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Leaving Freenode for a new network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440 - May 2021 (253 comments)
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)
Where is this motive made apparent?
edit: s/add/ads/
[0] https://freenode.net/ [1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
I second this sentiment. Can anyone summarize objectional actions that Andrew has either taken or committed to taking in the future?
As far as I can tell, he found a way to purchase legal rights to Freenode. And, he's communicated this control in a way that pissed off existing mods.
But, as a Freenode user, what I really care about is how this will impact me as a user. If the only potential impact this will have on me as a user is a smaller user base, there's a clear solution: don't leave?
From what has been revealed, Lee wiggled himself in from conference sponsorship side. He used this inroad to strike a secret ownership deal with a person who the rest of the crew reckons was not in position to decide. Freenode is not a commercial enterprise. It's more like a community soccer club sold to a sponsor by a guy who happened to be a secretary with a stamp - after the years you've been tending the lawn and volunteering with training.
Yes, they are understandably pissed off, as one would be with hostile takeover by some renegade crypto prince (yes he really claims he's a prince).
- a few years ago, the previous head-of-staff ('christel') became an employee of Andrew Lee's company
- sometime last year they left the company and also stopped being active as a staff member
- the rest of the staff elected a new head ('tomaw')
- Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's successor (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of successor)
So I think it isn't so much about anything Lee has done, so much as the fact that he's no longer taking a hands-off role, as (the staff apparently think) he promised.
Also perhaps that his claim to be in a position to take charge is based more on his ability to pay for lawyers than a solid legal foundation (it's clear that he bought something, but not so clear what, and not clear that it was the seller's to sell).
I think the underlying problem is that freenode's previous parent organisation was dissolved in 2013, apparently without setting up an official successor.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130322063238/http://blog.freen...
Is this really correct? As far as I understand tomaw tried to claw back freenode assets from rasengan which initiated this whole mess.
Maybe if he’s your actual boss and you are being paid.
Free isn’t enough to deal with this kind of shit (when you can set up and own your competing server in a few seconds).
Of course this isn't stopping him essentially staging a coup by ejecting the original volunteer staff and replacing them with a staff of his choosing.
Freenode is a community project that is in the process of being co-opted by a shady organisation.
As for the situation, if I understand correctly:
- Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain names without telling the community of maintainers who actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers running.
- The maintainers perceived the company that now held the domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the company but it looked like its corporate filing status was out-of-date or something.
- In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name" (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks which documented the transfer, and other such things... there was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain that the main burden is on you rather than on us?"
- And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came across as a domineering outsider.
For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on over to the new domain.
It might just be that there's no affordable legal recourse.
I guess you were arguing morally, just pointing out this isn't legally true everywhere.
Sounds like you forgot about the very expensive conference freenode staff organized with rasengans money
> Freenode is a non profit organization that benefits from support from Private Internet. It is not owned by Private Internet. We are serious fans of IRC and the open source community, so it makes sense for us to divert profits to orgs like freenode among others.
> To be clear, we also donate to other orgs: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo... Our new merged company will continue to do the same as we are in fact the same company going forward - just much better resourced.
They're all a bunch of shady scammers. I don't understand why people trust the freenode staff either, since they evaded or demured when challenged about selling freenode to scammers years ago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210520103526/https://freenode....
"The rumors of a 'hostile takeover' are simply untrue - I've been the guardian and owner of freenode since 2017, when Christel, the former owner approached me and asked if I was interested in purchasing it, as we had in previous years discussed this."
It doesn’t appear he was lying, because by all accounts he owned it personally.
Said promise is in writing, but only has a few chats message, nothing official (they are a bunch of volunteers doing that for a couple decades as friends, hard to fault them).
Christel seemed to sell out, and when she got kicked out of her op at freenode by other staff Lee came out of the shadows.
Since the volunteers previous could do this, and were promised that nothing was going to be changed it was pretty upsetting.
Then one other person comes in saying Andrew said he could be a mod now, please grant permissions.
Freenode was managed by volunteers without any official organisation. A couple years ago, the person that the volunteers considered their "head" informally made a UK company that would own at least the name and domain name, merely out of a wish to have some legal structure instead of random staff users owning random parts of it. How much of it is owned by the company is very vague, staff are not on contract, servers are loaned without any paper signed by third parties, ...
Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew Lee's company, who made the promise to the staff to not involve himself. Then that head pushed for profits ads on the website, with no warning nor explanation, and with the profits going to said company. Staff complained a lot, head is removed from the freenode staff and then removed from the board of the company she had sold.
