-* / #openpandora-*

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.

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

I hope he set all the topics to: t4k30v3r by l33

The response on the freenode website is wild.

https://freenode.net/news/for-foss

And that is why free-whatever (society, software, people...) needs immunity from arbitrary take-over from companies and governments too.

Easier said than done.

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.

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

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.

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.

What about it? Nobody said anyone could be immune from having their reputation hurt, that's not what we were talking about.

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)

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.

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.

Please provide context. Assume that I have no clue what is going on. I know there's freenode, which provides IRC as a service since forever, and there is this new thing Libera. Otherwise I didn't have time to investigate anything.

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.

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 :)

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.

That's too charitable. At some point when someone keeps showing you who they are, believing them is the right course of action.

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

The people are mostly still around on libera.chat

I am not following the whole story but how does the crime profit anyone ? Who wins what ?

It's not rational. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288630

Interesting, thanks.

> In a 2013 interview with ProPrivacy, Lee was asked what his goal in life was, and where he saw himself in the next 50 years. He said that he wanted to ease “pain, suffering and stress” by harnessing technology. In the next five decades, meanwhile, he hoped to either be alive or be known as a man “who helped bring happiness to the world”.

Swing and a miss.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/312...

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.

This is ridiculous. Ircops need to know better than this.

ircops and drama? Tale as old as time.

True as it can be...

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...

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.

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 #.

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.

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.

Ah, I was mislead by the wording. Ah, thanks for the clarification!

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.

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.

Exactly. #guix was not closed and merely mentioned that the community had moved to Libera.

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.

You assume incorrectly, unfortunately. Advertising libera.chat is enough to get taken over.

Nope, they nuked a local user group's channel simply for having Libera in the topic.

nice to see this freenode situation is finally calming down... /s

RIP IRC. The destructive splintering has already sent too many of what little was left to Discord, Slack, and Matrix.

this has something to do with it

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...

IANAL Are there any IP claims against freenode that could be made by any FOSS project that has an official channel that has been taken over? I know legally freenode can deny services but in this case they are literally taking over projects public representation.

Edit: spelling

The worst part of this debacle is now I have to abandon PIA. I had no idea this was that guy.

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.

PIA is an independent operation from Andrew Lee now? Interesting.

Today's episode of the "Fresh Prince of Dead Air"...popcorn time again.

You know, none of this can happen if you have a decentralized network such as Matrix.

Because you can move to a different server, right? You can also do that on IRC. Almost every client has good multi-server support.

The drops in the graphs speak volumes, i wonder how they'll look in a week or something...

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

I'd anyone remains on freenode after this, they deserve whatever comes to them.

Irc servers are not that hard to start up and libéra is already in place. It's a matter of time now before they lose most of the users.

Is it a good time to move chat to a federated setup? Something like Matrix.

Could you elaborate more on your statement/question? Isn't IRC already federated by design?

With so much drama on I-R-C, Freenode is now trash thanks to L-E-E

Reality comes at you fast.

Good that the "freenode" maintainers are displaying their intentions upfront and that the projects are moving quickly.

It's actually great that he still comes on HN. It gives people he screwed a chance to vent a little.

It’s really unfortunate that Andrew Lee is killing the thing he loves, and that he can’t seem to see it.

As an outside observer, I really didn't believe that IRC could cause this level of drama.

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.

Is anyone tracking the migration from Freenode/Leenode to Libera?

The numbers must be amazing to see.

The best tracker is probably https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

Here's the graph out of my prometheus: https://i.imgur.com/iUkkqAK.png

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.

Europeans: let's all GDPR bomb Freenode and request deletion.

Does the GDPR apply?

Freenode Ltd is a UK corporation, so I'd think so.

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.

The GDPR applies regardless of where the company is, so long as the requester is an EU resident.

To any EU citizen anywhere and anyone in the EU.

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.

Based on the "discussion" on #freenode-policy-feedback and #freenode-services, they are considering it as "inappropriate advertising" and "spam"

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

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....

At least you can switch networks. With apps like discord you don't even have that option when the admins misbehave.

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.

However, this does reinforce the idea that:

protocols > programs

But you can’t get funding for managing a protocol.

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.

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?

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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?

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.

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.

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.

>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.)

