Leaving Freenode for a new network | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Freenode for a new network

kline.sh

613 points4ad296 comments

I submitted this link under the title "freenode IRC network purchased by VPN company PIA" back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101538

it hit the top of the front page, and people complained about my use of the word "purchased" (including freenode staff now that seem to be extremely upset...): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102030

needless to say the title was edited...

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Shows Mr Lee aquired >50% voting rights in 2017.

(via https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...)

From what I understood of the previous (draft) resignation notes, there was a misunderstanding/disagreement over what (if any) Freenode assets actually belonged to that limited company.

Tomaw fought legally with Lee to get the sale contract from what I've read; and apparently it _does_ legitimately own the network.

By "network", do you mean the domains? What did the sale contract say?

He means the irc network. The servers which one connects to when using irc. The freenode network is an irc network that one can connect to in order to chat but there's a freenode domain that acts as a client to the network which it seems freenode Ltd (of which Andrew is now the only member on the board) owns

I mean everything that makes freenode freenode. I don't know what the contract say exactly, but by reading the resignations letters, especially this one https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd... :

    What has become clear to us in the last few days is that we were lied to,
    by both Andrew and christel. Contrary to public and private statements, the
    sale included the network as a whole, something christel should not have
    had the ability to relinquish, as most of the infrastructure is not owned
    by her or any of us. However, Andrew has more money than us, and so we
    cannot fight this.

I've read a lot of chat logs and so far I've only seen Andrew try to claim he owns the whole network, domain, copyrights, etc whereas it seems he only owns freenode Ltd which owns the domain that has a client to the irc network. The volunteer staff of the irc network say the irc network itself is hosted on servers owned by sponsors of the network who are not affiliated with freenode Ltd. Up to what I read, they were still trying to figure out if freenode Ltd owned the copyright/trademarks for freenode. Was this from newer chat logs then?

the thing is, IMO, that once Christel shut down the PDPC (the entity behind freenode a long time ago), Freenode just became "Christel" owned. And Christel sold everything under shady reasons (without really saying everything was sold) to Lee.

Some resignations letters say that it seems to say this.

Why did people object? Because "purchased" makes it legitimate?

Not fully up on the controversy, but I suspect because it implied the "freenode IRC network" is something that can be "owned" - when it's more complicated than that. (A company can be owned, legally, sure, but an ongoing-set-of-relationships, & mostly-volunteer processes, is usually something more than property with neat property-title.)

Looks like it got pretty owned tbf

Realistically, the infrastructure for the servers can be replace and when that is done there is a high chance >75% of the users remain. There will always be other people willing to volunteer. I remember the AOL ICQ IRC had volunteer opers and there is no way you can think that wasn't fully a for-profit setup.

If your analysis centers on 'servers', I think you're missing the point of concerns about describing an "IRC network" as being "purchased", and other aspects that make some Freenode channels interesting.

I think you miss the point, my point is that point is moot. A community is about people, if the people don't move the community stays. Sure there seems to be some very vocal very committed staffers leaving but a major part of Freenode when I was using it was the people who had massive amount of knowledge and were sharing it on a regular basis. If those people stay then Freenode lives on even as a corporate sell out.

People will overfor free if you give them power and status

> needless to say the title was edited...

Congrats on spotting the danger early. Still, I support editing the title back to the original. Avoiding editorialised titles is important, it means that opinions are shared in comments and it's easier to have a neutral discussion.

Back then you were right about the purchase but it seems that you weren't able to get your point across to the others; I wish people listened more and I also wish you talked more.

I’m in the camp of whatever title seems less biased and more directly describes what is happening should win out.

As someone with only a passing interest in freenode which I used to use but no longer do, learning they were bought is much more relevant than the implication they formed a partnership. I understand that there is grey area over whether they were “bought”, but a partnership doesn’t seem to cover what went down in any way.

> a partnership doesn’t seem to cover what went down in any way

True, but we only know that in hindsight. At the time the claim about acquisition was disputed [1] [2]. If somebody replied with information about voting rights [3] then perhaps the "joining forces" title would have been treated as misleading and replaced with "purchased by".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102301

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102139

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207992

The title was edited only after the original propitiated the story into notoriety. The votes before and after the intervention therefor became in conflict. Hacker News aided in the spread of disinformation.

PIA can't feed its own pilots, yet still goes doing outlandish foreign acquisitions.

They will sell their last airliner, but will still cling on to stuff like Roosevelt hotel, and such.

Pilots? Airliners? The PIA in question is Private Internet Access, a VPN company. Unless a VPN company also flies planes?

In this instance, PIA is referring to the Private Internet Access VPN service, not Pakistan International Airlines.

Uh, it got to me now. Performing the facepalm maneouvre

That's an interesting example because I don't think we'd edit the title that way now. We try to replace corporate-press-release tropes with more direct language; but of course only if we can be sure that it's true. If people in the thread were complaining about the word "purchased", that explains why we'd have changed your title. But I cringe a little to see that we put press release language like "joining forces" back in there.

Corporate press releases are sort of a special case: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I sometimes say they're an exception to HN's title rule, but that's not really true. The rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait", and the euphemistic, one-sided language of CPRs tends to be misleading (and sometimes is intentionally so).

Dan, if you're actually one person and not some algorithm, I have to commend the visibly valiant effort you've put into this place. You got this one wrong though.

It was a different atmosphere back then; far more "grifty" a time perhaps. I need not make appeals to some Hegelian universal history for us all to see now the owl of Minerva has flown. You were duped and spread disinformation -- that's okay -- apologetics can save you.

Since you are in a position of authority and trust, ironically, just like the subjects of this very story, there is one thing you can do: Apologize.

Just apologize, and keep doing your thing. History will judge all of us far better than our downvotes.

I'm always happy to apologize when someone points out a mistake, but I don't see the mistake yet in this case.

What the fuck did I just read.

It's interesting to me that the draft was censored and mentioned a buyer, while this one only talks about control. For me, it paints the situation worse.

Still sad to see FreeNode fall. This will lead to a lot of split communities and dead links.

EDIT: Fuchs finds some harsher words[0]:

> In the past few weeks, this has changed[2], and the existance of a legal threat to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know the substance of this legal threat as it contains some kind of gag order preventing its broader discussion within staff. The democratically elected heads of their respective teams, development, infrastructure, projects and communities were removed by force[3] and have been informed that they are not entitled to act in their respective capacity.

> [...] A contract in which christel, former head of staff, allegedly sold freenode, surfaced. And while I personally think that this would have neither included any servers or code or user data, since that did not belong to christel to sell, I am not a lawyer and apparently some of our volunteers got pressured very hard and their personal life could have been ruined easily should we have fought against this apparent contract.

This makes it look far more hostile than the linked note. Sad to see.

[0] https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt

>the existance of a legal threat to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know the substance of this legal threat as it contains some kind of gag order preventing its broader discussion within staff.

Is there any more context about this? I'd be interested to read logs. Are they saying Andrew Lee got an NSL for freenode?

Log (#freenode): https://paste.sr.ht/~ircwright/7e751d2162e4eb27cba25f6f8893c...

Log from after that one (#freenode-staff-discussion): https://paste.sr.ht/blob/4f5c7a6b3f6adb4697572f8cd77582fa16a...

I skimmed these logs and it is not clear what legal order they are talking about or in what way there is a gag. Are there specific lines in these logs that go into detail?

> Are they saying Andrew Lee got an NSL for freenode?

no of course they are not saying that, they would be punished if they did (because it would be illegal).

now, that such a thing exists in a "democracy"... is a topic on its own broader scope.

Apparently it’s in the UK, where judges are prompt to issue “superinjunctions” where even discussing the injunction is contempt of court and can incur a prison sentence.

Whether a monarchy without a written constitution, or separation of Church and State can be considered a democracy is left as an exercise to the reader.

The constitution is entirely written, we're just not sure which documents are part of it...

Source? Everything I've ever heard about the UK constitution is that it has both written and unwritten elements. Indeed, no statute or court ruling even defines the important head of government role of Prime Minister.

> Whether a monarchy without a written constitution, or separation of Church and State can be considered a democracy is left as an exercise to the reader.

That's begging the question, since it assumes an objective answer. Rather, "it is up to the reader whether they consider a monarchy without a written consistution, or separation of Church and State, to be a democracy".