Conflict of management erupts, and was justified freenode having no clear admin structure. But Lee comes out of it acting as if he was the boss and owner of the entire platforms, ask that servers and users data gets transferred to him. When staff rebels and refuse that, he "removes them", which ends up with the hilarious moment of him asking them to de-op themselves (remove their admin status) which he can't do himself since he doesn't even have the authority. On several occasion he claims that "the board of freenode voted to have you removed", while he means the board of his private company freenode ltd (which the staff have no relation of any kind with), and he is the only member of said board.
Most of staff agrees about a need for a proper structure, but refuse to see everything transferred to an opaque and for profit company. Lee argue that's it's the only solutions. Several head of major communities or projects hosted on freenode make the suggestion of transferring the control and data to an official not for profit like the FSF and Lee and staff being given the lead in the interim to a proper governance.
Lee reacts by trying to "bribe" some of them with admin powers and/or financial sponsorship for their project if they side with him, which goes terribly wrong, and them saying "Now I will never have anything to do with Freenode under Lee anymore".
That's a summary of the event as understood by me. It seems the governance issue was real, but it also seems one side is saying "it should be owned by a non profit with clear governance and clear rules for data protection" and the other side, Lee, is saying "all the data and admin privileges should be given to my for profit that doesn't report to anyone else than me".
Frankly, while there is gray on both side, his action made it pretty clear that I wouldn't want any of my data in his hands.
Not recently. In 2017. Why did freenode staff support (or at least refuse to engage in complaints about it) until now?
I know its a bit of semantics but I have found that many (if not most) of the loud and proud DT supporters are incredibly irritating. I find them just as bad or worse than the hyper politically correct/SJW crowd.
I think this is a good reaction to accidentally publishing information that was intended to be private. Nothing is deleted, but you stop telling new people about it. People who already know can keep reading and talking.
What was more interesting - as is usually the case - was the HN discussion, from which I learned a lot.
Life took path (1) as we all know, and so this has been the most-discussed story on HN in the last couple days, including being at #1 on the front page all day today, and still.
Their real problem is the actual website UI sucks. I don't think they've changed it for about a decade.
If I were them I'd take something like Gogs and rebuild the site based on that.
Notice how in a typical Sourceforge page you get the name of the project right at the front with big letters, right below it a rating by its users, how popular it is and when it was last updated (though that date is misleading because it tracks all the project data and not releases) as the most important bits, with a big fat green DOWNLOAD button next to those and buttons to be notified for updates and sharing the software with others? Then the information panel below these describe the software, what features it has, etc followed by screenshots, category information, license, etc and then comments/reviews by users. This panel is just one tab with others being the files for users to download, reviews, support, forums, etc. The code, where you can see the repository, is at the last tab.
This is a design very strongly targeted towards users, unlike Github/etc that right in the front page of a project show the repository and rely on Readmes to show any information.
Some projects even use Github (or Gitlab or whatever similar tool/service) for the repository while keeping other functionality, like downloads, mailing lists (that AFAIK no other similar service offers, btw) in Sourceforge.
That is not to say that Sourceforge's UI doesn't need a bit of a cleanup, but replacing it with something like Gogs (or anything Github-like) isn't going to work since Sourceforge's UI has a different target and goal.
https://sourcehut.org (the hosted version is https://sr.ht) has a mailing lists feature
I mean, promises like that sound like obvious bullshit to me. ‘EA promises that Codemasters will continue to operate on their own like they did’. Yeah sure buds, who are you taking me for. Unless the company is a cash cow startup, why would anyone buy it with other aims than to try making it bring a bit more profit than the previous owners could manage? (Buying the team/the technology is pretty much the same, as it means the workings of the business will be thrown away.)
The server donors own their servers and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The channel operators own their channels and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The staff own their volunteer labor and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The users own their choice of platform, and can support whichever they wish.
This is a legal entity that owns itself.
>Who owns Linux?
Linux Mark Institute owns the trademark, contributors own the copyright to their code.
This is not a complicated question.
And the quibble about a couple of K's really grates on me. The guy founded freenode and kept it going. Let the donations fund his groceries.
I never knew of the hate until I befriended a few of the atheme people and they told me some of their side. I do think he misappropriated funds to survive which is unethical but I'm not mad at the spirit of it. I used to troll the staff a bit that netsplits were caused by the /shakedown command lilo put in to collect donations.
Unrelated, but freenode is weird among IRC networks. Other networks I went on would sometimes just ban people because they felt like it, not for any particular reason. The server donors were not allowed to give themselves O-Lines (IRC staff privs), this was an important distinction as well as it kept servers neutral, and later on was the reason they did not require a foundation with overhead. There was an incident that I believe they deleted off their blog where I think the Newark, NJ server was punted from the network for giving themselves an O-line without permission. So yes, the sale is weird because the assets should have only been the domain name and website. My guess on PIA wanting more was recommendations from their lawyers over GDPR crap but I don't really know or care.
