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Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

We also got a number of channels totalling a few hundred names hijacked from chanserv, because of 'libera.chat' in the topic. No contact, nothing. We aren't even a F/OSS project, but a hackerspace. 10 years of a chanserv registration, gone, just like that.

The irony is that we were planning on a progressive transition to Libera via bridging to make sure everything went smoothly for everyone and that we didn't split the community. Now, well, there's nothing to do but just move cold turkey.

Great job, Andrew Lee.

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This is exactly the situation DiscFerret has found itself in. We were bridging to guarantee a smooth transition... within hours of changing the topic to point to the new chat, they took over our channels.

This scorched earth policy is only going to make them look petty and childish, and cost them in the long run.

I'm sure all of HN feels for the hassle you and others are going through. Please consider thoroughly documenting your experience publicly, permanently, so we have a record of these harms.

This is certainly an historical situation.

There's not really much more to say - I posted the logs (not much) on Twitter. They're pretty similar to everyone else's.

https://twitter.com/philpem/status/1397453537936805895

I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you transition away smoothly? Going cold turkey means a chance of leaving someone behind on freenode.

Edit: I see that I have not expressed my point clearly. Freenode knows that it is dying already. Allowing a smooth transition wouldn't stop that or heal that. A downwards trajectory. Like a dictator usurping the throne, the new management wants to gulag everyone who even slightly disagrees to not leave any dissenting voices on the network. This way those who stay might stay for good, instead of only for the smooth transition.

Realistically, most channels are moving to Libera and the people are remaining are people who haven't noticed yet. Going cold turkey will just give those people a WTF feeling without being able to do anything about it, and eventually they'll also leave since everyone else left.

Not to mention that the stuff is on top of hackernewes - anyone idling / currently on vacation / in coma can quickly figure out what is going on.

One reason could be to not destroy any goodwill that was left by some members. Hijacking channels sends a clear signal that Freenode can't be trusted to provide a stable and secure network.

> I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you transition away smoothly?

Because that transition window (which was planned for O(weeks)) could've been enough time to win back our trust and make us decide to stay on Freenode. I was honestly starting to think maybe we had too much of a knee-jerk reaction with the decision move and was willing to reconsider, but now, well.

I'm not up to speed, could you expand on what happened?

See these links:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27208422

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207734

Freenode was “acquired” a while back, people were looking on it dubiously.

Then last week (or the week before) volunteer staff resigned en masse saying that the new owners were planning on taking control of the project’s direction. A number of projects using freenode for chat started looking at alternative just in case.

As GP notes, this looking around was done in the heat of all the resignation, but was not necessarily a done deal for all projects, after all nothing has changed yet.

Today, freenode highjacked / locked hundreds of channels mentioning libera (the alternative network set up by some of the resigning staff) out of nowhere, proving that the network most definitely could not be trusted anymore.

Here's a summary of the situation up until about 8 hours ago

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...

8 hours ago, around 700+ single-hash channels were assigned to a placeholder account, redirected to double-hash "offtopic" channels, and their topics locked. Ops were removed too. The trigger for this seems to have been the string "libera" in their topics.

Global Liberation Army will never recover from the Scunthorpe attack.

> I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you transition away smoothly?

Retaining any user at all on the network?

I haven't used Freenode in a long time, but I would absolutely under no circumstances establish a channel there now. Not for some grand principled moral standpoint, but simply for not knowing if I'd get to keep it.

Ah, but you retain more users if you prevent the users from seeing that anything is going wrong!

How’s that working out for them?

And they'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that pesky internet!

What if this is a sneaky way to recruit non IRC users to a new network? I'm saying this because I want to try it out.

Towards what goal? Most already useful stuff is going to libera but that may not be useful to you. What type of new community do you envision being born there?

This is a key point.

People forget that IRC works like any other product: at the end of the day, someone "owns" the customer (in the sense of having the strongest relationship with them).

In this case, it's pretty clear it isn't freenode.

The actual relationship is owned by the OSS projects and their teams. If they kill the freenode link as an official channel, people shrug and use the new link.

The entire calculus on freenode's side seems to be stuck in the 1990s.