Even that is rather silly, since it's drawing arbitrary lines on a spectrum of more/less democratic. Some are pretty clean, e.g. direct democracy is more democratic than representative democracy; an elected head of a republic is more democratic than an inherited head of a monarchy. Others have more overlap, and hence aren't strictly ordered in the abstract, e.g. written versus unwritten constitutions, sortition versus election, etc.

>Some are pretty clean, e.g. direct democracy is more democratic than representative democracy //

Unless the people want representational democracy but are forced into direct democracy.

Or, in theory (and I can't stress that enough that this is theoretical), representational democracy could better represent people than they can represent for themselves .. I can fix my own windows, but the glazier will probably do a better job. In the same way a group of professional politicians, in theory, could more closely represent the combined will of the demos than could direct democracy -- like how an adult stops a child from eating cake before they're sick -- knowing what is best for oneself, and what's best for society according to ones own choice of self-societal balance, is a hard thing that needs professional input.

I might add I think UK (and probably USA) democracy is seriously broken and that representational democracy isn't working well; but direct democracy is too easy to pervert with propaganda.

> Unless the people want representational democracy but are forced into direct democracy.

That's a category error; you're comparing a decision-making process to a decision. A totalitarian dictatorship is not more democratic than a body of elected representatives, even if the people voted to implement that dictatorship. It's like the XKCD comic which claims the number 4 is random, because it came up in a die roll.

> Or, in theory (and I can't stress that enough that this is theoretical), representational democracy could better represent people than they can represent for themselves

Sure, but what has that got to do with the relative level of democracy between those systems? "Democratic" isn't a synonym for "good" or "best". It's perfectly possible for a more democratic system of governance to produce outcomes which are "worse" (according to whatever measure we care about). The rest of your comment seems to be further conflation between "democratic" and "good".

I don't think I made a category error, the process is not democratic and the continued decision making by the demos would be contrary to their desire (to have a less direct democracy) so would remain undemocratic. Votes within the system would be democratic inasmuch as they were 'by the people' but they wouldn't have supreme power -- as they couldn't choose to change the system -- and so it would fall short of being democratic. It was, and remains, a cutesy and non-productive comment.

>A totalitarian dictatorship is not more democratic than a body of elected representatives, even if the people voted to implement that dictatorship. //

To press the useless point: yes, a dictatorship is less democratic as the people no longer have the power vested in them (and would have to reclaim it by a coup, or similar).

On your second point, you're right. My go to for reflecting on democracy is 'government by the people and _for_ the people' and that has coloured my response. I do think there's an element of necessary agency, which suggests a qualitative aspect, however.

But strictly, I concede, government to the utmost detriment of the demos could be democratic in the primary sense of the word.

When a God-appointed King tells his subjects they live in a democracy, the subjects agree.

"... now, that such a thing exists in a "democracy"... is a topic on its own broader scope."

In other news, the rsync.net Warrant Canary turned 15 years old last month:

https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1387090538273206274

Are these reliable? Can a judge compel someone to continue publishing a canary to prevent leaking the information?

And is it unthinkable someone would do it without a legal requirement, to keep their business afloat?

Actually, yes. Likely fewer people would leave and there would be far fewer repercussions to be honest about the canary than for someone to discover it was falsely put up. The longer the charade goes on, the worse the blowback will be.

There are numerous situations where gag orders can be issued, both in the US and the UK, not just NSLs. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order

A lot of questions here:

> christel, now former head of freenode staff sold `freenode ltd` (a holding company) to a third party

why was the previous owner/director(s) of this company (presumably christel) and what rights did they have to sell - and where did the money go?

EDIT: yes https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/10308021 also, it is claimed by AL that christel was harrassed. Fuchs contests this.

> it seems that Andrew Lee - despite zero involvement in the day-to-day operations of Freenode - has decided that ownership of the domains entitles him to ownership of Freenode as a network and community, and intended to give his own people administrative access to the network

so, did AL get access to "the network" and if so, how? It seems AL sponsored ~3k/month, but did they also sponsor, and thus control, the hardware too?

> this company has absolutely no operational involvement. It does not own any servers, it does not employ any of the staff

Then why are staff resigning? What are they resigning from?

> The democratically elected ... were removed by force[3]

The link shows the 'people' page listing different people in various roles. What does "changed by force means"? That someone was able to edit a webpage? Or something more (like access revoked)?

How did the website content get changed? By someone with access to the original site, or a clone? Was the domain redirected at any point?

EDIT: AL claims "tomaw" changed the staff page. Fuchs says he made the change - which further complicates what is meant by "by force"...

> have been informed that they are not entitled to act in their respective capacity

How, and by who?

> Then why are staff resigning? What are they resigning from?

Freenode the vaguely defined project staff, not Freenode the company staff.

Freenode didn't fall. They just had to change to a new name.

It's a better name anyway.

People that are not able to adjust to a new name, you should feel sorry for them.

Dang should pin an announcement about the new domain for a few weeks. Or all the subreddits and other forums the maintainers use can do something like that. The word will get out.

I think this is a matter of opinion but how is libera or libera.chat a better name than FreeNode?

How do you even pronounce that? Lee-Bear-Ah? Lee-Bera? Libra? Leebra? Liberia? That last one is a joke.

In Latin Libera is to deliver and pronounced Lee-Bera In Spanish Libera is to liberate and pronounced Lee-Bear-Ah

I can't say either of those roll off the tongue in either language and any English mispronunciation of it is just awful. Lee-brah and the like to me is about as grating as Tay-Co (taco), Jal-Ah-Peeno (jalapeño) or Ques-Aaadla (quesadilla).

This is a major loss of brand for the network. I'm sure I'll get downvoted into oblivion.

OTOH freenode sounds like freedom fries to me, like American political talk.

If this leads to a mass exodus from Freenode, it'll probably significantly reduce overall IRC usage.

Communities will fracture, people will set up random splinter networks that will die off in a few months, and lots of open-source projects that already want to be using something Javascripty like Slack or Discord are going to use this as the motivating thing to make the switch.

Personally I'm staying put on Freenode because I don't see a lot of user-facing impact potential here, and IRC was already essentially untrusted/public (yes, even your private messages - you don't really know who is relaying them and how trustworthy they are).

How many would move to Matrix?

Why does it matter? Matrix is no IRC. Fewer clients, way more complex protocol, the identity server is centralized, only one complete server implementation exists (and it seems like that's the only one that will ever exist, other attempts appear dead, despite the list on matrix.org) and worse than Freenode being owned by private capital, all of Matrix is controlled by New Vector LLC -- the protocol, the clients, and the biggest servers, and they operate the main identity server so they can keep track of your phone number or email address and map it to your Matrix ID. (I wonder when they'll start selling that data?) If this situation with Freenode makes you move to Matrix you're choosing to move to a network with all the same problems you're fleeing, but magnified

Oh but there's one more thing about Matrix

If you don't like it, the CEO of the company will come argue with you about it here

I don't check for replies to my comments on HN because this community is too toxic but I'll bet Arathorn eventually comments to tell me I'm wrong. Maybe he'll promise that they don't sell the vector.im identity data. I don't trust him, anyway.

You're right. Matrix is no IRC. But it's an order of magnitude better than Facebook Messenger.

And it has encryption built-in, so even the server operator can't read messages.

> Fewer clients

It does work decently on my phone though.

> the identity server is centralized

Is that really a downside? I don't know a single newcomer who found authenticating with "Nickserv" was a natural thing to do.

At the same time, people used IRC because you could remain anonymous (with IP leakage being the only real issue). Matrix seems like a FBI honeypot asking you for email and phone number.

As stated above, these are completely optional and only used for contact discovery (and password resets in the case of e-mail).

Edit: Though I believe that matrix.org requires an e-mail address nowadays. But most homeservers don't.

matrix.org does not, though it does have a prompt for e-mail on registration page. There's a line of text under it explaining that this is for optional opt-in contact discovery and password resets.

Hmm, I've been hearing mentions of it being required since recently. But then I haven't tried it myself, so I may be wrong.

Matrix DOES NOT require an email or phone#.

irccloud works great on my phone. You can paste screenshots and do pretty much everything I want out of a chat client.

"they can keep track of your phone number or email address and map it to your Matrix ID"

Damn. Fuck that.

My phone number and email is none of their business.

It's so dispiriting to see every form of communication on the internet moving to ever more spying on their users.