Yes, he did try to make a living off freenode when he hit financial and professional difficulties, and people resented that, but he was unquestionably the founder and a major volunteer (though, by the time he asked for donations, one of many volunteers).
Many OSS projects moved off freenode (including some I was involved in) specifically because Lilo was pulling donors into chant and trying to convince them to fund freenode instead of the oss project they were on freenode to discuss. It was really sleazy and created a lot of well earned bad blood.
I don't think I ever saw anyone too irritated that lilo spent some donations on his living expenses.
Not only that, but for people who get by through exploitation of trust, doing anything to attract scrutiny from anyone generally doesn't work in your favor.
Changing governing council: https://bolagsverket.se/polopoly_fs/1.279!/Menu/general/colu...
registring a new non-profit. https://www.skatteverket.se/foretag/etjansterochblanketter/b...
Just send people in with token amounts of money and vote on things that benefit your company.
Also, depending on who's "taking over" and who's "taken over", it can be argued that if the majority of members that provide the majority of the funding to the non-profit, shaping the non-profit according to the majority of its members is the right thing to do. If there's too much differences in opinion, the non-profit can also split any time.
To be a non-profit you also have to spend at least 80% of the income on the stated purpose of the non-profit (which of course might benefit members in the way that the goals of the non-profit is worked on but not in the way of paying money to member).
I really hate that corporate shell game bullshit and attempts at monetization are being made by a dude that professes to love IRC. I wish andrew could acknowledge the hurt he is causing but it seems like saving face matters more to him at this point.
I mean I feel like changing the domain name is less of a problem than the one all of the 4000 people named Andrew Lee who are not that guy now have. It's a lot harder to change a legal name. So they will have to live with his bad reputation potentially rubbing off on them. But luckily online most people use aliases so that should mitigate it somewhat.
Libera.chat is a more modern name anyway.
0: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd...
Fortunately I doubt IRC servers need to be communicated vocally all that often.
Your sass is unnecessary. Their nickserv registration email was delivered to gmail just fine.
Even if Gmail is currently delivering the messages (for now...), other service providers have to manage spam in their own way, and TLDs are sometimes a really strong signal for message reputation. For example, 99% of email traffic from .info addresses is spam, and the other 1% is mostly spam too.
Even major services. I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a gmail address.
Luckly it turns out you don't need an account to order, and I was able to use my custom domain for an unregistered checkout.
This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?
I've noticed that some sites will specifically ban public domains from throwaway services like mailinator, but I can't recall having encountered a blanket tld ban.
I wasn't using a weird TLD. It was a .us that only my family uses.
I didn't try too hard to get it to work, or figure out exactly what their criteria were, but I kept getting blocked until I used my old gmail. Their customer support wasn't very helpful, either.
My nickserv registration worked fine btw.
But most of the good stuff gets marked these days despite spf/dkim so I'm not particularly shocked.
This is sadly always the case. For everything. We'd rather let people die (e.g. Challenger) than admit any fault or delay to fix a problem.
IRC will live on.
> On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the server for April Fools. Only a very few EFnet staff were aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only) server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018, eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on the "Eris Free" IRC network and accepted clients.[11] At the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to erisnet.org.[12] eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02 2018 at 19:50 UTC.
Statement from the ex-Freenode Staff is now official.
> Sorry, we do not accept registrations with email addresses from that domain. Use another address.
That's going to limit adoption.
Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? How do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode?
I know addressing a messy past on a new site is no fun / I saw the other articles on HN, but ... they should still address who is running the show and some level of assurances (as much as you can in text on the internet) that this is a good place.
You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that, except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example, actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in #nim.
The people running the show are those people and friends of those people.
The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the networking etc.
So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are problem solvers.
Original question: "there is not a single name of a real person anywhere on the site that I can find. there is only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in Sweden." Is it normal for the staff of such a project to be secret?"
Your answer: "They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit." Not named. And then you had a bunch of stuff about unnamed people who chose not to put their names or nicks anywhere on the site, when the question is "why wouldn't they associated their names/nicks with this?"
The staff are not secret. They have names on the network. Those nicks are published (at least on the old site, not sure if that has been transferred to new yet) and well-known.
The one guy who's name everyone knows is undisputably trying to profit from a non-profit organization, which he previously lied and said he would not, and in so doing has caused the worst disruption possible. So that proves that names don't actually help us.
It reads like (good) satire. The perceived esteem of some of the users are unrelated to the validity/integrity of a company.
Go on.
It will almost certainly go the same way as its gone in the past.
Looking forward to joining Libera Chat.
