Last remaining 1000+ user community channel seized by Freenode staff
linux.chat
linux.chat
Libera: Current global users 32769
Freenode's decline in users over the past month: http://www.hinner.com/ircstat/Socip_F_2.gif
Comparison showing Freenode decline and Libera rise: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
Probably won't be long before Freenode is effectively dead.
Edit: Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27502059 for a projection and more stats.
But then again everyone is on Discord now so no surprise
IRC as a tool is certainly not dead.
Former IRCOP.
Last time I used IRC seriously, I had to get off the train because I was chatting more on mobile than not and the mobile clients were basically un-serviceable (IIRC, protocol is too chatty and stateful for reliable connection on a device continuously changing its physical network connection).
It's little wonder to me that IRC's lunch got eaten; the UX on mobile is just awful.
I use weechat, with the glowing-bear frontend on both desktop and mobile.
In both cases, the mobile interface is a frontend for something else instead of being an actual irc client.
Edit: the IRC Wikipedia page has numbers from a couple of years ago. IRCnet is twice the size of EFnet and QuakeNet, freenode was three times the size of IRCnet.
#postgresql IRC has by far the most insanely helpful and in depth discussions of even the most trickiest of issues.
> The future for freenode and FOSS communications, indeed, looks bright and exciting. Stay tuned for many great things to come!
Is their death greatly exaggerated?
What this means is that probably most of the users left are either bouncers or lurkers that just haven't disconnected yet. However, this is speculation on my part.
or a subreddit?
it always stuck me as amazing in how much autonomy IRC channels tend to have on various servers, especially as the internet has changed in the past 20 years.
Between mobs wanting "accountability" for speech they don't like, the increases in liability, the MSM targeting any platform that has any free speech or autonomy to it (be it Substack, podcasts, E2EE messaging, etc.) or just blatant cash grabs by trying to control and bank off something fairly open... i thought IRC - in its near entirety - would have gone this direction a long time ago.
I have always said they should be viewed as content janitors but many many many (most) moderators disagree and take the limited power they have way to seriously
If anything, Discord and Reddit are the ones that have it backwards. Their servers are theirs, and their free speech interest are theirs, but while you can own the premises and prioritize your own interests on your premises, that doesn’t grant you ownership over the communities you host.
Communities are made up of people, so claiming to own a community isn’t any different than claiming to own people. People can just pick up and move elsewhere, even if that means losing the benefits and privileges of the prior host.
Seriously? Server and especially channel admins using their privileges to moderate the contents on their network is a decades old concept - with the debates on power abuse and the limits of "free speech" being as old.
If one thing, today's Twitter "mobs" are way more transparent than ye olde IRC fights, given that you'll have detailed explanations of the outrage under the respective hashtags.
IRC doesn't need to boom. The communities matter; IRC is just a protocol.
I'd have thought real names and chan culture's extreme NSFWness would get on incredibly badly.
Making everyone more anonymous seems very chan-like.
Chat is a slightly more dynamic market than email for user acquisition, but it's still damn hard to get new users. Who but a bunch of rubes would use a previously nonprofit service that was publicly obliterated?
Or is the end goal a new, commercial brand strategy? No one in tech with any sense will use them.
https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
Freenode is dying and the staff are actively killing it.
Thanks for that link - I was on Undernet starting in 1995 and even though the charts only went back to 1998 it was interesting to see the popularity of different IRC networks wax and wane over the years.
That, combined with a fragile ego and controlling personality, led very predictably to him reacting to people starting to talk about leaving by trying to tighten his grip on everything—and everything slipping through his fingers.
Oh, people barely know the half of it... and for those wondering just how bad it can get, peruse one of the court cases currently against him personally.
> For example, he told-LTM employees that he wanted to hire a female candidate simply because he wanted to have sex with her. Similarly, Lee expressed his desire to set up a "modeling agency" in the Hollywood Hills that would actually be a front for illegal prostitution (i.e., the "models" would be paid escorts). To that end, Lee circulated a memo to male LTM executives advising them to make sure and wear condoms when having sex with the "models."