The Matrix identity server system is entirely optional to use, and basically a separate system from the rest of Matrix. The reason for that is that there's not really any way to implement that specific feature in a decentralized way, so they did the next best thing by making it a centralized server that you can choose to use (opt-in) in case you want people to be able to find your Matrix ID based on your phone number or email address.

Don't want them to know your phone number or email address? Simply don't give it to them. It won't break your Matrix experience in any way. Using the centralized identity server is entirely opt-in for this specific reason.

"Using the centralized identity server is entirely opt-in"

So there are no channels on Matrix that require you to identify yourself before you can join?

Not OP but no channels require you identify yourself through email/phone/etc to join. As far as I know there's not even a mechanism to do that.

Third Party ID's (email etc) are only used for opt-in contact discovery.

They may also be used for password recovery.

> The Matrix identity server system is entirely optional to use,

I remember that I gave my email when I signed up for Matrix at element.io but haven't found a way how to find out if I'm using the identity server. If my email ended up there, how can I see if it is public? How do I actually query the identity system for information, especially which information it has about myself?

I have tried to find this out, but it is not obvious at all and I could not find much information except the repeated statement that the identity system is optional. Any hints about the identity system are appreciated.

On Element desktop Settings > General > Email Addresses / Phone Numbers

In your Settings > General you'll be able to see if you're using the Identity Server, and it let you disconnect your Matrix account from the Vector.IM Identity server if you wish

https://i.imgur.com/N09ZPFp.png

Thanks, that made it pretty clear. I somehow expected the identity server to have its own UI but having this integrated in the Matrix client actually makes more sense.

Decentralized/federated is a beautiful thing.

Phone number and email are not required.

These are optional recovery methods.

F.U.D.

As opposed to NickServ, which is the centralized point of failure for 90+% IRC users, and easily has top 10 worst UX I've come across in my career.

I happen to like nickserv's UX. There are far worse UIs on the web. Simple is good.

The fact that nickserv is just another user and you can't be sure the network had taken precaution to avoid another using swiping the name in the event of a services outage is a problem. Add to that the (now admittedly rare) networks that don't use any form of nickserv and the phishing potential for users that don't realise that

The hostname mask is used to authenticate users. If someone can impersonate a hostname mask there are bigger problems.

Nicknames are ephemeral. It is designed to be this way.

You can use SASL and connect with a certificate to give yourself a fingerprint to validate your identity.

It's fun and simple. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

However, people or their clients use /msg NickServ. The passwords are sent to something identified by a nick only. I don't believe you if you claim people are doing a /who NickServ and checking the hostname mask first.

SASL is definitely an improvement over NickServ.

I use SASL to authenticate with NickServ on Freenode. My IRC client automatically looks up the hostname of users I message.

You can, because a server can reserve nicknames via a configuration directive. Many ircds also allow the /NICKSERV command.

Also, I hope Arathorn (who is a pretty admirable & balanced community manager (unsure their title, no disrespect intended), does come and lay some well-reasoned facts out.

But...the community itself will likely beat them here.

Even if you don't check, other people should know that this is extremely misleading.

> Fewer clients, way more complex protocol

This is actually a valid complaint, though it's partly due to Matrix being pretty young. The other part is that Matrix does a lot more for you than IRC (eg e2ee and federation) and those extra features require complexity.

> The identity server is centralized

This is a completely optional part of Matrix. You don't need identity servers. You never have to provide your phone number. They don't even push you to when you sign up. It exists as a convenience feature for people who complain that they need to be able to discover their friends on Matrix by their friends‘ phone numbers. Also, you're free to run your own identity server for you and your friends or whomever.

> other attempts [at creating a homeserver] appear dead

This one is way off. Synapse, the "one complete server" you must be referring to, is going to be deprecated. The Matrix Foundation team is working on Dendrite to replace it. There are also several independent projects that are very active, notably Conduit, started by one guy unaffiliated with the Matrix Foundation team. Conduit is extremely far along and is under constant development.

> All of Matrix is controlled by New Vector LLC

The people who created Matrix were careful to separate their for-profit projects from FOSS community projects. Matthew Hodgson (Arathorn) explains it well here [0]. TLDR: The Matrix spec, the Element clients, and the Synapse/Dendrite homeservers are maintained by a nonprofit. Same team, different organization and funding. Everything is open source, so anyone is free to fork at any time.

> This one is way off. Synapse, the "one complete server" you must be referring to, is going to be deprecated. The Matrix Foundation team is working on Dendrite to replace it.

Interesting, I've always been reticent to host my own instance because of how complex Synapse is to setup for the uninitiated. Hopefully Dendrite makes it simpler.

Doing the steps required manually was a little of a pain. I've found using an ansible playbook like https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy to be the easiest way to setup a homeserver.

I bet Conduit is going to be the easiest to deploy once it's finished. It's a single binary (with the database included).

> This one is way off. Synapse, the "one complete server" you must be referring to, is going to be deprecated. The Matrix Foundation team is working on Dendrite to replace it.

I hugely disagree.

I have tried to setup a "homeserver". Synapse is huge beast, complex, CPU and memory-hungry, hard to setup (no, a Docker or VM instance does not mean easy to setup). Dendrite is not ready and has been "not ready" for years, not to mention it is also huge and hard to setup, and from the same vendor, so it allays none of the fears. Construct is the _only_ one of all the 3rd party servers which I have found to be actually in a fully usable and federable state (the rest being all in different states of abandonment and uselessness), created by an author who is _openly_ critical of Matrix-the-company and their policy regarding 3rd party servers (incl. how most of the protocol is just defined by bug-by-bug Synapse compatibility and how the Matrix webpage to this day has no 3rd party servers list -- but happy to feature 3rd party paid-hosting list)

Compare this with Jabber. I install in seconds any of the _multiple_ servers that come with Debian stable. They are by now years old, but they still can connect with _everyone_ on the Jabber network. In Matrix, if I run a 2 year old Synapse, it will be like death-by-ostracization; same if I run today's Conduit.

Similar story. A couple years ago I tried to set up Synapse. I've set up and administered IRC before. I've twice gone from nothing to having an XMPP server (different daemon each time) working and hooked into web services and custom auth serving production traffic. And that's just the chat-related work I've done. I kind of know what I'm doing, at least.

After a couple hours I gave up on Synapse, having accomplished nothing and only being more confused than when I started out, as far as any path to a deployed config I'd be comfortable with. That they sell hosting, and it was such an incredible pain in the ass to run sanely on one's own, sets off some alarm bells.

I don't think anything you wrote contradicts what I said in the parent comment. In the section you quoted, I only meant to say that other homeserver projects are definitely not dead. There are a bunch that are actively developed and improving.

It's also true that the new homeservers aren't yet ready for prime time. But they're coming along really fast.

It's true that homeservers by third parties had a bit of a rough time in the beginning due to finding "bugs" in the spec that no one noticed before because there had previously only been a single homeserver implementation. That situation has been improving though. I've seen Conduit development result in several different patches submitted to the upstream Matrix spec.

> It's also true that the new homeservers aren't yet ready for prime time. But they're coming along really fast.

I have seen way too many being abandoned to believe that. In fact last time I researched I put Conduit in the abandoned list, though apparently I was wrong. Matrix is just a too complex protocol, and way too focused on one and only one server implementation. Which is ironic considering probably every other competitor protocol (save for perhaps IRC itself) is even more complex, but at least they were not that complex when they initially showed up -- so other people could actually start implementations that survived and growed along.

I asked the primary author from conduit, as a third party implementating a server, if he thought the protocol was too complex. He said no, which actually surprised me.

I'm somewhat of an layperson on this topic in that I haven't actually ever tried to work with the protocol on a low level. But my take on it is that if they can slow down the pace of Matrix evolution in the next couple years, the protocol will be in a good state. It's complex, but it's providing extremely complex features.

But if they keep going at this pace for too long, third party implementations may become less feasible.

>Everything is open source, so anyone is free to fork at any time.

Matrix 1

Matrix 2

Matrix 3

Matrix 4

Matrix 5

Matrix 6

Matrix 7

Matrix 8

Matrix 9

Matrix 10

Matrix ....

Matrix 999

Which clone of the matrix do you mean to use and how many messengers to install? XMPP has similar Matrix capabilities and modular architecture.

XMPP protocol surpasses the Matrix, it is clearly seen on the client for Android Conversations https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.siacs.conversations/

Matrix is a federated protocol, so you could easily use your forked client or forked server with the existing servers and clients out there. Basically like you're free to fork any of the open source email servers or clients and operate your own version.

