Happy Birthday, Libera Chat | Hacker News Reader

Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

libera.chat

302 pointsmcwhy148 comments

Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which is either answered quickly, or devolves into seeing that no one can help them, eg. because what they are asking doesn't make sense or is too mbitious or whatnot. Then silence again. In other words I've never gotten a clear sense of "community", but rather a forum for random and often uninteresting questions, and therefore just naturally stop visiting. All in all it just kind of gets boring very fast, I find, so I am curious how people manage to get something out of it and what motivates them to stay joined in a channel.

I haven't tried newer systems like Matrix or Discord so I have no idea if these do any better, or if so, why, although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so..)

My point is not to dis on IRC/chat rooms here, just explaining why I've never particularly found it engaging, and so I'm curious what others see in it, as I feel it's something I could learn to appreciate if I tried a bit harder.

Discord seems more about gathering people around a community that someone is driving. For example users of a service, driven by the company. Or a book author running a programming language server. As such they are more successful but perhaps less discoverable. There is no big list of them. (Which might be a good thing from a spam perspective)

I may not be the common case, but I didn’t join IRC looking for a community. I primarily used it (and still do today) for help and collaboration — open source work and ##javascript /##math questions, usually. By being in the channels frequently enough you begin to figure out the community. Many channels also have off-topic variants for, well, off-topic discussion. Those will tend to be more like communities and not have hundreds or thousands of users.

In terms of why IRC specifically, I enjoy the simplicity of the protocol and the open-source nature of it’s ecosystem

Are the off-topic discussions more (or less?) engaging than the topical ones, for you? Just curious.

Some channels (right now I can specifically think of SourceHut's) refer to their off-topic channels as the watercooler, and I think that's an apt description. If the main channel is something you're interested in then you'll enjoy the off-topic too.

Appreciate your thoughts on this topic. What are some things that would help keep your interest in a topical chat app? Is it strictly that you're uninterested in the content and so the discussion is boring? Or is the asynchronous/disjointed conversation more of an issue?

> My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community

I think that misses the different ways people seek to interact online. Reddit/HN style threaded comments have played a traditional role in social/aggregation sites, whereas live chat-based platforms are newer and facilitate a different kind of experience.

Both have value but they are different, and it could be that the latter is simply less interesting to some people.

> you're uninterested in the content and so the discussion is boring?

I would say that perhaps, at least from what I've seen, it's often not really a discussion at all, but more like a question answering forum. I suppose what I like about HN/reddit style forums more, is that there is a "post", with a clear topic or article, and then people actually have a full, long discussion about it. Sometimes of varying quality, but it's at least full of threads where people react, people react to those reactions, etc. Whereas what I've seen on IRC is mostly just "how do I do x", and then some random short-lived arguments about how to do X better, or why are you doing X, etc. It doesn't seem to be a discussion but more like a problem solving brainstorm with a bunch of people who aren't stakeholders in whatever the original poster is talking about.

So, I'm not sure, but maybe the way the discussion in a link aggregator is specifically oriented around a "post" and clear topic is what makes it more engaging for me, rather than just a nebulous promise that "this channel is to discuss X.." followed by people just sitting there with not much to say about X.

But, maybe my take is completely wrong, and that's why I asked the question, maybe I've missed the very interesting and dynamic back-and-forth discussions and funny moments that attract and keep people engaged in a chat room. Maybe it's just a matter of being there long enough.

Disclosure I'm building a topical chat site at https://sqwok.im

One thing I've noticed is many conversations will start out on-topic but eventually the active participants will exhaust whatever they have to say and it will pivot to more casual conversation. It isn't necessarily bad, but it creates the problem where new/arriving users see a conversation that appears unconnected from the topic. I recently received a bunch of feedback to that affect.

Another factor that someone else already mentioned is simply that many people like to lurk and don't want to engage in live discussion. Also not a problem if the previous issue is solved.

Information density is a phrase I throw around a lot when comparing the new web based chats to IRC.

I agree with sibling comments.

I'd also add that IRC nowadays is very different from what it used to be. If you removed bouncers channels would be mostly empty. That's why you often see silence.

Back in the days IRC had very vibrant communities. I'd say it's turning into nostalgia now.

You're probably making the mistake of joining communities that have been embrace-extended-extinguished by slack and matrix bridges.

Users on the attacking service get full access to IRC but also additional channels. For who don't mind the insane web bloatware it's simply the least friction path to abandon irc to participate.

In my experience communities that banned these bridges have remained vibrant and active.

This is a thing, yeah, unfortunately. Some channels have really awful bridges like the #calyxos channel on Libera that bridges to matrix but doesn't puppet its users. So all messages seem to come from the same user and you lack nick colours etc.