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

Both discord and slack have web based versions which are far superior to the associated apps in my opinion.

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.

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.

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.

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!

here is a link to his message: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285980

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.

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.

Programmers who use IRC seem like a hard group to build a wall around.

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?

Seems totally unsourced and unlikely

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.

"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.

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".

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.

> 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.

Why don't you try and find out what would happen, instead of making spurious accusations against the Libera staff?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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

these channels weren't abandoned, chatting one minute and banned the next isn't "abandoned"

You are burning down the network around you and complaining that others are starting fires.

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."

We have deprecated the function "get_channel()" please use ".channel" instead...

Deprecated eh, you mean abandoned. Deprecated function removed immediately!

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)

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.

Goodbye #reprap@freenode You will be missed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> …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.

> 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.

"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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Except the other side "responded" against bystanders, not the instigators. If I was a bystander, I would leave.

The fight was started when Andrew Lee hijacked Freenode.

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.

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.

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.

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.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

> ...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.

They are just volunteers, not employees. They can always quit and that is not a temper tantrum.

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.

> 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.

> 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)

> 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.

So you're saying it's not OK to change the terms and conditions of a service you're running? Channels weren't gracefully moving in the first place they were kicking and banning users and forcably closing thge channels. And everyone keeps saying freenode community is now on libera yet at the same time crying that freenode won't allow libera to be advertise on their network.

> aggressive lock-in is generally not what is expected here.

There is no lock-in. They're actually closing down channels that don't want to use their service. Think about it. These channels don't want to use freenode. Freenode closes them and everyone cries.

> (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)

Let's be serious that's because that was a single project and not a mass targeting of the freenode user base. Acting like "Oh but when it was 0.01% of the channels it was fine but now it's 700 major channels it's an issue, this is outragous" is spinning a false narrative that only uninformed people would fall for.

I won’t speak for the spambots (which are dubious to be honest), or the banning/kicking which, while I know it happened in some places, was not really widespread.

Most communities I’m in were in a "wait and see" position, heck, one even only had something along the lines "We’re undecided over what to do, but you should register your nick at libera in any case". Guess what they decided to do after the channel got taken away…

> There is no lock-in. They're actually closing down channels that don't want to use their service. Think about it. These channels don't want to use freenode. Freenode closes them and everyone cries.

Because what a decent service provider does is provide a sunsetting period, in which most of the banned channels were already. Immediate termination because you decide to change your service provider and want to not fragment your community is not what a responsible provider does.

> Let's be serious that's because that was a single project and not a mass targeting of the freenode user base

FOSS projects owners are not "targeting the freenode user base", they are choosing another venue for discussion. You can think there is a secret cabal out to get Andrew Lee, but that’s really people considering their options, and getting proven right.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Github has the right to kick out people but people also have the right to leave and they will.

> 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.

> even though lobsters is a directly competing message board

lobste.rs is invite only, so not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

It's pretty easy to get an invite.

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.

The history of IRC, though, is full of network fork/splits when the network owner goes heavy-handed.

> Expecting otherwise is just acting entitled.

As is the idea that you can just buy users.

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.

> 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.

(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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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/status/139750445711463629...), Elixir (https://twitter.com/AmNicd/status/1397448111291879424).

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?

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

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".

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.

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/

> 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.

"Liberia Chat" or "Libera Chat" ? :-)

https://www.reddit.com/r/accidentallyliberian/

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.

I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe it's time to admit defeat and relinquish control of Freenode. I don't see how you can possibly salvage this.

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.

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.

You'd be really pissed if you saw what happening?

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.

FYI, there are other IRC networks than freenode. It appears hackint has "hackers" as a focus, including hackerspaces.

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_Bridging_Sunset

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.

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.

An empire of dirt.

> 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.

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.

Yeah, you should have. I was on your side before you pulled this bullshit.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

You killed a good thing for no reason. Enjoy your empty shell, I hope it gives you all the comfort you deserve.

> 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.

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!

> 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

> 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 :)

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

You can't answer that question any more than I can. This is a question for Andrew Lee.

I actually can, because (1) freenode mostly had good anti spam software since a while and (2) rasengan and his staff clarified it’s about people moving.

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.

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.

Imagine using PrivateInternetAccess and trusting this guy with your logs.

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