Not that I disagree with you, but it's pretty reasonable for someone to defend his product when it's criticized.

What about XMPP?

That would be XMPP MUC (Multi User Conference). It has TLS encryption to the single server used by default. End to end encryption works in the form of OMEMO at least but I don't think it scales very well to lots and lots of connected users. I think PGP would also have the same sort of scaling problem. It has IRC like moderation and channel control stuff.There are a lot of light weight clients for it in the form of generic XMPP clients.

There is a project currently active to make some sort of replacement.

Today XMPP it is the best choice for federated chats, as the protocol can handle any workload successfully.

I'm sure there's some truth to these criticisms, but it's hard to see this as anything other than immature trolling when you created an account called "newvectorllc" just to trash them.

This is straight FUD.

The identity server is completely optional (you can just login with username & password), and you can opt out or swap it in element -> settings -> general. Also, there's plans for getting it replaced.

There are quite a handful clients and servers. They are replacing their most featureful server (Synapse) with other implementations (Dendrite) to not have a monoculture. Heck, the German government is sponsoring development of yet another server (conduit.rs, in Rust).

Your approach sounds like wanting everything implemented right away, and giving no leeway. And I don't think your attack on their CEO is relevant even. Their whole approach is based on that you shouldn't need to trust them at all.

Given that your handle is "newvectorllc" (the previous company name of Element), it strikes me that you are so hellbent on trying to paint them in a bad light.

This could be the event that sees an alternative to Synapse (Matrix server) pushed over the finish line by new contributors.

The matrix is evil. Matrix is not currently usable for full federated use https://wiki.404.city/en/XMPP_vs_Matrix The matrix protocol is not scalable, so it becomes hell for large non-profit servers and in the future the Matrix network may split into several incompatible protocols

Also non-human-readable data formats...

IRC is already dying anyway. This will just speed up the process.

I think libera.chat has successfully positioned itself as the clear successor to freenode; all the projects I'm a part of on freenode have moved / are moving there. I'm sure it's not perfect, and it's been having some teething issues with load and such (as expected). But it seems like ~100% of freenode's volunteer staff have moved over to libera.chat, so my impression is that the writing is on the wall for freenode. (The server links were never especially stable when they _had_ staff; now that they have no staff, I expect stability to suffer heavily.)

Perhaps now that there's a void to fill Freenode can hire some staff who can keep a few chat servers running stably v(._. )v

Apparently London Trust Media, the company founded by Andrew Lee and which purchased Freenode, has now rebranded under the name "Imperial Family Companies". londontrustmedia.com now redirects to https://imperialfamily.com/ and it lists Freenode under Technology.

Andrew Lee also claims to be the crown prince of Korea, which was no doubt the inspiration for this move: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-12-0...

Lee also hired Mark Karpelès (of Mt.Gox infamy) as CTO of London Trust Media. and he is still listed as CTO of Shells.com, which is also owned by Imperial Family Companies: https://www.shells.com/l/en-US/team

Edit: Comment was moved, reworded to make it work in its new context.

Any thoughts on these observations?

londontrustmedia.com

I read that as "I on don't trust media" the first time.

As someone who followed the Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange drama as it unfolded, I'm amazed anyone would hire him for a technical role.

If he lived anywhere else besides Japan, he would have done jail time for the amount of fraud he did. He deserved that and got off light IMO. Dude is a complete joke and useless.

He spent around 1 year in custody before being released on bail.

And he's sentenced to 30 months, suspended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Karpel%C3%A8s#Arrest_and_...

From all I've read, custody before sentencing in Japan is no picknick.

Given that he was sold a fractional reserve system without his knowledge and the US government revealed that BTC-E was the hacker that made it a fractional reserve

Doesnt that suggest him being sentenced at all was wrong and makes him a fall guy?

Big mansion, made money with grey area internet services ... Anyone remember Kim dotcom?

A gem from one of the linked chatlogs (Ariadne is security chair for Alpine linux and a prolific FOSS contributer):

  [23:07:35] <Ariadne> i mean, i have important work to do.  dealing with an IRC network is not really something i want to be doing this decade outside of fucking around for fun with IRCX
  [23:07:51] <Ariadne> i have code running on two planets

Who is that? And I guess now that I think about it, who is trying to poach him or her? I have no context for this comment and I'm probably not the only one.

There is more context and link to the full(er) log here: https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1393006479700078595

I will not attempt to summarise it as I don't have enough information on the situation.

https://ariadne.space/about - she's pretty cool

I mean, she is right.

That last line is fucking legendary. Thanks for posting it.

> i have code running on two planets

Pretty cool. I wonder which one of her libraries (if that's what she's referring to) is being used on a Mars rover.

libucontext

I have been on Freenode for the last 10 to 20 years but I have absolutely no clue what this is all about. Neither this resignation letter nor the last explains it very well other than that the resigning staff apparently wants me to quit Freenode and join their network instead. I see no compelling reason to do so. Understanding whether there is some "substance" to this drama appears completely impossible. [removed snip] Really, if you can't explain why your cause is just to someone like me, who cares a lot of software freedom, you will not reach a majority of Freenode's users either.

The resignation letter says there was a hostile takeover and bad faith actions by the new owner. Most of the staff has resigned in protest. Thus, the reputation that freenode built is likely not any indication for how it will perform and behave going forward.

My understanding of Freenode's reputation is it's always been a giant bag of drama by a select few running the show. Nobody wants to see their dirty laundry, but they persist in showing us.

I'd edit your comment and remove the snip about downvotes. It's a lame cheat code for upvotes. (I upvoted you regardless.)

What I wanted to say was, I tried to join the new server and discovered it was down. So if they can't survive HN front page, I'm not sure it's a good idea to move decades-old communities to it.

I'm in the same boat as you. Your best bet is to join #lesswrong and ask them about the implications, I think. They seem to care a lot about this.

The key point seems to be that the new owner wants to harvest user data. If I were one of the staff commanded to violate users' expectations, I might also resign in protest.

That being said, sifting that out from the messaging they've presented was not easy. Most of it seems like either posturing for negotiation (e.g. the line "I have code running on two planets," which is admittedly a strong statement, albeit less impressive once examined critically) or just dunking on the new owner for the amusement of Twitter followers and maybe a few people on HN. Regardless, most of it seems to be targeting an audience who already agrees with them, and not to inform and persuade those of us who don't know.

If leaking IRC logs is the tactic du jour, it'd be much more effective if we had IRC logs where the disgruntled staffers repeatedly questioned the new owner about the substantive actions they have an issue with (e.g. harvesting user data for commercial purposes), and either got him to back down, admit or evade. That would tell a story that can transcend internecine organizational politics and/or tribalism. But, alas, the medium is the message, and so we get Twitter dunking.

Ditto. Usually with this kind of drama there's some kind of smoking gun, but I'm really having a hard time seeing what's gone wrong here despite reading three or four summaries.

Have you read these letters?

https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt https://gist.github.com/jesopo/45a3e9cdbe517dc55e6058eb43b00...

Not sure about people pushing matrix as an alternative. I tried out Matrix several weeks ago and hated everything about it. From the account creation process, shiny modern UI, channel finding options, activity level (since you are basically constantly logged in, channels with even quite a lot of users have next to no activity for days at a time), kind of activity (and most of it was really poor activity, like someone sharing a link, someone giving a thumbs up, and channel dead for another day) and I'm not sure I fancy large number of mobile phone users on any form of IRC replacement.

It's complicated/convoluted enough to be for a tech crowd, and modern/shiny/complex enough to be a disgusting mess to someone coming from IRC. At least for me. Given more users and activity I still wouldn't like it.

I might be wrong, but maybe this whole mess with Freenode won't be a big deal in the end. IRC never held a particular promise of "privacy" for me, many channels are logged by some or most of their users, or even publicly online via some sites. As long as Freenode continues to work (in a technical sense), and mass migration of channels doesn't ensue, I see no point in stopping my use of it.

I desperately hope matrix (or discord, which I haven't yet tried, but don't have much hope for either) won't be the answer. Maybe a switch to OFTC is an option for some channels.

We will see.

> IRC never held a particular promise of "privacy"

True, like almost all nice network protocols and implementations in heavy use of the 90s (NNTP/Usenet, Mail, IRC amongst others) no one did foresee the privacy/spam wave that hit us when the internet became famous. I remember in Europes most used IRC network at that time - IRCnet - it was mandatory to run an identd server that would tell the user of the logged in system to the IRC server, and it would display it to all users (along with the IP address of course). Imagine such requirements today...