And indeed, it really thins out the discussions because not all channels are bridged usually.

It's not engaging, because it's made for developers. It's a serious tool, and it's not corporate. Professionals want something that works, not something attractive.

For example there are two big c++ discord servers. You can't even search for discord servers, you can't favorite single channels. You quickly get overwhelmed with notifications. Not to mention the things you have to click when you join a server.

And it runs with electron.

It's about the people who will use the tool. Software developers would use irc, gamers would use discord.

This is an overly reductive summary that isn't backed by any of the stats--the number of IRC users has declined well below the number of professional developers. Dozens to hundreds of open source projects were already on Slack/Discord before the explosion of Freenode, dozens more switched when that happened. It's not as simple as "professionals use IRC, gamers use discord".

You could definitely argue that IRC appeals more to the kind of developer who spends their entire day in the terminal and Vim--but that's not the only kind of developer out there! Just like many developers prefer IntelliJ to Vim, many prefer Discord to IRC. Discord and Slack both offer real improvements for some workflows, and some people value those improvements.

As an example, persistent chat is hugely valuable in a help community--I often find I don't need to ask a question at all because I can just search in the history to find what I'm looking for. Even something as seemingly frivolous as reactions is quite useful--one person can answer a question and get a chorus of 'amens' without actually having a bunch of "what he said"s in the chat.

Yeah the notifications and other tricks to try and 'engage' you, so annoying about discord and the other glossy chat apps. "Did you try this channel? People are waiting for you!" bullshit. IRC is clean, fast and efficient.

A quick few thoughts based on using IRC for 13-ish years:

• I like IRC because it is clean and a light-weight text-only interface (well, you could use emojis, if you wish). I prefer text-based conversations when possible. I'm equally fine with video, but text is far more effective for technical conversations.

• It is also less stressful for me, as I can respond in a more asynchronous manner, without any implicit pressure to immediately respond (e.g. the "$person is typing ..." notification).

• IRC 'stuck' with me, because I largely use it for upstream projects that I participate in.

• To avoid "boring questions" it is useful to put an etiquette "hint" in the channel topic, and gently point new users to it. E.g. I've written this some 8 years ago for a channel I used to moderate: https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/

• Lastly, I recognize IRC's pros and cons, so I'm not religiously attached to it, and I'm fine to use other chat tools. I just don't want to become that guy in the last pane of this XKCD comic ;-) — https://xkcd.com/1782/

When I was in high school I was in different Linux related channels on IRC as I was getting into Linux. I ended up on Quakenet, not sure why, because I'm not a big gamer. Looking back it was mostly the community and meeting like-minded people. Instead of watching TV I'd fire up irrsi and hang out in the chats, talk a bit, answer some basic Linux questions and learn a bit myself. It was also a great place to get help as the expertise was bundled there and there weren't many online sources like these days. I was also in some C/C++ channels and the same goes for that. Some of them were basically a live version of Stackoverflow these days (I'm trying to do X, here's my pastebin of code...any suggestions). I slowly faded away once I got more busy and forums/search engines provided quick answers for most questions.

I share your observations, which apply to a lot of topic-focused channels.

I think they don't apply to the freewheeling chat channels.

In those, a totally different set of social norms apply, and one that may be counterintuitive is that, to get a conversation going, you shouldn't try to be _too_ provocative to get attention. Reason being that you may be dismissed as a troll not worthy of feeding. There's a balance to be struck, but it does exist.

Chat is also not for everyone. And IRC isn't even for every chatter. So it's entirely plausible and not really damning if IRC just isn't your vibe. But if the idea (of a 33-year-old protocol, of a mostly-decentralized infrastructure, of f/oss server and client software) intrigues you, then I'd encourage you to give it another try but with different goals.

Explore more channels. Pop into some of the social ones with 100 < n < 1000 users. Set up a persistent client like TheLounge or Convos on a pi in the closet, so you can catch what happens after you close your browser or sleep your laptop.

I see, interesting perspective thanks. Your tip about capturing the conversations to catch up later is a nice idea.

Getting a hang of irc does take time, imho. It's not something you actively look at and interact. Rather it's something I look at occasionally and interact with. I think this style of irc'ing has made it ideal for me. Once you get more used to specific servers/channels, you tend to have different types of engagement. In my experience, a lot of new users come in hoping for this type of more personal/involved discussion from the get go and get disappointed quite a bit.

There are also different types of channels. I only talk in technical channels like #ubuntu when I need help. No point introducing noise. But I might have a monologue about some petty stuff in ##math-offtopic, for example.

No in-line images. No animated GIFs. No reactions. No cutesy junk that wiggles and tells me jokes. Lack of those features keeps users who want those things away.

