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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

This should have been communicated better and for that I apologize. We published a draft policy update and worked with the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the community's wishes.

The policy was updated today to make clear that inappropriate advertising was unacceptable. As many of these channels were simply wildly unmoderated and closed, yet by protocol standards, "open" under a primary (#) namespace while in "official capacity", we felt it was best to redirect users to an unofficial off-topic (##) namespace.

I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that.

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> We published a draft policy update and worked with the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the community's wishes.

Who specifically are the "we" who published a draft policy update? As in, which people voted on it, and what were the votes?

Similarly, which people made the decision that advertising another network was "inappropriate advertising"?

Finally, having listened to the feedback from the Freenode community in the channel you made to do so, what have you heard from it, and what changes will you be implementing as a result?

Given that Freenode is a community that had, at least until recently, successfully self-governed for years, this is just in the interest of transparency, so we can each make a fact-based judgement about whether or not the policy changes were implemented in the manner best for the Freenode community, of which you are currently one member.

> to understand the community's wishes.

I think that "stop treating an old free software community shared by hundreds of other people like a property" would be a good start at understanding the community wishes. Right now, it seems to me that you're treating Freenode with a wrecking ball as a part of a demolition squad, and only stop to say "sorry about the new policies!" now and then before continuing to destroy it.

The things that are being implemented now aren't the community's wishes, they are your wishes, and they are hostile to the community that once inhabited Freenode and its channels.

You want to take the blame for something? Your selfishness and greed have shattered a beloved cornerstone of the FOSS community, leaving the people who created, nurtured, and provided for it since you were a schoolchild to pick up the pieces. This is not the fault of the former staff who have been steadfast for well over two decades, nor the fault of the relocating projects. This is your own mess. Do you really think people are persuaded by the blatantly transparent disinformation campaign we've been watching you traipse around the internet like a used car salesman with a "special deal just for you"? Your twisted self-serving half-truths hold no sway in the face of the numerous publicly available logs. Take the blame for the real issue; your comment is a specious facade of a personality. If you cared one bit about the cooperative community of creators you just trampled and steamrolled with an arsenal of lawyers that volunteers can't afford to match, you wouldn't have brought us to this point. You would have realized that freenode was a precious thing more important than your own ego and greed. Instead, your actions have spoken undeniably to the extreme contrary.

And now you do everything in your power to stymie the peaceful relocation of legitimate project communities simply trying to provide forwarding information in their topics during the transitional phase away from the epic disaster you created, while simultaneously slandering all of your victims? Did you put all those millions up your nose, or what? Hope you saved enough for some really good security; you just made enemies of an enormous number of the most relentlessly independent intellects in the modern world. You've furthermore sealed your own fate on a personal level: the only people who will have anything to do with you after this are the puppets mindless enough to believe your lies, and the leeches after your money and power. A cold, bleak existence indeed, but you've earned it.

A copy from my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286536

Look, I've found Freenode to be insularly run for the longest time and was no fan of the old staff. That said, this is bullshit. Being frustrated about having topics call out a new network is frustrating, surely, but you should not seize channels with no notification from their owners and move them to the off-topic namespace. You've hurt so many more than just the staff. Grow up.

Update: Think about the hours wasted in people's lives and important projects for nothing. Indeed it is your fault.

There is no disconnect or misunderstanding that I see. There is absolutely no way this could have been communicated that would have resulted in it being taken any better.

Freenode spent over 2 decades as a mostly open platform for tech and other communities where you could be kick banned for being a nazi or a spammer but where your community wouldn't be subject to interference solely to serve anyone's commercial interests. There was never any concept that it was disallowed to discuss the competition and if it had been expressed it would have been wildly unacceptable.

After you sprung it on people it remains wildly unacceptable and its the moment when you absolutely jumped the shark. If by next year you are left with ashes and dreams and you want to pick a moment where this became inevitable its this moment when you decided you could stop people from switching to Libera by censoring freenode. If you had a time machine there is no notes you could offer to your prior self save STOP!

How come you think you will have any community left? A chat network is entirely composed of and founded on the trust of its users. Trust that you have irreversibly severed.

If there is no trust, there are no users. Where there are no users, there is no community. Without a community, there is no chat network - people just migrate elsewhere and there's no trick you can pull to stop it. You have destroyed freenode and there is no recourse.

My question to you is: How did you actually think this would turn out? It all seems like a pointless exercise, and a person with half a brain should have seen this coming miles ahead.

In fact, he was explicitly warned of this exact outcome by me and undoubtedly various others, back when we were still hoping that this could be solved with diplomacy. I think it's in the published logs, even.

If anything removed any doubt about whether we should have moved to libera, this is it. There is no going back now, you've erased any trust that I or any project members had for "freenode".