With Matrix there is also a lack of good lightweight clients and servers. The official client uses Electron. It will never be an alternative to the IRC with this attitude. There is a Weechat plugin but it's in Python...

My hope is that bc it's an open protocol that it'll be simple to create local bridges to services and then hook those into an irc client. I agree with the parent that Discord and Slack are absolute messes and all I want is text on a screen with hyperlinks for chat.

To that end, I tried to set a personal server up on a local box that I have running, but it didn't take. I'm surprised there aren't any good tutorials sitting around to create a local instance/bridge.

weechat-matrix seems to be the lightweight client of choice.

weechat-matrix unfortunately cannot coexist with wee-slack if running on top of Python 3.9 (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/812, https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/issues/248), so one has to choose between Slack and Matrix. It's just a bug that will eventually get fixed, but it does make things unnecessarily complicated right now.

With this issue and Matrix being several times slower than any other instant messenger I've ever seen, I'd really prefer communities didn't move to Matrix. :-/

I setup a server a few months ago to get familiar with matrix. It wasn’t very lightweight either. I have since shut it down because I felt it was too resource intensive for the small amount of users that were using it.

The weechat plugin is being rewritten in Rust right now.

https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs

There's a trend of "new, revolutionary Internet protocols" having reference (and, chronically, sole actually-useful, but with other ones always at various uselessly-incomplete stages of development so they can point to those and say "see, we're catching on!") implementations in languages that integrate like shit, crippling their adoption, rather than writing, say, a C library. IPFS is another one (and I like Go).

>mass migration of channels

...has been happening for the past several hours. It's bedlam...

I think many are registering nicks and channels "just in case", I haven't seen true "migration" as of yet, meaning large public channels forcibly shutting down on Freenode.

Let the storm calm down and then we will see where we're at. The whole conflict seems to be opinionated ops clashing over governance rather than any serious privacy related issues imo. It still might bring Freenode down in the end, who knows, but I don't think panic is warranted.

From what I'm seeing, everything I'm active in is moving (including my own channels) -- the old ones aren't being shut down yet, mostly because people want to give libera.chat a few days first to make sure it doesn't suffer major hiccups. But the new ones are going to be the permanent ones, I expect. (That's certainly our plan.)

Yep, 12 hours later it certainly looks that way. One channel I know migrated to OFTC, others seem to have parallel channels on Libera or are thinking about it, and might make the switch. Am registered on Libera just in case, and connected. Will go wherever my channels will end up on, even if they end up on different networks, not a problem. It's that simple.

Your UI complaints apply only to Element (the flagship client) rather than to Matrix the protocol. As others have said, there are other, less-flashy clients available (and others under development).

Some examples:

Quaternion: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion

Hydrogen: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

Nheko: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko

with UI I meant user interface, but also to some degree feature set. I know they want to have it modern, but the charm of IRC to me is that it's a simple stream of text messages. No 'answering' to specific messages, URL previews, reacting to messages with smileys and a thumbs up, et cetera. Also quite a few of the clients listed on the official website are inactive or as of now "incomplete" (aren't yet full featured), so in the end I went with the official client (as it seemed the best bet to just try it).

A simpler client would do away with some of it, but some of my complaints have to do with the features the protocol implements rather than the client.

I just got a message from the staff on freenode:

[Global Notice] Hi all. It feels like my moral responsibility to inform all users that administrative control of freenode and its user data will soon change hands, and I will be resigning from freenode staff effective immediately. It's been an honour to help you all.

Sad to see a hostile takeover of Freenode.

Its controlled by Private Internet Access now.

What’s the connection to PIA?

EDIT: Andrew Lee is founder of PIA. From Wikipedia:

> The company was founded by the American-born Andrew Lee.[6][7] London Trust Media also owns the Freenode IRC network.[8][failed verification]

It's not owned by PIA now. PIA and London Trust Media was sold by Lee; who moved most other holdings to "Imperial Family Companies", which is effectively the owner of freenode: https://imperialfamily.com

So interesting it seems he's going all in on the royalty branding using Korea's former royal house's seal. I saw a news article of him being named 'crown prince' of Korea by one of the pretenders to the throne despite not being closely related.

A related article (by SCMP): https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/312...

Very cheap.

This is what's known as a "flounce".

Private Internet Access has no connection to Freenode at all anymore. It WAS owned by London Trust Media, which also owned PIA, but Kape acquired PIA in December of 2019 and has had no connection since then. We do not have any involvement or knowledge of any takeover of Freenode.

After going through a few logs, it looks like the crux of the matter is that things went bad when the previous head Chrystel left.

Andrew Lee argues she was effectively pushed out by a gang of other ops, and he’s “taking it back” to “take it forward” with something that smells like cryptopayments or something.

The admins say Lee, when Freenode Limited was created for admin purposes, originally swore precisely not to do what he’s now doing, and that he got lawyers involved to implement a hostile takeover.

Just sad to see this happening, it looks like there is no possibility for mediation anymore. The result will likely be fragmentation, which probably weakens everyone, but in a way it’s all “very FOSS”, we’re just seeing a project fork.

Possibly of interest, Edward Kmett posted [1] his thoughts on the issue to r/Haskell today as well.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nfqw0t/thoughts_on...

Perhaps this could be the rise of Matrix many of us have been waiting for? I hope many freenode channel operators and admins encourage people in that direction, rather than trying to start alternative IRC networks that will die out.

I sure hope so! ...Not only because "yay, more people on the matrix network"...but because it would bring even more devs and designers (and content writers for documentation!), which would bring continued improvements to the ecosystem of servers and clients/apps as well as the matrix protocol itself! (Obviously, massive shout outs to all who do this tough work already, but more eyes/hands makes the bucket of bugs shallow, right?) Plus, not unlike the spike in activity in 2016/2017 around the fediverse - primarily Mastodon, where nontrivial numbers of people started their presence on the fediverse away from FB, etc. - i hope lots more homeservers start appearing for folks to host their own matrix homeservers (or at least host it for/on behalf of their communities and such). And, if any spike in activity does not in fact occur, that's ok too...things seem to be growing slow and steady anyway for the matrix network. ;-)

I see, so the moral cause you've identified is the opportunity to grab users from freenode and put them onto matrix.

This is like when twitch streamers stab each other in the back over/for subs.

> the opportunity to grab users from freenode and put them onto matrix...

While i certainly prefer matrix network, I have no desire to grab any users that don't wish to move to the matrix network if they don't want to. I merely made positive, hopeful comments that if users are abandoning freenode, that matrix network is an option, and that the matrix network can benefit from the influx...but the new users may akso benefit...but i'm not forcing anyone, nor am i trying to use morality. Of course freenode irc users can simply find or establish an alternative that leverages irc. I used and enjoyed irc since 1992, but i simply prefer matrix network and protocol (warts and all); and in fact i reserve the right to have that opinion. That's all.

Running a Matrix homeserver is still quite a pain in the ass, especially because there is no real automatic way to purge old history. Join a busy room once and pay for it in megs or gigs of text stored in your DB forever.

Just using a matrix.org account instead is antisocial at this point because of the resources you're taking from the project, whereas paying for a hosted homeserver might not be something everyone can afford. IRC instead only requires a bouncer in the worst case, and even if you stay on channels for years you won't accrue as much history as a Matrix room can generate in a few days. I find that easier to maintain and store.

I do run my own Matrix homeserver and I intend to keep doing that and paying for it, but Matrix has more rough edges than IRC at the moment IMHO.

Edit: Ah, sorry, this was actually meant in reply to parent. But gonna leave it in.

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/mess... is the server config for automatically purging old history - it got added last year.

This does not apply to state events. I still had hundreds of MBs of those after purging :( I think it's not impossible to manage this, just a pain in the ass :D

> ...Matrix has more rough edges than IRC at the moment IMHO...

You might be right. Yet, I'm still hopeful for the matrix network and protocol. Also, irc has had a bit of a head start, having had the benefit of decades of eyes looking at it, and hands helping to improve it. Then again, 2 or 3 decades from today, I might be the one holding onto my matrix network world when someone else on a forum discusses the merits (warts and all) of some new protocol for communications scenarios (not limited to chat). :-)

People who love IRC will still use IRC and not move to Matrix. It will just be a pain to reconfigure all the bridging between Matrix and libera.chat.