After using Slack, Discord and JS build tools that fill the terminal with emojis (half joking here), joining some IRC channels from a lightweight Linux client (looking at you, Electron) felt amazingly refreshing.

Plus it woke up some nostalgic feelings back from when I was first discovering the internet (circa 2000).

I think it's inertia and age. I joined a few IRC channels when I was a teenager for topics I were interested (Tolkien and old Disney films) and poked around in a lot of other communities, but never really stuck with any in particular. Back then obviously I was looking for friends and chatting to random people. Eventually a small group moved from the Tolkien IRC channel I was on and created a small community of our own which over the years have dwindled to a handful of people, but some of us still stick around (and couldn't imagine going anywhere else). The only other IRC channel I'm on was built around a small message board for a group of highschool friends. The message board is still somewhat active, but the IRC channel is down to 2 members :) I'm now past 40. My social circles stays fairly static. I have tried joining new communities on Discord (and IRC) and generally failed. I don't think it's specifically IRC (although I much prefer its simplicity to Slack and Discord).

I have also always felt this way, trying to get into it and thinking I'll enjoy it but never really succeeding. Maybe all of the people trying to get into it need to create a channel on Libera and just start talking?

IRC and all internet communities that rely on real-time communication have this implicit hurdle where you have to be comfortable talking to people you have never and will never meet.

I personally have never felt especially interested in internet friends and so when I see a Slack channel for something I'm interested in, I just lurk. There is something about the real-time nature of it that is harder to get into compared to sites like HN or reddit, where you can post something and not be as actively holding up a conversation; It's more work. It's also less interesting than doing it in person.

The upside of lurking on platforms like Slack is that every now and then, when someone posts a link, a job posting, something else that I find interesting, I can click on it and easily search for it. Without an IRC bouncer and checking in at regular intervals, I see less interesting stuff over time. You have to "be there", it seems. That's aside from the slow, questions only discussions you're referencing. My guess is that people who can't get into chat rooms, IRC, etc are not willing to check into these online spaces in the same way they do physical ones.

> I have also always felt this way, trying to get into it and thinking I'll enjoy it but never really succeeding. Maybe all of the people trying to get into it need to create a channel on Libera and just start talking?

Tbh if you're on hacker news you're already halfway there. You clearly like high-density no-nonsense communication and aren't put off by the lack of a glossy consumer app.

Slack is kinda IRC just more glossy though. I have a lot of time for slack groups, especially the professional ones like MacAdmins. Don't forget slack also has actual search (at least in the groups that pay for it).

But lurking is normal. When there's 500 users in a channel you don't want to go "hey everyone how's your day" constantly because nobody has time to keep up with that if everyone does it. Though if you're into that, there's offtopic channels usually with people that do have time for it.

> although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so..

I feel the same way about IRC (and Matrix). I think a part of the problem is that the technical Q&A discussion that happens in most of the dev channels would be better served taking place on a forum. Lots of those chats aren't happening in real-time anyways. And if you're not there to receive the messages, the information is lost.

OTOH, certain activities do lend themselves better to real-time messaging. For example, the subreddit of your favorite sportsball team might have a Discord chat that is lots of fun during a live game. Another example; many video game subreddits will have all their LFG (looking for group) activity in a Discord server. Both of these scenarios are very "in the moment" interactions that don't really need to be preserved for the future.

> I feel the same way about IRC (and Matrix). I think a part of the problem is that the technical Q&A discussion that happens in most of the dev channels would be better served taking place on a forum. Lots of those chats aren't happening in real-time anyways. And if you're not there to receive the messages, the information is lost.

This is where a good bouncer comes in. I can search all the way back to the beginning of when I joined a channel in Quassel. It's not lost at all, and a forum is much less direct.

This is one thing where Matrix shines by the way, as when you join a channel you can even go back to things that were said before you joined. Though this is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sometimes when you say something it's good to be aware of who's there to read it and who isn't.

Open standard

Simple protocol

Use any client I like

Also accessible via the web

Decentralized and non-hierarchical

Been around for a while

Runs from command line (with a quake-like terminal) so it’s easier to access than alt tabbing. Text only. Most users have technical background or are hobbyists so the conversations tend to be different.

I absolutely love IRC.

It's blazing fast, uses very little bandwidth and is not polluted by images and stupid stickers, shaking windows or chat bubbles. Of these only the images can be handy sometimes but you can use a weblink for that.

Also, it's anonymous, you can just make up whatever nickname you want, no need to register (ok for some channels/servers they can require it). Just make sure to use a VPS to hide your IP. No "create an account with us first, what's your date of birth and other stuff we have no actual reason to ask for". No terms & conditions crap.