Our channel was still moderated by all of our original project staff while recommending other members move.

To say that "many of these channels were simply wildly unmoderated and closed" to justify an indiscriminate automated action is ridiculous.

Communication wouldn't have saved you.

If you dream about decentralized IRC and the IRC Foundation the last thing you should do is to pick a fight against a new member of the IRC ecosystem.

There is no inappropriate advertising in discussing or moving between alternative implementations in the decentralized world. You should embrace it and build on top of it, as Fediverse does. You should build bridges, build common policies, setup possibilities for easy migration between servers, come up with the agreement on reuse of the same names for the same channels and so on.

So far the only version of the "decentralization" we have seen is you trying to take full ownership of the network on your own terms fighting against competitors, and really not understanding what you are doing. This is not how it works.

I am not sure if it is even possible to repair what you have broken now, but you can still try.

I think you should apologize for attempting to fracture and disrupt the choice of communication channels for 100s of open source projects instead. You are making life harder for maintainers, who volunteer their time to give people software and support for free. Please stop doing that.

You felt it was best? Did you stop to consider or talk with any other channel ops? Did you consider warning channels? Did you consider talking to ops? Did you consider any options that doesn't make you look like a butt hurt shit bag?

I wasn't convinced leaving freenode would be a good idea, i didn't want to fracture the community. But you've convinced me freenode is an enemy of it's users. I'll miss it, but I wont miss the user hostile dumpster fire you turn a once beloved network into.

Thanks for nothing!

> I am pleased to announce, the plan to destroy freenode has failed!

Let me guess: you'll keep trying until you do finally kill it huh? Looks like you starting to win this war already!

> This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that.

You shouldn't be blaming yourself, it was the best thing to do. Some people may have been confused over who the "good guys" were in this mess. By taking over all these channels you made everything perfectly clear. No amount of arguing could have made things clearer than your actions.

Considering how much of this mess is supposedly due to "poor" communication, don't you think it's high time to start working on that aspect?

While I might have given you the benefit of the doubt before, the long list of heavy-handed, "poorly communicated" actions, make you look more and more like an inept, authoritarian jerk.

> worked with the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the community's wishes.

The community's wishes were largely not in favour of this change, and your last comment on this in #freenode-policy-feedback was that you were going to hold off on these changes.

As far as I can tell, what was done was to shut down any channel that mentioned libera in its topic, whether or not the channel had decided to actually move to libera, in the process banning anyone lurking in the channel from the # or the ## channels.

For the channel I was affected by, we hadn't decided whether or not to move. Indeed, the most recent conversation may itself have been on the freenode side. It's clear to me that there was absolutely no attempt made to determine whether or not the channel was "wildly unmoderated and closed." Indeed, I read the policy statement to find what clause we could have violated and couldn't find anything matched.

If you were truly sorry, and you truly wanted to apologize, what you should do is restore the affected channels back to their original state immediately, and without waiting for anyone from those channels to come and grovel to you for restoration. However, it may be too late for people to believe your sincerity at this point. You have burned away so much trust with so few actions that it may be impossible to ever recover it.

As I've put in other comments, we hadn't yet decided whether to move from freenode to libera yet. But your actions have made the decision for us.

Maybe it's time to admit defeat and relinquish control of Freenode. I don't see how you can possibly salvage this.

I've been away from IRC drama for so long. The idea of people fighting over IRC channels, trying to strongarm maintain ownership of them is just so cringeworthy now (nuking channels that advertise an alternative network, holy hell). Sad little king of a sad little hill.

It's no different than any other similar drama, when ownership and control of a shared resource is contested.

You may find IRC channel dramas silly, but I used to run a Hackerspace that (back then) communicated mostly via IRC, on Freenode, and I'd be really pissed if I saw this happening then. Conversely, I find similar dramas over Instagram or Twitter handles silly, but that's because I have no attachment to these services.

And structurally, when a bunch of executives get into a dispute over company ownership, from the outside it often looks just as sad and silly as this IRC drama - except with more money at stake. But again, for some people on the inside, it's personal.

You'd be really pissed if you saw what happening?

This whole drama. Sudden mass resignation of volunteer stuff, corporate interest assuming direct control. We'd likely leave Freenode immediately, and... most likely migrate to one of SaaS chats. A lot of people in the community didn't like IRC and wanted to use something more mainstream. I was one of those arguing for staying on IRC, and the argument was much easier when status quo was a Freenode channel.

I suspect quite a lot of IRC communities exist only because staying is easier than switching, and if you disrupt their channel, they'll end up fracturing and migrating to Discord or Telegram or some other corporate network.

FYI, there are other IRC networks than freenode. It appears hackint has "hackers" as a focus, including hackerspaces.

Also FYI for others reading this, hackint forbids any Matrix bridging [1], which might exclude some communities, as it did our hackerspace.