I've been using IRC for 25 years and Matrix is close to unusable for me. There is something to be said about the combination of text-only, barrier to entry perfectly calibrated, hostile to mobile devices protocol features that make IRC such a resilient/long-standing solution.

No matter what happens with freenode, the same people that have been using IRC for decades will keep on using IRC.

This gives a lot of context to the previous Freenode article and the resignations mentioned there.

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

Hostile takeovers are almost never a good thing.

Pointing the entire community to a new server (ircs://irc.libera.chat/) is going to cause a huge disruption, maybe destroy the community altogether. I can't help but wonder if there's no better way. What a tragedy.

Bridge your IRC community to Matrix today for the best of both worlds.

I dunno who the "We" is in "We are founding a new network with the same goals and ambitions to support foss and likeminded communities: libera.chat."

But if it is the same people who mismanaged freenode into this joke then maybe nobody should go there. Just a heads up. I think this Andrew Lee person would have a tough time being worse than them.

How long until they sell libera.chat for a pack of magic beans? I give it 2 years max.

They were the ones opposed to this sale. The sale was basically not a sale but a hostile takeover, and the former staff have now created a non-profit organization under Swedish law to hold the new network so that this kind of thing can't happen again.

> under Swedish law

What statute in Swedish law prohibits them from selling the network to someone who "totally gave his word" for a pack of beans?

My (limited) understanding is Andrew Lee has been a large source of donations to Freenode for many years. As well as a significant benefactor to open source projects and founder of privacy focused services (PIA being one). So this ownership change may be simply an extension of that charity into a formal business arrangement.

I don't know the particulars behind-the-scenes, just trying to not immediately assume the worst.

In 21-ish years on OPN/Freenode it was one constant in rapidly changing tech landscape. Sad to see it go this way, and much thanks to the staff for taking it thus far.

Just letting people know, if you or a project you know is looking for a new home because of this, I can hook you up with chatroom over XMPP and web + optional IRC bridging, no charge for open source or free culture: https://cheogram.com/freedomware-muc/

XMPP MUC is is fantastic, but it seems like the only public chats are for developing XMPP clients.

There are a lot of those of course, but browsing https://search.jabber.network/ I see for example:

- xmpp:openhardware@conference.magicbroccoli.de?join for chatting about open hardware

- xmpp:discuss@conference.soprani.ca?join for chatting about bridges and opening up the phone network

- xmpp:floss@rooms.dismail.de?join for general FLOSS discussion

- xmpp:thinkpad-user@rooms.dismail.de?join for people who love thinkpads

- xmpp:libreparents@conference.singpolyma.net?join for discussion of the intersection of FLOSS life and parenting

Probably more, and I only looked for ones in English for this list :)

Not many though, and not much discussion going on there. It seems that German language MUCs are more popular. It would be nice to see more.

hey guys, could you please use a tld that can be protected by registry lock (not registrar lock).

you are free to use libera.chat for your branding domain. But could you switch to something like liberachat.com for the actual server and turn on registry lock please (Safenames or Cloudflare,etc)

It seems inevitable that any Good company with great TOS with promises to never turn can be bought and changed towards evil. We've seen it time and time again. It's inevitable?

How can we structure these organisations from creation so that this cannot happen?

freenode believed the purchaser promises. What should they have done differently?

Be a worker-owned co-op from the get go so that one person can't just sell the whole thing. Or at least have a larger board be the legal representative and don't give the president or whomever the ability to sign contracts without other signoff. I don't know why or how this was possible with Freenode, but it's not hard to prevent.

(the internet suggests they may not have had the legal authority to sell off Freenode but taking it to court to prove that would be ruinously expensive for the volunteers; I don't know if this is actually the case or not though; maybe someone can provide them some pro-bono legal services since this network is such a core piece of infrastructure for so many OSS projects?)

Make it a foundation/non-profit with some form of specific charter. Some sort of actual management structure with a board and distributed power. If you want even more safety have some sort of larger voting base that can replace the board via some process.

It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything.

By comparison, many other European countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, …) have specific types of legal entities for associations that have appropriate restrictions on what can be done with them. For example, they can generally not be sold, are required to be internally democratic with fixed statutes, usually (but not always) have open membership and an elected board. I think that would go a long way to fixing these recurrent issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...

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

you can write whatever restrictions you want to apply to the company into its founding articles of association/memorandum, which are the legal documents which state what the company is allowed to do and how it is to be operated

however most of the off-the-shelf Articles tend to be completely unrestricted (for obvious reasons)

>By comparison, many other European countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, …) have specific types of legal entities for associations that have appropriate restrictions on what can be done with them. For example, they can generally not be sold, are required to be internally democratic with fixed statutes, usually (but not always) have open membership and an elected board. I think that would go a long way to fixing these recurrent issues.

As I understand it you can set all those things up in an American non-profit and many do in fact have that setup. So it's not a shortcoming of the legal system but of the people who created the entity. They chose not to do those things and no one objected strongly enough.

Fair, but one significant advantage of having a specific legal form is that the way the organization is set up is immediately apparent from the legal name. This also means that any non-profit that is not set up as such will automatically be subject to much more scrutiny.

On other other hand, when I read "Signal Messenger LLC" or similar I have no way of easily knowing whether the organization is in fact set up in such a way.

The main difference is the cost associated with it.

In order to be an non-profit organization you need an founding meeting, board elections and all of it have to be notarized and drawn up by an attorney before being validated by the state an process that takes weeks if not months where as anyone can set up an company online in about 15 minutes.

For some European nations the processes are far more similar and as code civil courts can do their own fact finding you don't need to pay an notary to validate everything or have an attorney draw up a whole bunch of documentation just to found an small non-profit association.

In Australia, setting up an association of members is as easy as a limited liability company. You can become a Federally registered not-for-profit as an incorporated association.

The cost of having a model set of a constitution and doing the paperwork is as simple as doing the same for a limited liability private company.

It varies from state to state, but in the states I'm aware of (at least 3) it's not nearly as hard as you're making it sound. An attorney is not required and, while the non-profit status may take some time to approve, the existence of the corporation itself generally is essentially the same as founding a for-profit corporation. In particular, attorneys are not required, and it is generally pretty easy to get things notarized for free (most banks have notaries on staff and I've never had one charge me.)

I know multiple people who have set up non-profits on their own, without any lawyers, and have not had any difficulties throughout the process.

I think you may be looking for a CIO, or (in Scotland) a SCIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_incorporated_organi....

Do note, though, that it's insufficient to be a "non-profit" in order to become a "charity". Also, we have more than one type of limited company, and some are more amenable to community interest than others. A company limited by shares will likely have either concentrated or tradable ownership, while a company limited by guarantee is more likely to have a wider membership without so much economic interest.

Going in the other direction, the charity I chair isn't a company at all -- we're an unincorporated association. Which isn't usually the best structure for a charity nowadays, but we make do with what we have.

> Going in the other direction, the charity I chair isn't a company at all -- we're an unincorporated association. Which isn't usually the best structure for a charity nowadays, but we make do with what we have.

Is there a reason your members aren't interested in incorporating? Protection from individual liability is huge.

It's not that we're not interested, but -- as far as we're aware -- it's not as simple as incorporating our existing organisation and retaining charitable status.

It seems freenode did at one point have a charitable parent organisation, in the UK, but it had to dissolve because it was too expensive to run.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130322063238/http://blog.freen...

> It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything.

This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.

These are quite common, and in fact Freenode Limited is one. It was never "sold" in any conventional sense. There is no owner of Freenode Limited, but Andrew Lee is currently the only voting member so he has full control.

> This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.

There's one more structure that's (so far) exclusive to the UK: the Charitable Incorporated Organisation [1].

It can be founded as either a foundation (trustees and voting members are the same) or association (usually a larger group of voting members).

The key advantage of a CIO versus a CLG are the less onerous compliance requirements, which go a long way towards keeping smaller charities cheaper to run.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_incorporated_organi...

A CIO is more onerous than a CLG because a CIO is a charity, and comes with the charitable reporting requirements (and also the tax benefits).

A pure CLG doesn't have the charitable tax benefits but it's still a non-profit governance structure, and you only have to file with Companies House and HMRC. The CLG is the lowest-hassle non-profit structure.