The whole thing with the rooms with hundreds of people joined but not talking is exactly what I like. There is a huge powerful community but very little noise. People don't blab on about what they had for dinner (except in the offtopic channels). IRC is really to the point, though this is a cultural thing, not technical. If you go to #obscureapp you will see talk about this obscure app, and don't have to wade through cat pictures and other BS. Because none of the regulars want to sift through this shit every day so such distractions are quickly moderated.

What you need is a bouncer. I use Quassel myself because it has a GUI client which makes it easy to control multiple connections to networks (with other bouncers this can be complicated). And it has a great Android client QuasselDroid. With Quassel you can just visit it once a day and scroll back to see what you've missed.

In IRC time is also very fluid, you can just reply to a question someone asked much later. If you saw an unanswered question, you probably didn't wait long enough. In fact it is super annoying when people plonk down a question on IRC and then leave 1 minute later. This is not how it works when people are on tens of channels at the same time!

If you're on there regularly and keep a bouncer running 24/7 you will get to know the 'usual suspects' in each channel and you will see a very strong sense of community.

I hate Discord, I like Matrix but matrix becomes difficult to manage if you join 50 public channels. The UI of its clients are focused on being a whatsapp/telegram replacement, not an IRC replacement.

As one actual specific example of what I like about IRC, I had an issue once with a FOSS package on FreeBSD. I mentioned this on the right channel, and it turned out the maintainer was there as well. He confirmed he saw the same issue, found a fix, gave me a workaround and published the final fix 10 minutes later. This is what makes IRC (and Libera in particular) so great. This kind of support is amazing. And this wasn't even a small package at all.

In comparison: I work for a multinational and we pay millions to the usual big tech suspects for "premium" support with agents that don't know more than it says in the kbase which I have already read, not to mention all the jumping through dark pattern hoops I have to go through just to get a ticket in the system. When it gets through I have to reiterate everything I have already said in the ticket, then they will tell me I'm doing it wrong because according to the docs it should work. Yeah, I read the docs, I'm contacting you because it doesn't. Then follows the "troubleshooting" which involves turning unrelated things on/off in the vague hope that it might work because they can't tell me they have no clue as to what the problem is. Fast forward a week or 2 or sometimes a month and if we bug our account manager enough they might grant us the extraordinary privilege of sending our request to someone who is actually slightly involved in development. Only at this point the issue is fixed though we usually have to wait for ages for it to make its way into production. And we pay really big bucks for this crap.

This is where IRC shines. And a lot of the things I mention are not even technical. You could do this thing on any platform, really. But it's part of the culture of IRC. I think what also helps is that the only people who are still sticking with IRC are quite technical so it bypasses the whole "expecting you're a moron that doesn't read the docs" stuff. Bonus points for those that have a registered + cloaked nick and haven't logged in 2 seconds ago :)

Normally you are going to want to go into the "offtopic" channels for general chatting. Normal support channels are often very focused and explicitly disallow non-support conversations, but it depends on the specific channel and the operators of the channel of course!

Woah, been a year already. I remember sitting on mIRC for hours and hours watching the users flood into libera and out of freenode.

I will never forget how absolutely gobstricken I was with how perfectly the Libera team executed everything, and they were so incredibly polite through what has to be some of the densest chaos one could witness on the internet.

Really historic day. Happy birthday, Libera!

I agree. I really thought the whole thing would split and kill the community but within weeks after Libera started everything was as if we never left freenode. With some improvements even. Really well done.

Also kudos to the Libera team to not continue trying to fight the battle, after the first few weeks I don't remember freenode ever even being mentioned. They just focused on getting back to life as usual which worked great.

That's my experience as well. Ample opportunities to attach a bunch of extra fluff to the whole thing and it wasn't even a temptation for them to do so. Very professional and expertly executed. I can't think of many comparable examples.

One of the biggest selling points of IRC is that large numbers of people are not on it, and will never be on it.

I stopped actively using IRC about 15 years ago precisely because regular (for the time) people gradually disappeared.

I've stuck with too many dying communities.

The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.

The text could actually mention Freenode because this wasn't really a "start from scratch" as stated:

> Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half

Technically speaking, Libera Chat did start from scratch. It isn't their fault that another IRC network was in the process of imploding at the very same time and many projects and people felt the need to move to a less deranged foundation, therefore fueling the effective userbase of Libera.

The instance of the software was started from scratch; the communities (which are the hard part) were largely cut & pasted

Do we have any reliable info on how freenode is even doing today? At least some accurate user counts? Who is using it? When the Exodus started, it seemed to turn into some right wing cesspool, but that was also more hearsay iirc.

It's had a bunch of guises as a website. For a while it was a blog filled with shouting about how removing the administrators will allow for real Free Speech and the future of everything will be freenode (and cryptocurrency, please buy our shitcoin maybe).

https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode....

