Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com