/msg alis LIST *linux*
/msg alis LIST *clojure*
/msg alis LIST *art*
This is what it has going for it. It is meant to be a drop-in(ish) replacement for freenode. All the same clients, all the same protocols, all the same channels (in theory).
A drop in replacement for a place that was run into the ground by the people who now will run the drop in replacement.
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
If the sarcasm is missed, there is nothing at all funny about this abomination. I would much rather trust Andrew Lee than this bunch.
I think an open source project is more scalable and reusable than a proprietary one, but if the goal is long term communication among diverse users, then using a protocol is good.
Speaking in a strictly personal capacity, I don't think that point can be taken for granted. The W3C's missteps with HTML5, and WHATWG's success, is a particularly notable failing of a dedicated standards body. The Rust programming language is also developed and codified outside of a traditional standards organization.
There's a reason why eg. the WHATWG exists, basically.
Also, rapid development has its own set of problems as we've seen with XMPP (where no two clients support the same set of features because new ones are being developed to keep up with various proprietary things all the time).
Anyways, point is, don't reinvent the wheel, I'm sure one of the standard bodies could have been a good fit if we needed this at all, but Matrix definitely isn't a good fit for this Freenode replacement and this is one of the reasons why (the other is that Freenode works just fine and the point is that this is a drop in replacement).
This is just false. Speaking as co-founder and project lead for Matrix, it's been the same team all along since we began in 2013. We were incubated until 2017 in a company which never tried to monetize the protocol, and then we span out to set up Element (formerly New Vector) where we keep the lights on by selling Matrix hosting and support/consulting.
At the same time we set up The Matrix.org Foundation as a non-profit neutral standards body, with an independent board where the original founders are deliberately in the minority - and when we set it up, half of the spec core team were independent of Element too. (This changed as folks on the team opted to join Element so they could work on Matrix fulltime).
Rather than spreading FUD about Matrix, why not collaborate and work together? Or at least spend the energy on improving XMPP rather than negging us...
Is there a place with this history or the governance structure that people can link to the next time this comes up?
You're trying to moderate discussion that you don't like, because it's not about IRC. Matrix is relevant in a discussion about IRC because it's a valid alternative. You can't police natural and useful discussion you don't like.
All that being said, you're right, I shouldn't get drawn in every time this person (whom I've just realized is the same person who goes by another name elsewhere) jumps in on every chat across the internet trying to advertise their product. My own fault for getting drawn in and using language like "hissy fit" that is, as you said, unreasonable. I'm sorry about that.
We're all only human.
Thank you for working on XMPP
Who decides when a standards body is real?
I think IETF is a good example of how anyone can propose standards on a plethora of topics. When they were very young it was hard to trust but now they are decades old with hundreds of standards demonstrating how easy it is to propose and work on new standards. Maybe even the “gold standard” of standards bodies.
Single standard organizations created by the dev group are just naturally biased certain ways.
I don’t think there’s a single perfect body, but it’s definitely curious to me why someone would start a stand-alone foundation rather than use w3c, ietf, or others that seem to work pretty well.
I also judge the number of different clients and servers implementing the spec for whether it’s real or just a controlled intermediary. Sun/Oracle seemed pretty bad about this back in the day with JSR stuff although I haven’t paid attention in 10 years.
Projects can make their own choices and set up foundations if they are willing to fund and monetize, etc. But that stuff isn’t as robust as IRC or protocols that have independent standards bodies.
Seems like there are lots of different clients [0] and a couple of different servers [1].
The idea of a single dev team being VC funded means that there’s a drive to monetize. That’s bad pressure on a protocol and one that doesn’t exist for IRC and other protocols. There’s multiple members in the matrix foundation and that helps but there’s just not much diversity of interests.
Again, not the end of the world, and the project seems to me to be going to great lengths to collaborate. But I feel the same way as if Microsoft started up an independent foundation to drive development of the Skype protocol. Good on them, but it’s not as robust as an independent protocol.
[0] https://matrix.org/clients/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
Ouch. Did you read https://matrix.org/foundation or https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...?
I'd agree that skepticism was warranted if we hadn't split out the Foundation and the protocol was de facto controlled by Element. But instead we made damn sure to create the Foundation independently and frankly protect it from being sabotaged by Element or any other commercial entity building on Matrix. To suggest otherwise is pretty insulting to the other Guardians/Directors whose only role is literally to oversee and ensure that the protocol isn't sabotaged by commercial entities.
This is very different from Microsoft's model.
IETF is one of the best standardizing organizations out there, I'll certainly give you that. They have fairly transparent process, and a really good track record when it comes to creating robust protocols.