It was turned into a Free Speech reddit clone for a bit, which nobody used.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode....

It's now a wiki which refers to the network as "assmode" and implores you to instead join "pissnet" run by the Impeerial Family.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode....

Sort of the death knell of desperately trying to form a community.

Someone was editing that wiki, but to be clear Pissnet is not affiliated with Freenode, though it was born from its collapse. It is a small but active community, and has a couple hundred servers.

https://shitposting.space/network

It's very hard to explain, but it is a real network that currently operates as an anarchic sandbox for doing weird things with IRC software/protocols and just generally goofing around.

Pretty much every single active user is a netadmin. It's the network where you register a nick by linking your own server.

It's back on netsplit's top 100 list at #7: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

I'm idling in the top 10 channels, it's semi-active in that people pop in and say stuff, but there's no interaction. Most connections are from old bots, or from community pages that haven't been updated.

> from community pages that haven't been updated.

Yeah, I lurk in a community that _also_ has a Libera channel now, but they keep a bridge-bot in the old Freenode channel because all their old videos implore people to join them on Freenode.

It gets a bit of traffic, meaning those folks might otherwise be lost without the bot, so I understand it. It just sucks.

Yeah suffering from that too; we need an internet-wide PSA that people should just s/freenode/libera/ whenever they see/read/hear it somewhere. :-)

It seems to be alive. My client still connects to it. I saw a lot of trolling that seems to have simmered down now. I have had some odd/interesting conversations in the #freenode channel. 417 users in the channel at the time of this writing.

Good, freenode is dead. Amen.

I'm sure it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.

Irc in general is in a slow death.

As fast as people who grew up with it die ;-)

Slower probably. I doubt there aren't new people getting into IRC. You could've made your comment back when I just got into it, and IRC doesn't really seem any more dead now.

But maybe just as many as old folks leaving it for Matrix et al? Might just even it out in the grand scheme of things.

Most of the people that I find on IRC are 40+.

We are all in a slow death. Right now it and we are alive with a vibrant IRC community to be thankful for.

IRC as in the 1988 chat protocol, sure.

IRC as a concept has never been healthier. Lots of alternatives, most proprietary, some libre, and more users than ever.

What are you basing this on?

I'm not trying to be difficult, I have used IRC since the 90s and still use it. It's just the best format for chat imo.

But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.

> But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.

Is it? I'm not on it every day, but I don't really notice a change. Isn't it just that it isn't growing, at least not as much as the explosions of web-based, proprietary platforms like twitter or slack?

Well first of all there was no "it" when it came to IRC 15 years ago. There were many huge servers that I never visited like Efnet, Quakenet, dalnet and more.

Me and my little group of hackers would also host our own, and link with other groups around the world.

I think it boils down to accessibility. Even back when I started certain people just couldn't handle the terminal clients so they used Xchat or Mirc. In school in Sweden IRC was actually often pronounced "mirck" because people would refer to the mirc client.

So when web chat came along, with mobile apps too, it just reaches a much wider audience.

So the ones who are left on IRC are old farts, and terminal junkies.

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

In 2004, top 10 networks had together around one million of users. now, it's around 150 000.

Top reason of this decline is gamers leaving the network. Quakenet and GameSurge had like 300K users together, now less than 10K (and probably mostly bots or bouncers).

IRC has inspired most major chat protocols, even as much as they've deviated. The fact that there are major networks with tens of thousands and hundreds of users that are running with minimal funding is a testimony to the protocol and the communities around them.

I mostly agree with you. But I still find IRC very useful. My main gripe is that there are few IRC clients that suite my tastes.

> it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.

Yawn. All I have seen is some angry techbro who can dish out an hour of time for an attorney to write angry letter when he does not have things his way. That is not to say this is a criticism of victims but rather a damn shame more people do not stand up to this nonsense.

Incidentally this 'notoriously litigious' individual is also being sued over alleged sexual-harassment committed by him at his previous company London Trust Media[1]. However not sure of the latest status given the sale(s) of certain companies.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compr...

I wonder if they're afraid Lee might sue them if they did or something

Edit: Or maybe they don't want to drag the whole drama into this celebration again :) Libera moved on so quickly that even after 2 months it felt like everything was in the distant past and the community was just as it had always been.

But then it would have been better to not elaborate on the history. I agree it's a bit weird like this.

> This time, instead of this awful cycle of disempowerment of the people, it's time that the people of the world, together, plant the flag of the power of the people on the Internet. The internet changed everything and leveled the playing field. This cannot be taken away.

By his own manifesto he wouldn't do that, and he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite.