(Confusingly, CLGs can also be charities - because charitable status can act as a "wrapper" around other corporate structures - and indeed a lot of charities are CLGs because the CIO is a more recent invention.)

I wrote about this, ages ago, I think it's mostly still correct:

https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2009/10/25/starting-a-non-profit-...

I'm a little confused by all this controversy. I'm no stranger to people trying to exert secret influence in open-source projects, and put themselves in positions of power to satisfy egos, etc. and I certainly don't like that kind of thing.

But what was actually done on Freenode? I've read several of the volunteer resignations and it seems to just be that they're obviously now in control and people don't like that. Is there something more concrete they've done that points to a particular ulterior motive or the negative impact of their ownership? Am I just missing some historical baggage?

It seems Lee actively sought to take over the operational access to the network, brought in staff outside of the existing staff process, and started exercising editorial control over the Freenode website.

So if you mean "is there actual end-user operational impact to the network", it seems that there isn't so far, but the way Lee took over everything does not bode well and I completely understand why the existing staff resigned. When staff processes change so suddenly and abruptly, end-user visible changes tend to follow, and in any case this warrants significant loss of trust.

Previous discussion, from when the draft was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338

Welp, don't feel like repeating every resignation letter, they are aggregated in this previous post that seems to have been buried: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926

IRC seems like drama central. I can’t say I understand the detail of this takeover and split. But the tone of all the messages are very dramatic.

Why is that? Is it something inherent in the aggregated community of mods, channels and servers? Some communities seem ripe for drama and I have no idea why.

This is the first IRC drama I'm hearing about. There is more drama in issue trackers of random GitHub projects that surface once a month on HN. I don't know where this perception of IRC comes from. Such a comment shows up under every link commenting on the matter. But it's still just one case.

> This is the first IRC drama I'm hearing about.

How old are you? For my generation (40+), IRC and drama are basically synonyms. It seems to have subsumed a lot simply because younger folks don't use it as much as we did.

23. Been using IRC on and off since I was 14.

So since ~2012. I've not used IRC since before then so maybe things have been relatively calm in those nine years, but IRC has been around since 1988 and has a long history of drama arguably starting with the first big split in 1990.

While not caring to know the details of past drama is fine, to be _completely_ unaware of it seems both rather myopic and somewhat naive IMO. Have you never taken any interest in the history of the tools you use or the Internet generally?

<snark type="unneccesary" how-unneccesary="probably completely" style="hyperbole-level:calc(Godwin-2); old-man-shouting-at:clouds;">I've not been aware of any world wars since I joined the world in 1978, have any really happened?</snark>

I didn't write that IRC was devoid of drama. I wrote it's the first one I'm hearing about. As in, know what it's about. Vaguely knowing that there probably was some drama in the past is another thing entirely. There is a lot more drama in more mainstream parts of the Internet, which is where my surprise at the mention of it comes from.

I also think you're taking it too seriously. Internet drama is a relatively unimportant thing in life. Wars on the other hand... Internet drama has the importance of celebrity gossip.

> Have you never taken any interest in the history of the tools you use or the Internet generally?

I did take interest in the history of some of the tools. It doesn't mean I explore the history of all of them, or that this history is particularly valuable knowledge. What you learn this way is mostly just shallow trivia. E.g. knowing why strncpy works the way it works with regard to '\0' isn't knowledge that deepens your understanding of anything; it's just trivia. But sometimes it's a pleasant way to mindlessly, idly spend your time.

Fair enough, but your "first I've heard of..." comment implied (to my mind) that you considered yourself aware enough of IRCs history that you not having heard of previous matters is significant.

This comment is September in a nutshell. IRC has fragmented itself into new networks because of olines bickering with each other since the early 1990s. Look into why EFnet, Undernet, and IRCnet (and sorta DALnet) came to pass. The history you’re confused about and that everyone else accepts as fact predates your birth, is the issue.

All one has to do to see that it hasn’t changed is read these logs. Something about getting an oline makes people think they’ve been cast in Othello and very serious, mortal stakes are on the line. It’s been pretty ridiculous since 1992 yet was very educational about power dynamics for a lot of young hackers (if you want to see who someone really is, oper them).

Most IRC users today were kids during the fragmentation days. It's like still complaining about 1990s AI Winter.

There’s something about giving someone op. It’s like the electric shock power experiment: people generally end up abusing it. This, though, doesn’t seem as pronounced in online forums.

I have a lot of good memories from IRC but it did create twisted dramas full of power crazy ops who, as you say, take it all far too seriously. That seems to be the key.

Every mod seemed to be charge of their own school gang. Highly concerned with their own role and power rather facilitating communities and conversation.

IRC is inherently an extremely open and fragile protocol. It's effectively a social network, so it attracts all the drama such a network naturally generates, while doing very little to mitigate it. Low barriers to entry, easy pseudonymity, basic but pretty rigid social structures (you either got a flag or you don't)... it's just a volatile mix.

In the end, it's just people bitching on the internet, with only enough features to generate more drama and no extra features to distract you from it.

I started on IRC circa ... 1990? My older handles are still in the most ancient of helpfiles. Drama is practically built into the protocol.

First, last I saw, servers connected in a tree structure, so a "split" further down the tree structure, closest to the trunk, might take out quite a lot of users. Therefore, administrators closer to that trunk effectively control a larger population -- unless the admins of IRC servers toward the "leaves" connect with someone else.

Second, and again I am working from old memories, there were a lot of synchronization issues, so timing attacks were quite common. Join at just the right moment, and you could take over a channel. That has probably stopped.

Third, bandwidth usage can be intense as you approach the root, so most admins were originally piggybacking off of .edu connections. "My bandwidth, my rules."

Fourth, the protocol has evolved in many, many different ways. Originally, bans didn't even exist, you just had to hope that if you kicked someone, they stayed gone -- forkbots took amusing advantage of this. So, too, did the server code evolve, as well as the code for numerous clients, which were often vulnerable to buffer overflows.

Fifth, claim that name. NickServ had a period of not existing, so if someone wanted your nickname, flooding you off the net was an option. Whoever can DOS the most wins. Similarly, channel names were hotly contested, so combined with various attacks, you could "take over" a channel and depose people if ChanServ didn't exist -- and they didn't have bots busy re-opping them.

Pulling back, you see people from server admins down to channel owners and then half-ops, each appointed by those above, scrambling for bandwidth, knowledge, and names. It's nearly designed for drama.

Andrew Lee is also trying to disappear from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Lee_(entre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur)

Made the switch. I quite like the short cloaks:

    icy (znc@user/icy)

Staff are a little overloaded, understandably. Nickserv works, so now's the time to grab that nick you couldn't get on Freenode!

what did you switch to?

irc.libera.chat:6697 (SSL)

How did you get the cloak?

You can ask for one at #libera.

#libera-cloak is the place to go now, by the way.

It seems like there's something wrong with NickServ:

> 15:56 -NickServ(NickServ@services.libera.chat)- Sending email failed, sorry! Registration aborted

It's probably just busy with the influx of new people :-)

Yeah, it worked fine for me a bit later.

This sounds really bad, but I know nothing of the other side of the story. It's been a couple of years since I used freenode. I worked up some tests for Stripe integration, and followed a developer of something or other and bought him some whisky (Adam Shaw maybe? I can't recall).

Anyway, is there a better network for finding these groups now?

A. I am wondering if all of the volunteers are resigning. That would be great. B. I will move with libera. This shady hostile takeover wouldn't have to be just accepted by communities

> Some time ago, Christel, the former head of freenode staff sold `freenode ltd` (a holding company) to a third party

Couldn't help wondering - where did the money go? If it was sold for cash.

Community transitions to irc.libera.chat seem to be starting and things are happening step by step.

Note that currently irc.libera.chat is under a lot of load, and might take some time to get things organized/get load sorted/etc.

As a minor upside: I'm seeing people live who possibly haven't actually been online for a long while!

More info from Fuchs: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006888.h... :( It's bad news.

> You can connect to the new network at `irc.libera.chat`, ssl port 6697 (and the usual clearnet port).

You might want to consider to shutdown the clearnet port, since it sends user passwords and private chat messages in plaintext over the internet.

This story is just so I’m clear and leaves me full of questions. It’s a complete mess, despite the numerous semi-official statements trying to clear things up.

Things I’m wondering about:

- why was freenode being sold in the first place?

- for what was it sold? For money? And who was paid for the sale?