Thing is, I don't see why Matrix.org would have any more or less "cachet" than WHATWG, or Khronos Group. In the end, the identity of the standardizing org doesn't really matter too much. What matters is that the incentives of the standardizing org are aligned with those of the community.
It honestly feels pretty likely that this is just a maturity thing - as more products are built around Matrix, the Spec Core team will likely become more diverse.
In which way does the protocol make no sense for chat? IRC is extremely complicated as well and a giant pile of hacks.
Most of the state resolution (eg. the auth chain) involves calculations of which you can cache the result without needing to care about the inputs beyond that - at least, unless you need to recalculate them once later if delayed events come in.
Ultimately, the performance problems that Synapse has are problems with Synapse's implementation choices (especially around the database schema), not with the protocol nor with the state resolution algorithm.
That doesn't seem like a fundamental issue though.
Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode.
Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated, but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo). Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are positively skinny.
Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major underestimate given other stats which suggest only about 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption?
(Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
I want to test this claim. After an hour of google searching I'm none the wiser:
1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP. I would love to integrate them into a single client, but afaict it does not appear possible.
2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the Element UI.
Um.. :D
HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such disclosures all the time - but making them available in bios is practical.
You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts may exist whenever there's no bio info at all – as with your user page.
Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their affiliations declared for when they're flacking their company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but things to think about.
But bringing up that you're the project lead of the project your discussing seems like an obvious step.
And, it often has the added benefit of more useful credibility context than just revealing blatant conflicts.
It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for every comment, "how much involvement in these particular topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on topics for which the commenter often comments, or multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion - where such a standard would be onerous for both the author, and the readers.
Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're covered for comments related to those affiliations, as it's then easy to check for anyone observing any partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading with redundant disclosure-noise.
No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you read, but conversely we shouldn’t expect him to preface every single one of his comments with “Hey guys, I’m the project lead of Matrix.”
Arathorn is very active in comments, and it’s well known to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix.
If you want scrupulous disclosure of relevant affiliations inline in every single comment where they could apply, I think you're in the wrong place.
As you note, it's not a site guideline. As I've noted in a sibling thread, it wouldn't fit the minimalist HN presentation, and would place an onerous burden on both writers & readers.
It'd also especially encumber people with deep personal knoweldge and interest in some topics, if every related post required boilerplate "I'm employed by X"/etc inserts.
But putting it in the bio for the curious/suspicious is a very honorable thing to do!
The guy gives up additional disclosure information and you see that as an opportunity to make smartass comments
Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose their affiliation when advocating against renewable energy sources.
It's not about whether you are advocating for or against something specifically, it's about whether you have a vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious, nobody can be completely impartial).
To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't think the reason stated for not doing so is really evidence either way.
The protocol may not be, but in practice, the servers and clients that nearly everyone uses sure as hell are.
I run a synapse server for half a dozen people on a reasonably beefy box and it sure feels that way when I'm using it on a daily basis.
I regret getting people onto Matrix now. I'm keeping it running with the hope that things improve and because I don't want to get people to move to another system which may also have problems.
Should have just stuck with XMPP and my Prosody server, and IRC.
IMO it doesn't need to be "better", there are different requirements and preferences among users and between Matrix, IRC and Jabber, each of those ecosystems got their own set of issues.
(The bridge is unreliable, but still very handy to stay connected to old friends)
I don't know enough about Freenode. Is it normal for the staff of such a project to be secret? (Or, at least, secret if you haven't been following the previous history of Freenode?)
When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require real names.
Isn't that exactly who they're aiming for though?
Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed solution is basically to do this out the gate.
Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC funded chat service with lots of users and a looming prospect of having to be profitable without losing them.
Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather used it to set up new events like freenode live.
We're talking about networks and communities here. Those aren't as interchangeable as things we buy.
That's because we are ensconced in a framework of corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses happen all the time.
Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their community there trust the entity running Discord.
I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity behind them.
I was never talking about the community on top of a platform, but the platform itself.
I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat.
With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service is more clearly documented and understood by everyone.
At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit they have established should be clearly displayed on the web page somewhere.
The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat, but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a more complete story will emerge.
That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the persona and back to the person behind it. A single person can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains this kind of gaming of the system and so makes trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.
This is not to say that the costs of using real names outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of establishing trust is just wrong.
Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title, etc ...
The other way around also works (e.g., Facebook has all the impressum and contact pages you want, but it's the least trustful tech company out there).
Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if not offensive.
EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News karma scores are fucking cold.
* - that is to say, each individual instance (drip) wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can cause a lot of anguish.
I left the community because it just upset me to have to do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does.
I would find it deeply wrong if HN were to ask for the gender of their users, let alone their sexual preferences, but I would expect the same of a dating site.