> he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite

I'm not sure that's actually true. Clearly he very much liked taking power away from a specific set of people. The guy really likes constructing this narrative where he's some sort of free speech savior, but when you look at his actions the opposite seems true. E.g. during the switch to libera if you had any mention of libera in the channel topic on freenode you'd end up with all the channel operators banned and replaced with friends of Lee. That's hardly a pro-free-speech thing to do.

We need to standardize sarcasm punctuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Oh whoops. The sarcasm seems obvious in hindsight. Apologies :P

"Oh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention."

Just realized taht "/s" is a de-facto standard recognized almost everywhere in the international tech world - perhaps it would be viable to submit a RFC for it that can be referenced? Plenty of time before next year's April.

> By his own manifesto he wouldn't do that

Except, well, he did.

He's a chump and only "believes" in that stuff insofar as it lets him perpetuate his savior complex.

"promises only bind those who believe them" - JL Gassee

FWIW, it's a very common saying in French. I wouldn't attribute it to Gassée.

Edit: googling it in French attributes it to Henri Queuille.

Thanks. JLG attributed it to politicians, I think, but I was (a) too lazy to find the source, but also (b) don’t speak French. I just didn’t want to appear to be taking credit for such a sharp observation.

Jacques Chirac famously used a variant of it.

He can try, it will not end well.

https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1526971545356214275

> Hello (do not) @buyvpnservice from (dirty) @Kape_com

> I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

> You are now at KAPUT, you are booked until the final destination, FUBAR.

> Please fasten your seatbelts and return your tray table to its full upright and locked position.

I'll be honest: I have absolutely no idea what this means. It's obvious the @buyvpnservice is meant to be a play on "buy VPN service", but everything else looks like mindless mumbling to me. Could you explain it, please?

Hello, thank you for taking the time to read.

If you read my tweets since December 21, 2021 (<20 total) you will get some more context.

I worked for PIA VPN for 5 years before it was bought by Kape.

They're scammers.

>* They're scammers.*

Given all the not-false-but-absolutely-misleading advertising I see/hear for VPN providers¹, I suspect they are all scammers or as near to as makes no odds.

[1] including in sponsored segments in the output of technical influenzas who don't help their reputation in my view by parroting the words themselves instead of letting the sponsor do it, or by being more choosy about exactly what they are willing to parrot

You are correct, scammers is too mild a term to describe criminal racketeers like Lee.

last time he even threatened them with legal action he managed to get them to transfer the domain name and everything else to him

(so I was told)

Yes, I understand. They prey on the weak, but we are not weak.

They have also threatened me several times over many years.

They will not last long now.

https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/an-abusive-relationshi...

From the article,

> Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half, a number which has been mostly steady since.

Seems pretty impressive when they put it that way!

I don't see anything wrong with that.

I've been part of a community which forked in the past and it was so cringe (at least to me) for one of the sides to keep explaining the origins and such on each and every presentation even 10 years later.

Anyone who knew Freenode knows the story already, and does any newcomer need to know, on that very blog post? I'd say no.

Because it's factually true and explains everything else.

Hi, one of the blog authors here, Fuchs.

My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually.

Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.

We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc. I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was.

Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well.

Hope that clears up that part a bit :)

Edit: removed a typo / half cut off sentence

I agree that history is in your favor (and so does everyone else who moved to Libera), which is why it was a bit odd to not see Freenode mentioned at all. It's nothing bad, it was just a bit "hmm, I wonder why they did that".

It seems to have confused some people, we also got some remarks in that direction on IRC and on Mastodon. I hope my answer cleared it up a bit.

just leaving out the "from scratch" bit would probably have killed any confusion. happy to be a libera user regardless, thanks.

I'm completely uninitiated to this topic but I'll give it a shot from what I've read in this and the parent comment: It seems like there's some denial about the past/roots of Libera, in this blog post. The "acceptance" phase is yet to come.

> It seems like there's some denial about the past/roots of Libera

I'd disagree. There are some coals that no longer need to be continually raked.

Some parts of the lawn we no longer cut

> We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust.

This is a half-truth. Some people (in a community I'm in) had implicit trust in the team that did such a great job running freenode, though not everyone. I'd say you already had some trust (just like some IRC software, I guess); and we're glad we chose to follow to libera.chat in the end.

Well, they're still the ones that built it. :-)

I sincerely applaud focusing on positivity instead of negativity. You all are not putting in your current efforts because of FreeNode. That's long in the past and completely irrelevant to current efforts. You're all doing it to enable the wonderful communities that are out there and thrive on this fertile ground.

You may want to make it a 'clean cut', but that's not how it comes off as. When I read it (as well as everyone in our Libera channel who commented), it comes off as sounding so terrified of the clown prince that the word 'Freenode' can't even be mentioned, and the huge lacuna looks hilarious (especially the parts about growth).