[1] - https://hackint.org/archive#20181028_Matrix_Bridging_Sunset

Admins/Operators taking over legitimate channels and removing migration references to allegedly capture and unknowing audience doesn't seem like a "ceingeworthy" issue. The popularity/coolness of the medium shouldn't matter.

It seems my comment was misleading. I meant the admin trying to wrest/exert control, being jealous of "advertising" is pathetic.

Certainly the damage that idiot has done to all those communities is real and bad.

An empire of dirt.

Disclaimer: I haven't used IRC regularly in years, and I was not following the freenode drama.

What you've done here is going to result in some variation of the Streisand effect. People who had no opinion on this or were simply unaware are now going to be turned against you. This was an incredibly bad move.

You killed a good thing for no reason. Enjoy your empty shell, I hope it gives you all the comfort you deserve.

Yeah, you should have. I was on your side before you pulled this bullshit.

> I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that.

(Disclaimer: I have no stake in this drama, though I spent a chunk of my life chatting on Freenode.)

Here are some facts: through both your actions and the reaction of the volunteer staff, you have a huge PR problem. The kind of people that use IRC, that form your target audience, see you as the bad guys now. You will continue to receive strong pushback on anything you do with Freenode.

Since you're reaching out and apologizing, I'm going to tentatively assume that the issue isn't as black-and-white. I have no stake in this, and I know from experience that just because someone gets outraged, doesn't mean they're right. So, if you actually care about the community and the values it represented, stop doing anything you're doing and start communicating openly and honestly. If you want to be seen as the good guy, you need to start acting like one.

What that means is:

- Address all the accusations raised against you by the volunteer staff that recently resigned. No corporate bullshit, no PR filtering, just like one technologist to another.

- Give proper and detailed explanation for the actions you've taken. What you wrote here is an acceptable first paragraph. What you need is something like a post-issue analysis[0]. Describe what you wanted to do and why, step by step. Then, what actually happened. List the mistakes, lessons you're taking from them, and concrete steps to prevent that from happening again.

- Give proper and detailed explanation for your future plans. IRC isn't a company, and communities are not made of employees and subcontractors. If you want to keep people around and have them trust you, you have to communicate openly, in advance, give people chance to voice feedback (even if you aren't going to act on it). You can't count on network effects, because IRC is already such a pain in the butt that half of the people on it are secretly looking for ways to ditch it. That's why the other half is so afraid of this drama - killing Freenode communities is an existential threat to continued use of IRC in general.

- You're a for-profit operation that took over a non-profit one. You need to be very clear and very detailed about outlining how you want to keep the profit interest and community interest separate, and actually follow through on what you promise.

- Want to score some points with the people? Put some resources into improving IRC as a protocol and set of technologies. Note that you're starting from position of "bad guy", so whatever you do, it cannot have a single string attached, lest people will (rightfully) call it out as "embrace, extend, extinguish".

Regaining trust takes time. You have your work cut out for you.

(And, if you actually are a bad guy, then just be up front about it too. People will be able to see it anyway, and continuing the charade only wastes time of everyone involved.)

EDIT:

Want to do a quick thing to show some good will? Fix [1]. Give them control of their channel back, and let them finish their migration.

[0] - See e.g. https://github.blog/2020-03-26-february-service-disruptions-... for the level of detail I'm talking about.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287039

> You can't count on network effects, because IRC is already such a pain in the butt that half of the people on it are secretly looking for ways to ditch it.

How so? I really like IRC for what it is. It's much quicker and higher-density than Matrix. Try opening a hundred channels in Element and see if you can still stay on top of what's going on :)

I am genuinely curious: Was this at least partially in response to the bots over the weekend spamming "JOIN #LIBERIA ON LIBERIA.CHAT"? Because that probably didn't come from libera staff or even from the libera network, for that matter.

No. It's a response to people trying to leave. The spam bots wave were probably done by the same people doing that for ages (the pedo spam and so on).

You can't answer that question any more than I can. This is a question for Andrew Lee.

I actually can, because (1) freenode mostly had good anti spam software since a while and (2) rasengan and his staff clarified it’s about people moving.

Imagine using PrivateInternetAccess and trusting this guy with your logs.

To repeat some advice I once got: Find something you're not good at, and don't do that.

You're not good at operating an IRC network. So, don't do it. Do something else with your life.

I've been trying hard to keep people from making rash decisions about moving, since I have read enough to know that there is some amount of duplicity on both sides of this split, and we were playing a waiting game for the truth to come out and help us make a more informed decision. I do not support morality police, and all we had to do was wait out the momentum. There was some censorship on libera, but what you have done here has made all of my efforts to aid Freenode totally indefensible. You have made a grevious strategic error.

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