But I don't disagree with you in general. I also miss the intimacy a nick could afford you. Somehow you could talk about deeper things when nobody knew your name.
I wonder what other words can be used as a pronoun?
Basically anything you can use in place of a name, so long as the grammatical usage is namelike.
"That guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a noun
"Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can tell because "he" also works grammatically)
However, I think these would need to be in the initial position(s) when slash-delimiting one's pronouns, because the final position is for a possessive form. That is, they're analogous to "he" but not analogous to "his" (and using them like "him" would be a stretch, as far as I can figure...), which might be what got GP in hot water.
You don't think that's merely people being lazy and leaving off a word that can be inferred ('That')? This is something I often do in casual conversation, particularly vocal conversations:
"I am wondering what you mean" - 'I' is a pronoun
"Wondering what you mean" - 'Wondering' is now the pronoun??? Clearly not. It's just a way that people are lazy and sloppy with grammar when correct grammar isn't important.
But to answer your "wondering" question: nope, because "he/him/his," nor their analogues (person, number, gender, etc.), don't work there.
People are too forthcoming on the internet today, with some divulging almost their entire being to the megacorp spy machines. It's easy for stalkers, let alone adtech and three letter agencies, to find and track people.
I prefer today's tech, but yesterday's freedom, mindset, and lack of tracking.
Believe it or not but cis white western men were and still are subject to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. As a cis white western man myself I personally have experienced harassment online.
"If you did not pass as a cit het white man you would likely be harassed for it on the early internet."
is not the same thing as
"If you were harassed on the early internet then you must not have passed as a cis het white man."
During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
The way you worded it sounded like you were as explicit as you can be without explicitly saying that men are not harassed. You said you either adopt the persona of a man OR you are harassed. You also said you gave up and learned to talk like a man (to stop certain harassment). Both of these implies that you are not harassed if you act like a man.
>During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
There is a difference in your original post and your analogy due to the use of the word 'or' in the original post. If you go to a restaurant and they ask if you want salad or soup as a side dish they are not implying you get both, but one or the other.
It is too bad in English we do not have xor to prevent such confusions.
The Hacker Manifesto said it nicely:
"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it.
The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care.
There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female.
So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.
This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else.
I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.
Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.
The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.
Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online.
Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups.
(I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
Now granted, I have only been online in various forms since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine" name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30 years of online activity under my real name, I can tell you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate through the university mail system, and probably even before then.
I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird people out there.
Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and largely only psudo-anonymous.
The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users. And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited connection range. People were locals.
> we.
Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to represent, utterly fucking failed. You point the finger at the The Eternal September, but how many of those 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that? Failing one time after another until you give up and realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.
> we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of writing I actually just did.
> we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time
Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed masses finding the internet.
--
I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has changed. I dare say it's worse.
This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.
Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.
That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.
The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.
What newsgroups did Chaucer post to?
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Middle_English-they [2]: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/gr.html...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender
(Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/20120530024829/http://www.nytime...)
Of course:
> More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, and singular they is becoming the dominant form
But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody flips a switch and everyone across the world updates their habits, so it takes time.
While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he or she" being the taught solution for a single person of unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is going out of favour.
Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a job, she would be known as female and harassed.
Every single woman had to think about that, every single day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.
Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. No, you may not hit on every single person on the Internet just because you think they are female." They object, but to women, that's something they've done every single day of their online lives.
But:
> bragging about your genitalia,
If you’re not doing this ironically, then what the fuck communities are you in?
> talking about your wife
Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than the other examples. People do talk about spouses/partners.
> even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer
Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully sexist of you to assume not.
Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if they don't, or if they like other things, speaking up about those things isn't equally easy.
Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap point with an offhand accusation.
The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.
And even then, everyone's still a dog.
During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.
Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women.
That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.
Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1]
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-haras...
There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.
Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java.
Ah the times of Nickbot.
Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else.
(this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)
It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.
Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s
We would joke about it in programming channels, but people really did use it in non-programming channels.
I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal organization or legal rights that let one person who had enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he owned it.
You want that not to happen again, you might want to do something different. And indeed the announcement acknowledges that, that's why there is "a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).
The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... they got away with it.
The comment at the top of this thread was talking about how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that sort of thing happening again before investing energy in this new thing, one would want to know more about the formal legal structure and who is behind it.
The "old internet" way is "We're just some people cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to know each other's real names." That has plusses and minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone else for personal profit, even though all the people informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns out it's hard to stop them.
I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry) and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted with.
Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had established enough "rapport" to do so.