Yeah this is what I thought also, but fuchs's answer makes a lot of sense, and I have seen how that approach to looking forward really worked. But you're right, I did get that feeling too from the blog post.

Perhaps just a line about wanting to look forward and not dwell on the past would have clarified it.

> We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.

This really helped. You focused on "getting life back to normal" from the get-go, looking to move forward instead of looking back at the anger and despair. This really helped to make Libera the home it always was within a matter of weeks. Really well done and thank you.

For me this mature and positive mindset only increased my trust in the team, there was never any need to rebuild it because none was lost :)

Mentioning it somewhere is good for history, but it's confusing and meaningless info for most people. People don't care, don't know and would rather have something "fresh", also from an internal perspective in the org.

A fork would imply it had copied all user accounts and channels. But this didn’t happen.

Dear lord, it's been a year already? It feels like it was only yesterday when Freenode was trying to take over every other channel on their network. Glad to see Libera doing alright

I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that (for me at least) the best IRC client is Matrix. They offer a bridge to Libera.chat, and that then sets up a Matrix "room" for each IRC channel you join.

You then get a consistent session, that all history automatically, with clients for every platform. Plus you're on Matrix which is a good thing :)

Except when it sporadically disconnects and forgets your login credentials.

it should never forget your login creds if you saved them. type !help in the admin room and it’ll tell you how to save them.

That's odd, it happened to me quite a few times on the Libera network despite having saved my credentials with Liberachat IRC Bridge status using `!storepass <password>`, but on OFTC bridge it happens all the time because IIRC it's currently not possible to save credentials for the OFTC network.

What is the state of Freenode now? Looking at Wikipedia it apparently still had low-thousands of users at the end of 2021?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t...

I see Bitcoin still has their official channel on Freenode[1]. I wonder if there are more projects still doing that.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/community

That's just an unmaintained webpage.

I let Libreoffice know yesterday that their non-English pages were still pointing to Freenode, this was fixed.

It was kind of nuts to see so many pages that weren't updated in years change their links.

bitcoin.org is not owned by bitcoin project.

There is some tug-of-war going on about that domain that's too stupid to even talk about. (As are all the stupid "what is true bitcoin???" debates of 2017-ish.)

The actual Bitcoin domain is https://bitcoincore.org and they link Libera there.

While I'm no longer using IRC, I'm happy to see Libera.Chat succeed. Godspeed!

Not hard to remember, since it's also my birthday. Thank you, Libera, for being one of the players keeping IRC alive.

Happy birthday!

I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things:

1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities

2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system

3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing

4. Reputation is everything

It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and further fragmentation of IRC, and hopefully the recovery continues. It was great to see everyone united for a brief moment though, regardless of your views against Freenode or any particular channel it was widely accepted that it was a horrible move and everyone resisted the hostile takeover.

I wouldn't accuse him of having technical prowess. Pretty much as soon as the takeover happened freenode started suffering technical issues. Libera on the other hand dealt with the insane influx of users really well. There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly, but has been pretty much spotless ever since.

The most difficult thing to deal with in the first couple of days were the occasional server crashes. We would have liked some more time on our testnet to iron out the bugs in the IRC server software we were planning to migrate to (and started out with on the new network), but that didn't end up happening. In essence, we deployed a beta straight to production with >10k users on day 1 and had everything ironed out by day 4 if I recall correctly.

Well from a users perspective, for all intents and purposes it looked like you got everything sorted by the end of day 1. I vaguely recall some netsplits happening after that, but that's just part of the IRC experience on most networks.

Props on the smooth switchover. It could have hardly gone any better as far as I can see.

Aaron did a really nice job putting together Solanum (https://github.com/solanum-ircd/solanum).

Solanum isn't my effort; Ed has done most of the work on it. I'm more focused on services (NickServ, ChanServ, et al.)

I believe this was criticising the initial operation of post-Lee-takeover freenode, not Libera.

I was responding to "There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly", most of which were caused by incorrect ulimits (easy fix; change limits, restart ircd) or server crashes (not so much; investigate, write patch, test patch, deploy patch to half a dozen boxes, restart ircd).

To be fair, when you don't own your servers, don't have any contracts with the volunteers who provide those servers, and then they exercise their ability to stop providing those servers, that's more a social problem than a technical one.

I mean that's the second thing of course, but sponsors weren't pulling out on day one yet as far as I recall, but technical issues definitely did start popping up on day one.

Is there any hints at this being the case? I could just as much see him somehow doubling down on everything, twisting it as purging the network from bad actors and that the current state of freenode is actually what he wanted in the first place, or god-knows-what...

Twitter is not IRC. Switching from Freenode to Libra means changing a config and possibly sorting out some channels that switched faster than you expected.

