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Freenode Exists for FOSS

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20 pointsrasengan22 comments

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So the new staff is:

* a deluded President (rasengan) picking grandiose self-titles

* a head of training who was fired from Rizon for leaking user data (foxy)

* someone who wants to build a pan-irc surveillance apparatus (bagira) [1]

* someone who was ejected from the IRCv3 working group for persistent harrassment (eskimo) [2]

and they all have access to user data, including being able to see through cloaks to real connection addresses, and user emails.

Top it off with an Alpine Linux team lead who taken a staff role to see if it could be saved and found it "unsalvageable". [3]

It's not looking good.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210523224209/https://phanes.si...

[2]: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3.github.io/issues/265

[3]: https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1396909867563114502

You got any more information on that IRCthulu thing (the pan-irc surveillance apparatus)? Even the archives of his blog don't have much info. What was he trying to do, specifically?

The intention was to build a system that could ingest and analyse every single irc message sent, in realtime, in order to persecute his perceived attackers. There's little written up about it, but you can read the malicious intent in a number of blog posts.

The most technical information I understand is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180105031259/https://phanes.si...

Yes, 2017. He's been at this for years and is known on every network, so Andrew Lee has no excuse to pretend he isn't aware of the person he has elevated to a staff position with powerful tools to get up to no good with.

There is some more information at https://phanes.silogroup.org/a-thousand-years-of-ircthulu/ (https://archive.is/ETvoD) and https://github.com/cmpunches/Tentabot

Every channel on Freenode that mentioned 'libera' in any capacity has been joined by a bot, had the topic renamed, ownership removed, all users deopped/unvoiced and all bans cleared.

Something that was against Freenode policy... until yesterday.

They also nuked private channels that were being used for Wikimedia and Wikipedia's editor communications.

https://pastebin.com/S2sDiiPE

Clown Prince wants to be a Dictator.

rasengan... nobody's buying your clown prince bullshit, bro.

Whatever sort of obsession you have with irc in general, all you've managed to do is give freenode an early funeral and turn the vast majority of the FOSS community against you.

Whatever was the 30 pieces of silver that you paid Christel, it doesn't matter what you say now to try to save face. You've managed to become more toxic than Stallman, for fuck's sake. At least THAT much has to be able to sink in.

I used Freenode for over 15 years. The only words I have for you is to "Go fuck yourself."

I have to admit I'm not up to speed on the current events, but this article is something that no company or organisation should be proud to have hosted on their website.

It just seems so cocky and immature. I don't think it's a good look for Freenode. Normally I would have thought Freenode is a respectable organisation, this article gives me a very different feel.

In case you missed it, last week the staff running freenode for 20 years were evicted by legal threats and the sudden change in how the network is run is because of new management.

The old staff are running https://libera.chat/

The comments on https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/516 are, well, an interesting read.

This is, like, peak delusion. Wow. Freaking incredible. I am so delighted that I got to ever see such a thing in my lifetime.

>Current global users: 68347

A week ago freenode had 78644 users according to netsplit. Bragging about tanking your user count by 10k in a week (and its still dropping, it's at 66715 now) is a weird flex.

Well, some people had different expectations last week (2021-05-19 7:54 UTC):

> -!- ChanServ [ChanServ@services.] has quit [Killed (grumble (My fellow staff so-called 'friends' are about to hand over account data to a non-staff member. If you care about your data, drop your NickServ account NOW before that happens.))] > -!- ChanServ [ChanServ@services.] has joined #foo

You mean, the same expectations.

Can someone better-immersed in IRC culture explain why the temperature is still so high? All the summaries I've read have amounted to nothing, and comments on all of these things just look like kindergartners shouting at each other.

Think of it this way: Joe Biden got elected a few years ago which made some people uneasy, but he didn't really do anything so they let it be. Now he's started actually interfering in government, adding more and more regulations, so all the Americans started migrating to Mexico, but then Biden put up a Berlin Wall to keep the Americans in. And wrote a blog post pretending everything is fine, like a Soviet disinformation campaign.

Slight change, at least in that case the __people__ would have wanted him.

It's more like if Joe Biden somehow appeared with a trillion dollars, bought the Presidency from the former President (Can the President even do that? Probably not, but it happened!) and went "Yeah I own this now." And then add in the rest of your comment and it matches up pretty well.

Ah yes, that is indeed a correction.

Andrew Lee formed a contract with the head staffer of freenode a few years ago, both of whom insisted that it was only a sponsorship, but did not release any further info, and that Andrew would have no operational/executive control over the network.

Now, it turns out that the contract was a sale of everything that could be had, and Andrew does want full operational and executive control.

Learning this, the volunteer staff resign as a bloc, and move to start an alternative. 250 projects (from Ubuntu, to PostgreSQL, SourceHut, the IRCv3 Working Group, etc) have all left freenode to head to Libera the volunteer network.

Losing all his projects, Andrew insists that "freenode is for FOSS" while at the same time shaming foss projects who want to exercise the freedom to choose their own chat platform and hiring a very dubious set of IRC "personalities" as staff.

The core of it is simply that the person who was head of Freenode staff at the time (an employee of Lee's, also) sold something to Lee that was not hers to sell. After promises from Lee to not interfere, the staff later found out this was not the case and left to create a new home for the projects hosted on Freenode. Whether those projects move is entirely up to them.

I’m not immersed in IRC culture but I used to hang out on Freenode a bit, and I think it’s quite obvious that top-down dictatorial decisions like the recent “hijacking” of channels for mentioning Libera (or whatever actually happened there) are toxic to community building. To the people actually doing the community building, choosing Freenode now looks a bit like founding a city in the shadow of an active volcano, with a capricious force immune to accountability who can (and demonstrably will) nuke your decades-old community structures without any meaningful warning.

FOSS is rife with stupid drama and I don’t think either “side” here is an exception, but the recent “purge” goes above and beyond. I would absolutely never consider trying to start a community there now, for entirely pragmatic reasons.

spend some of your millions or hiring a competent PR droid for godsake

at the moment every post makes you look more and more ridiculous

This is pretty deeply sad.

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