- Did whatever freenode was sold for go back to support the IRC-network? Or did someone weasel it away for themselves?

- why would anyone buy and IRC network? What did they expect to gain by owning the network?

- Why was a volunteer-run IRC network even registered as a business which could be sold?

Can anyone please help me understand?

This may be a naive question but why would a vpn company buy an irc network? Is there an overlap?

Either:

1) community

2) valuable data

This is an example of why a well organized governance and legal standing matters for projects like this. If that were the case this situation would not have happened.

Looks like the relevant previous threads are:

Freenode resignation is official, not a draft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926 - May 2021 (10 comments)

The Freenode resignation FAQ, or: “what the fuck is going on?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 - May 2021 (8 comments)

I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338 - May 2021 (262 comments)

Edit: oh - there's also this currently on the front page:

Welcome to Libera Chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207734 - May 2021 (254 comments)

I wonder whether old and long-lasting communities that depend on Freenode (eg. #linux or #openbsd) are going to switch to the new network.

#openbsd is already there, it was the first channel I joined. Not sure about #linux but #debian is there on the new server as well.

The are #debian channels here and there, but the Debian project uses irc.oftc.net (aka irc.debian.org).

#django has been / was a very responsive and friendly channel.

Much more so than other frameworks du jour.

I also wonder if that will move.

For somebody with zero context: what are the implications of this?

A bunch of people will probably move to libera.chat, some to Matrix, some won't care at all. Communities may splinter to smaller pieces. As for Freenode, it's not really clear what the new "owner"'s plans are and if they can administer it without the volunteers that left. I guess time will tell.

a popular IRC network has been taken over by a private owner. The users don't like that and are leaving. It was around for a long time so for many of those users it's effecting them negatively. I would imagine that these users could start a new network? If you were not part of the community you are likely not impacted.

Private Internet Access has no connection to Freenode at all anymore. It WAS owned by London Trust Media, which also owned PIA, however Kape Technologies acquired PIA in December of 2019 and has had no connection since then. We do not have any involvement or knowledge of any takeover of Freenode.

Welp, we had a good run, far longer than I expected.

It still the exact same thing in libera.chat

Sounds like chaos that someone like "Fierce Nerds" would create. Keep it up.

Why was this ever a commercial entity?

> This was done, from what we were informed, to organize our freenode #live conferences, that required a legal body.

Source: https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt

With hindsight that sounds like an excuse to make some money.

Q: Do accounts/channels that have been inactive for years get purged automatically?

Used to have some stuff there, not sure if it's worth the time to find the correct emails/passwords.

Piggybacking off this, what's a good way to archive Freenode content? I think I may still have some content on there from over a decade ago

You're probably thinking of the wrong service. Freenode is an IRC chat network, not a web site or other service with permanently stored "content".

Looks like inactive accounts are removed, NickServ doesn't know me anymore.

Yep, same, thanks! NickServ didn't know any of the usernames I think I had.

> * jess has quit (Quit: so long and thanks for all the fish)

Poignant :-(

freenode is like a public utility for many developers, now one person with some cash suddenly owns it.

maybe from now on each well-known essential OSS project like freenode should have a donation page and make it clear, unless it has enough fund to continue operations for the year its service will have to pause, so it can be self-sustainable for good.

and yes make it a non-profit for tax purposes.

Having enough funds to survive a projected period of time in no way precludes management finding the idea of more funds[†] rather attractive, even if the projected survival period was effectively until some infinity.

[†] for the project, for themselves, or some mix of both, apply your preferred level of cynicism here

I had not used IRC in a long time, just checked libera.chat... it doesn't work ("software caused connection abort")

It's irc.libera.chat, and seems to work fine here, though servers are understandably dealing with a surge (particularly on nick registration).

I did use "irc." before and tried again now. No dice.

Oh, the previous comment was downvoted. How nice!

It's down right now

I feel sorry for their servers rn

I have moved my channels to libera.chat:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-05-19-liberachat/

I set up a bot which herds people on Freenode, shoot me a PM (ddevault) if you want me to /join it to your channel as well.

Wait. An IRC network has employees?

seemed like it had one, who sold it to some guy in exchange for a salary (without telling anyone)

then buggered off when the consequences became clearer

I wondered as well and I think they're just used to calling their contributor team members 'staff', like you needed to be voted in as a contributor then you are 'staff', apparently oftc does the same thing

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

There are pretty good at spamming the libera network... Even get spammed on non-freenode networks and in my emails.

Some channels have announced they are moving, some don't know yet. Hope this isn't another blow to IRC

related resignation post from Md that has links to others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27208422

Account dropped, really sorry to say goodbye after so many years!

Why would someone want to buy freenode?

Is there some monetization angle?

Selling user data?

Is IRC user data of any value?

Only to law enforcement or government intelligence agencies IMO

Speaking of IRC, what about EFNET and Dalnet?

> under a legally registered Swedish non-profit

Thank you Sweden, again. Anyone have a good read why Sweden is always on the forefront of liberty and intellectual freedom?

Will startups move to another network?

does anyone have a sense for the daily active users across freenode? asking for a friend ;)

They might as well put "Arasaka" logo into their website (for those who played Cyberpunk 2077).

I officially consider FreeNode nodes hostile.

What economic value does Freenode has?

None now that all of its team and channels will move to another network.

One of the benefits of old decentralized protocols: The community is not locked in and can move as nomads, so it can't be sold. At best they get an archive of stale information.

Network + personal info, I guess...? But a catch here is that most people in the network are proficient in technology, which makes it difficult to abuse them like how Facebook does to its users.

I guess only if they know about it though

Fuck Andrew Lee

Just use Slack. It's a lot more user friendly and inclusive.

This is a joke right?

or a massive troll on freenode

I don't know about the process of the sale/takeover of Freenode, but I'm a long time PIA user and have a fair amount of trust and goodwill for London Trust Media (the owner of PIA and now Freenode).

- PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors

- They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

- They have been fairly open with how their tech works and it all sounds reasonable

- London Trust Media have sponsored the Open Rights Group (the UK's equivalent of the EFF) in the past and engaged in ORG events.

It's hard to know how much you can trust an organisation as an outsider, but for me they tick most of the good/reasonable boxes. They may have messed Freenode around, but I'd be surprised if there was a significant danger to user privacy here.

Have you noticed any significant changes in quality or transparency since the Kape acquisition? There was a lot of concern around that time. I was a happy customer until then, but I chose not to renew at my next term. I'm curious to hear your experience since.

Good point, I hadn't considered this. The service quality has probably increased, product seems more active. As for the privacy/trust angle, I haven't seen as much public commenting from them but I haven't been looking for it. Seems fine so far.

London Trust Media was sold and most of those things were the doing of the old owners.

> - PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors

I used Private Internet Access for a long time. When they merged with Kape Technologies (resulting in the ludicrous situation of having Mark Karpelès as their CTO) I lost all faith in them and immediately switched to Mullvad.

Having used both, I can tell you that Mullvad is far better designed. Mullvad has only account numbers, no usernames, emails or passwords. Creating an account is one click. Mullvad has an all-in-one VPN check page. Mullvad provides easy preconfigured OpenVPN configurations for any of their servers (you don't have to add your credentials among other things; as I understand PIA still just offers an "openvpn.zip" with a bunch of files you have to edit, which is error prone.) Mullvad is based in Sweden, not America.

All of these things provide much better privacy than PIA. And on top of that I don't recall any scandals with Mullvad than resemble the merger with Kape or the current situation with Freenode. These events should make you question whether you should continue to trust PIA.

> - When they merged with Kape Technologies (resulting in the ludicrous situation of having Mark Karpelès as their CTO) I lost all faith in them and immediately switched to Mullvad.

This is not true. Mark was hired by London Trust Media and never worked for PIA. Since Kape acquired PIA in December of 2019, there is no connection at all between Mark and PIA.

> They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

Do you mean the "hide your IP address <from vague/unspecified parties for similarly vague/unspecified reasons" stuff? Because over time I've heard many paid sponsorship shout-outs (and also direct adverts) in podcasts & youtube clips to PIA quoting that and related stuff.

Just a heads up I assigned CVE-2021-1000189 https://json.distributedweaknessfiling.org/CVE-2021-1000189, especially in light of the data harvesting concerns and DoS (offering people the ability to arbitrarily k-line people) and the simple fact that a good solution exists in the form of https://libera.chat/

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