I remember one time that after having been in the same channel with a user and chatting to them almost every day for 10 years, they finally revealed that they were female not male. That was a real revelation. The same could be said for people who you assumed were from the Anglosphere but turned out to be Indian, African, or from other far-flung places. The point is, none of this mattered. What mattered was your intelligence, knowledge, problem-solving ability, and programming chops.
In many respects, the Old Internet Way was better than the New Internet Way.
The internet was the only place I was treated as an adult, an equal. As I got older I no longer felt the need to hide my age to be treated that way, but I really hope kids of today can find a similar place.
People on the Old Internet assumed you were "like them". If they're a white, 25 year old american male, they're going to assume you are a white, 20-something american male by default. You can correct them, but… why would you care? Back then we didn't really try to paint a picture of who we are in real life. Like you said, all that mattered was what you would concretely bring to the table. Trying to emphasize your age, gender or nationality would be seen as rude in an "is that what you're bringing to the table?" kind of way (less of an issue in the case of nationality as RL meetups became more common, and especially less of an issue in europe-centric international groups where your location could in fact be something you're bringing to the table).
There's a lot of valid criticism of the Old Internet and it wasn't a perfect place. Sexism was certainly rampant. So was ageism. But in a much more practical sense, it was way the fuck more egalitarian than what we have now.
It's odd to only get a mail address - policy at libera dot chat - and no further formal contact information of the non-profit as a legal entity in Sweden.
I suppose you could try an inquiry via the Swedish tax office asking them for a formal statement from the public record. I don't know any Swedish but I suppose there might be a search engine which lists public information about non-profits?
Even so, there are other hints: the footer features a link to a Github organization where you can easily track development in the open. Of course, that still doesn't give the project a clear, identifiable "face" or formal point of contact.
Other commenters argue "anonymity is how Freenode got big, and how the Internet used to work and that's perfectly fine since it fosters trust."
I think this only holds so much water today. It's not about a relationship between users of a service which provides the affordances to hide behind an anonymous handle. This is about the relationship between users and the operators of a service. You trust that an operator "won't do harm" when you log onto their service.
Such trust is tenuous at best if the decade has demonstrated. Legal frameworks such as the GDPR and privacy laws exist for the exact purpose of protecting users, and creating a legal liability on the part of all too zealous operators of services.
Moreover, the GDPR framework actively tries to de-incentivize gathering and storing any personal data which can be tracked to identifiable individuals without due cause.
Testing Libera Chat's trustworthiness would be, theoretically, as easy as sending a formal subject access request under the GDPR rules to the listed mail address.
Now, I'm aware that all of this are round about ways of figuring out whether this service is legit. It would help if their website just listed formal contact and legal details that identify the legal entity which can be held liable.
Then there's Freenode Ltd which is a UK company. Since Brexit, the GDPR doesn't apply. Given the latest publicly published updates, I don't feel similarly confident about the credibility of any statements regarding the safeguarding of personal data, nor backed by a similarly strong legal framework as far as my own rights go (I'm not acquainted with British privacy laws).
I wasn't able to find Libera Chat there, though it might simply be the case that the registration has not been finalized yet.
If the organization hasen’t created a decree and elected a board, then it will not count as juridical person.
[Edited slightly]
("freenodegate")
Count me out of this scam.
Also, their privacy policy does begin by listing one of the parties as the Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat.
I guess you are right.
> Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat
Which could not be found in the national registry. Compare to https://www.kth.se/en/om/kontakt/kontakt-kth-1.1947 which promptly resolves to https://www.allabolag.se/2021003054/kungliga-tekniska-hogsko...
I mean, "Fuchs" for example means far more to me than whatever the name on their drivers license is. Typically the only time I find out someone's real name on IRC is when their obituary gets posted!
This is (at least) time number two, that OSS projects have used the "Libre/Libera" term in community reboot/rebrand efforts. Nothing against speakers of French which have given us so many beautiful words, but there is something off putting about libre/libera for me in "brand names". I like what they stand for even! They just don't roll off the tongue for me. Is this just a "me thing"? Maybe there's something inherit about the actual phonetics that makes it off putting for me?
Anyway, it doesn't bother me. It's better than "Free", which is mostly misunderstood, RMS's rebranding attempts notwithstanding.
Just wow.
Libreoffice rubs me in a particularly wrong way, because until someone explained it, I did not know whether it was "libre office" or "lib re-office". Either one is strange (the former especially awkward because of the two vowel sounds back-to-back).
And a lot of English speakers at high-school or above level would probably be able to associate Libre with Free / Open.
I will agree that OpenOffice was a better name.
One thing I learned with my own community is that building one on negatives isn’t sustainable. Think about it: all of the big communities had a positive purpose for being created. They stood for something. What does Libera stand for?
Mission statement is crucial, and it seems to be absent here.