I really hope they have a copy of that memo. That alone would be damning.
> Making matters worse, Lee also had an ongoing relationship with a mistress that he brought to company functions and the LTM offices, despite people knowing that he was married. Lee met his mistress through a company offering female companionship for money. Lee abandoned his wife and newborn child to spend time with this woman, and their relationship was toxic. His mistress was physically and verbally abusive towards Lee, erratic and unpredictable, and caused Lee to act over-emotionally.
> The two fought on a daily basis. And this happened in front of LTM employees, including Plaintiffs. For example, a few days after the February 2015 Meeting, Lee and his mistress had a violent altercation at a club in front of Park, Ken, James, and other LTM personnel. His mistress became infuriated and violent when Lee did not pay attention to her to attend to a conference call concerning LTM business. She punched Lee in the face, causing Lee to lose a tooth.
All that MtGOX money couldn't buy class.
WTF
Edit: if it is all a bit of performative art, then it's brilliant. I have logged into public IRC maybe 10 times in the last 15 years, and now I'm seriously considering going back.
While the claims in the lawsuit may eventually be proven, the fact that something has been alleged in a lawsuit is not even remotely similar to substantive evidence that it is true.
According to https://corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compressed.pdf:
> During this time, however, Plaintiffs became concerned with Lee's mental wellbeing and his ability to lead LTM and PIA. Plaintiffs noticed that Lee was a habitual user of marijuana and cocaine, and would frequently abuse drugs in the office _in front of his employees. Lee often combined his drug use with alcohol and would act erratically.
> For example, he told-LTM employees that he wanted to hire a female candidate simply because he wanted to have sex with her. Similarly, Lee expressed his desire to set up a "modeling agency" in the Hollywood Hills that would actually be a front for illegal prostitution (i.e., the "models" would be paid escorts). To that end, Lee circulated a memo to male LTM executives advising them to make sure and wear condoms when having sex with the "models." Lee went so far as to state that he planned to move LTM's offices to the Hollywood Hills mansion once the "modeling agency" was set up
That might explain why he's making all of these decisions to drive people away. Once the population gets low enough, then he can just pull the plug on the servers claiming that there aren't enough people online. No one will protest, and after 6 months the social network MyFreeNodeBook will launch.
Sounds straight out of an authoritarian regime's playbook.
The only explanation of what's going on that I can think of.
From what I can tell, somewhere along the line some of the staff decided that wasn't OK and kicked out the person who'd actually been in charge of the network since the founder died, his newly-appointed replacement demanded that the Freenode domain be transferred to him personally and rejected Lee and others' suggestion of giving control of it to the community instead, and things went downhill from there with attempts to lock Lee and people seen as affiliated with him out of the network, threats of mass resignations and bogus claims of unprecedented advertising intrusion on the Freenode site, selling people's personal info, etc...
If that were his goal, banning any channel even mentioning libera.chat seems to be going in the opposite direction. If he actually went more hands-off in the style of 4chan it'd have had a chance of surviving. There was a period after the takeover where a lot of people were just kinda waiting to see. Now that they have seen there's not much chance left for freenode IMO.
Some other thread is saying that 40% of the userbase had hemoraged already
In this case, no.
People love to throw this sentiment around literally every time any kind of platform does something shitty, and it's certainly very effective at demotivating people from even trying to do anything about it. It would be great if people stopped claiming this, because it's really not helping anybody and makes the job of resolving governance issues so much harder.
This specific case is actually a good example of how the sentiment is completely wrong, too; with the right strategy (which was what happened here) it's clearly possible to get people to move en masse. As evidenced by Freenode bleeding users to Libera at breakneck pace, and effectively all projects having moved over.
Bottom line: you might not want to put in the effort to solve governance issues like this, and that's fine. But please stop actively telling other people that they won't succeed.
Also, yes there are lots of idle people but at the same time when nobody responds to them with ~50ppl to the room, they will eventually wonder why.
Plus channels having no op (Just chanserv), maybe freenode staff. Which will look even weirder than usual.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
“He would see this country burn if he could be King of the ashes." - Varys
Staff tout free speech, but they apparently only mean troll speech since anyone speaking against them or announcing new homes is getting channels stolen and users banned. It's disgusting.