Switching from Twitter to Mastodon means abandoning the (pretty terrible but familiar) software and an entire mode of interaction. Mastodon is much more about interacting with your peers than celebrities.

If anything this shows how superior IRC because of its flexibility.

It shows an advantage of an open protocol over a closed system:

You can just host it somewhere else if things go sour.

I was there and rasengan handled it extremely poorly. He could've taken over the network and most people wouldn't have moved out if he didn't screw so many things up.

it was almost a masterclass on how not to do it

all he had to do was change the top level administration and keep quiet for a few months, at which point he could have implemented his changes slowly

He is not right in the head, that's pretty clear from all that he's said and done. What I mean to say is that someone sane could've handled it well. iirc freenode was already "taken over" by the guy who sold it to rasengan years ago and nobody noticed.

Yeah. When the first reports of problems a-brewing were coming out, I mostly ignored them as dumb Internet drama that would blow over. Then the channel take-overs started happening...

0. Do not threaten and steal from the guy who runs the show, or you're going to have a bad time.

Sincerely,

Gaurav Giri

Ex-CIO Private Internet Access Inc. (5.5 years)

PS: War is expensive, his costs are mounting.

You assume that resangan wanted to continue running FreeNode the way it was.

To me it looks like he had some issues with the people behind FreeNode and decided to take it over simply to destroy it (and/or change it into the right-wing gaslighting pro-trump "community" that it is now). If you look at it this way, it all makes sense: It's all just a personal vendetta project for him

Happy birthday libera chat! I use matrix to connect there because im a heretic, but im glad i can do that.

And fuck you, past 19 May 2021 Freenode.

s/past/post-/;s/2022/2021/

Thank you.

I wonder if discord might threaten IRC, it seems that is not the case.

There are two servers dedicated to the c++ language.

While I use discord (because thats what my online gaming buddies use) my main issue is discord is that they disallow alt clients https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

My main gripe if the offical client is the lack of multi account support, Yeah I know it has an account switcher but a) its only desktop atm b) you only get notifactions from the account you are currently using. The "workaround" is to multi-client.

The thing is with IRC, its a protocol, so any client supporting the protocol works, If one client doesn't support the features you want you can swap to another, if no client supports the feature you want you can hack it onto an existing one / create your own.

I am part of a few programming/language communities that are both on discord and IRC. I noticed that discord lends itself to...low quality discourse, so to speak.

It might sound a bit cliché but despite a big overlap of members which hang out and participate in both at the same time IRC has way less noise and better discussions and answers. I also feel like the language creators, while hanging out in both, do the "important" communication on IRC.

On discord there is more emote, picture and link spam and more "joking around with memes", and that is despite the fact that the discord servers already have dedicated channels for certain topics.

Now this is a very subjective observation on my part, but I believe that there will always be a place for plaintext communication, since it automatically filters a lot of noise and demands a lot less mental overhead to keep running in the background.

Please note that I am not really nostalgic for IRC, since I am a pretty recent user. I'm at an age where I barely missed the "golden IRC years" and when I got into programming it was already declared dead by many, whatever that even means given that some people have been claiming the death of IRC for a long time now.

Discord has absolutely hurt IRC, and supplanted it in many cases. Once upon a time, e.g. subreddits had their chats on Snoonet IRC, now it's all discord. Tech is still IRC-heavy, but Discord, Slack and Matrix all have sizeable presences now too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.ch...

I was on freenode off and on for many years...the ex staff that now runs libera are some of the most sad toxic ego maniacs on the internet. These people were never professional or kind, they've always been immature and obsessed with power and control to the point that the old freenode owner had to sell quietly to try and avoid riling up these neck beards...her efforts were in vain of course because per mo one of the lead freenode admins threw a tantrum and locked out the new owner by changing passwords...liberal can celebrate all it wants, it's leaders are terrible people who love to abuse the little power that they have. Irc in general is inherently awful and I'm glad it's almost completely dead. Keep faking dem connection stats and spamming "off topic" whaaa

I wish that Libera Chat would obfuscate user hostnames in the WHOIS...

You can just set -r on yourself as you join, that should do the trick (from memory, I'm on mobile)

There is, in fact, excellent documentation on their site for this https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks.

Of course, it's not as much of a free-for-all as some other networks (I recall Rizon lets you set whatever cloak you want), but it should hide hostnames.

by default, Rizon replaces the identifying part of your hostname with "Rizon-xxxxxxxx"... I wish that liberachat would do the same without needing to register and then take some other action.... I don't need a custom hostname, just one that doesn't broadcast my IP.

Happy birthday libera.chat! Thank you very much to the founders for providing this free and open platform :-)

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