The org structure (wasn't it a non-profit at one point?), the donation drives, etc. There was a lot of "much larger irc networks don't need all this", "its a cash grab", etc.
Now, it seems to have fallen victim to the very issues the organization was supposed to prevent ?
It does seem anything more then 10 years old now is forgotten as 'ancient history' :-P The whole purpose of the original freenode organization seems to have been lost in the mists.
Or maybe I'm just getting old and poetic :-P
"In 2021, Lee took control of freenode, making some staff resign and move to Libera.chat."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera.chat
Freenode's wikipedia entry also has been updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode
Not sure how I feel about those lightning fast Wikipedia changes.
This has consequences.
I would feel way more confident if they defined all the terms used in this document e.g. "various forms of antisocial behaviour are forbidden", "discrimination", "any other behaviour meant to deliberately put upon a person harassment, alarm or distress".
The vagueness is rather alarming and distressing to me.
Then use the defense "the rules don't say I can't call you a butthead", so the rules get updated then they push some more and the cycle repeats.
With fuzzier boundaries if someone is being an ass you can kick them the first time. This does of course mean you need a decent set of moderators and an appeals process to prevent people power tripping.
IRC works and has worked for decades. Its minimal, text-only, no bs, no distractions nature is its greatest asset. Client support, programmability, and ease of integration too.
The folks that like Matrix are already using it. The folks that have stuck with IRC for decades will not abandon it for a protocol they deem to be inferior.
You don't even have to go "all in" on all the fancy new Matrix stuff; just write a wrapper to comply with being a "homeserver", and continue using the IRC API with no changes. If not, that's also fine, I'm not that invested in this personally.
When the matrix gateways go up and down you'll have 1000 random users thunderously join and part the channel at once.
Matrix comment edits flood the channels.
Matrix is unhelpful with abuse reports, in my experience.
I generally ban matrix from IRC channels for these and other such nuisances.
In terms of abuse reports; Element hires a fulltime team of folks to man abuse@matrix.org on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation and chase down the tickets as they come in. Please ping abuse@matrix.org if we've dropped stuff.
Seriously, I think message length limits are the main thing that's holding back the IRC protocol. If you can send e.g. 65536 byte messages, anybody will be immediately able to create scripts for sending images or code snippets.
Please encourage your favorite client's developers to implement it if possible.
I guess it's mainly due to the EGA-like magenta/blue/white color scheme.
Direct e2ee is far simpler and can be expanded to small groups without the need for complex ratcheting trees. Anything larger and you may as well fall-back to client-server with e2e communications.
but as far as I know there is only one implementation, and it's underdocumented. The protocol itself seems well specified, but it doesn't use "standard" primitives https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.1.1.html And UIs are usually not great (you have to check a shared secret via a trusted channel).
There are also talks of an OTRv4, shared by XMPP and IRC: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-ideas/issues/67 but the protocol is even more complex, I even have a hard time following the introductory sections of its specification.
Google shows it as protected https://i.imgur.com/dVNMqZ2.png but it's gone.
HN hug of love?
> Hi all. The IRC network is currently experiencing technical difficulties, likely a result of a massive influx of people. We're working on fixing it.
all the people migrating from Freenode it seems
s/freenode/libera.chat/gMy own personal politics are probably very very similar to the above author who was complaining about the new owner being "Trumpian", but what will happen if/when we disagreed about something? Would I get the boot from Libera? I totally don't care about Orange Man's fans enough to leave a network over it.
e: You gotta appreciate the irony of which group is censoring me right here with downvote-as-disagree :)
That person is completely within their rights to not want to work for someone like that.
Trump being racist? Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/FragileWhiteRedditor/comments/ecajm...
So people who support him are also probably racist, or at least okay with him being racist.
As long as they do a good job running the servers and don't censor me, sure. Life's too short for me to add more hate to the world in anticipation of receiving hate even though I am several flavors of minority in the tech world.
I know a fair number of people who supported Trump because he was a departure from the Bush/Clinton oligopoly and promised no more "wars like Iraq." He also promised to push back on grossly unfair trade policies with China.
Had Trump not run in 2016 it's entirely likely that we would have had, starting in 1992: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama (more or less Clinton), and then a race between (drum roll...) Bush and Clinton!
Though I gotta say... many of them didn't vote for Trump the second time because even if he did have a few good points his personality is too repellent and humiliating to tolerate.
Racism is awful, but American racism has not killed anywhere from 500k to 1m people (depending on who is counting) recently. The Iraq war did that along with setting fire to over a trillion dollars.
Sometimes I think Trump was worth it to make sure nobody named Bush or Clinton ever inhabits the White House again.
Perhaps it's your VPN provider?