But really what they're doing is the opposite of responsible and fair management. I don't want a network to be run like this.
freenode was communities of people. The servers were donated, provided by people in the communities who wanted a reliable network. The staff were members of those communities, developers for those projects, and all volunteers. The users never were freenode users, they were ubuntu, and debian, and ham radio, and gimp users.
There was nothing to OWN.
And now that someone who has no clue about any of this does, they leave in droves.
I'm looking forward to the weechat-matrix-rs project becoming usable, so I can also use it as a Matrix client.
I suppose you could suggest it would be off-putting to users, but the current method seems to have done the same.
Does anyone know what the endgame is for freenode? Is there one?
Lots of HN discussion: https://www.google.com/search?q=freenode+site%3Anews.ycombin...
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
After that, at every turn when Andrew Lee has been given the choice between doing the right thing and acting like a comic book villain, he has chosen the latter.
Removed any restraint on staff, tried to bribe FOSSHOST to be the face of his operations, hired known trolls and right-wing extremists as staff.
More materially, he has killed or driven away ##linux, #fsf, #gnu, #archlinux, #gentoo, #fedora, #ubuntu, #wikipedia and OVER 700 MORE PROJECTS:
https://github.com/siraben/freenode-exodus
And he is not done yet. He has announced that soon he will switch the whole network over to a new irc daemon, which he will fail at because he doesn't know how and the people who do won't touch him with a 7-foot pole:
https://www.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/nyp855/new_freenode_ma...
IMHO, at this point you need to seriously consider the possibility that everything he's touched, including Freenode, could be compromised in some way, if not already a literal "honeypot"...
Off-topic: I love his new house: https://www.insider.com/south-korean-royals-california-mansi...
Someone bought the freenode domain name
The group of people that ran freenode get in an argument with that person
All of the previous administrators leave to start libera
the new owner of freenode installs his own administrators.
Channels start switching to libera
freenode bans any one discussing libera
freenode seizes channels that are in the process of migrating, because they consider libera competition.
Abbreviated: A LLC has enough papers to prove that they own Freenode, and they have more money than the Freenode past volunteers to spend in court fighting over this. Hence the Freenode volunteers decided to abandon Freenode.
Lesson: Even though you are a fully volunteer organization, always maintain an explicit paper trail that holds in court who owns and what, or someone will at some point simply come up with some documentation to their advantage and claim what you've built as their own.
In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer—who was, at the time, head of Freenode staff—created a corporation, Freenode Ltd., which she immediately sold to Lee.
Sounds like some money exchanged hands.
Actually they almost certainly don't. But they don't need to, either; they can just suppress the staff through legal threats, because lawsuits are expensive. Whether they are in the right is immaterial.
* Founder lilo/Rob died.
* Christel became new head of staff.
* Christel "sold" Freenode to Andrew Lee (of which was not hers to sell) and never told the rest of Freenode staff the terms.
* Lee decided to assert himself by claiming he owned all of Freenode and that the staff had to hand over the keys to the kingdom to him.
* Staff resisted, Lee used threats. Staff decided it was better to move on.
* Libera.chat formed.
* Since the majority of Freenode was the relationship a lot of projects had with the now ex-Freenode staffers, most decided to go with the staff to Libera.
* Lee threw a fit and decided to use a bot to hijack 700+ channels that happened to mention "libera" in the topic, regardless if the channel actually intended to move over. This included channels owned by IBM, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Wikimedia, GCC, etc...
* Channel takeovers continued despite his apology when caught.
* Lee is certifiable. https://corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compressed.pdf
If this is the case, is anyone pursuing a way to invalidate the sale?
However, it should be noted that she is the CCO of PIA, which was Lee's company before he sold it.
Any word on the alleged policy violation? Or has Lee just starting nuking communities at this point?
Generally speaking, mentioning anything about libera.chat in the topic is counted as "spam" or "advertising" or whatever, even if you were keeping a presence on both networks, or only considering the possibility of a move.