> The entire calculus on freenode's side seems to be stuck in the 1990s.

I'd say their calculus feels stuck in the 2010/2020s, while IRC is (fortunately, it seems) "stuck" in the 1990s.

All of this is actually pretty good publicity for irc.

But the bet people to share knowledge will be gone. The channels will not be of nearly the same quality. People may stick around not realizing that, but when the usefulness goes down they will leave.

To keep any form of goodwill. I personally did not care for this IRC drama (since I have not done enough research to take any side) but now I do. Now I will never join a community at Freenode. I do not want to use a server ran by immature jerks who hijack communities as retaliation. They are under no obligations to keep running it but then just shut down the server instead of acting like dicks.

Gulag is a poor analogy. Freenode can't imprison people or force them to stay on their service. Nor can it control the spread of information and opinions. Lee might own Freenode, but he doesn't own the front page of Hacker News.

In terms of effectiveness, this is perhaps more analogous to the boss screaming, "You can't quit, because I just fired you!" It doesn't keep anyone from leaving, but it does create unnecessary drama and make them look bad.

On the other hand, if Freenode had done nothing, it wouldn't have stopped some communities from leaving, but the flow might have abated all by itself. Like my mom used to say, "It won't heal if you don't stop picking at it."

>I fail to see a reason why freenode would prefer that you transition away smoothly?

The actions here are of an abuser seeing their partner is considering leaving, beating them harder as a result, locking them out of the house, then using their victim's devices to contact the victim's friends and tell them that everything is actually alright and the victim has decided to stay.

Consider the argument, "I fail to see why a domestic abuser would prefer that their victim leave smoothly?"

> Freenode knows that it is dying already.

This is a highly charitable reading of the situation, and in fact, Lee has put out a post claiming (more or less) that he's trying to do all this for the FOSS community.

From where I sit, it's abundantly clear that Lee thought he'd be able to come in and "own" the IRC network that hosts the plurality of FOSS projects' chat communities, and when they all started leaving, he lashed out and tried to stop them in the classic way an ego-driven control freak does: by imposing draconian restrictions, punishing those who dare to defy him.

The whole world still runs on IRC and not everyone realizes how fickle IRC users can be.

FreeNode is big, but Discord / Facebook / Twitter are far larger, by orders of magnitude.

The main issue with FreeNode users is that they're "elites" so to speak. They're the old guard, the ancients. Pissing off 1000-children is different from pissing off 1000-grandparents: the grandparents have connections and powerful friends so to speak.

Given the "age" of these FreeNode communities and users, I bet that the typical FreeNode user has more internet-influence than the typical Twitter user.

I've used IRC for thirty years (edit: typo 20) and been part of immeasurable communities. The whole world runs on ideas I typed on IRC.

On the one hand, I'm being facetious but on the other hand I'm telling the truth and I prefer there is no record of it. I helped boot strap fake internet money when there was no market, too many projects to name, too many technologies from IRC DCC bots, to running an ebook ftp personal fileserver ad for years...

IRC is the protocol I love most and how I talk to _my_ friends, they live around the world. This is not the first time and makes my 5th IRC move DALnet-EFnet-Chatchannel-Freenode-Libera

I don't use twitter I think it's stupid. I've said this before and been downvoted into oblivion.

IDK ya'll HN is weird like it forgot how the internet really works. It's disappointing really.

Forgot? Or are too young to have ever known? ;)

The internet growing on IRC doesn't mean that the internet runs on IRC – those are two very different things.

Quantity vs quality.

Discord/Facebook/Twitter users are discussing gaming and pop culture. IRC users were discussing how to build OSS software and communities.

Obviously its not as absolute as that, and Slack and Discord are both making inroads into what was once IRCs territory of coordinating small groups of remote thought-leaders, but looking at the raw numbers doesn't tell the whole picture of IRC's influence and importantce.

Yeah no. IRC was often jokingly referred to as “I Repeat Class” because it was an unproductive distraction from study.

Freenode, OFTC, and probably others that I can’t think of off–hand are a bit different from general–purpose IRC networks. They are geared strictly towards providing a place for users and developers of open source and free software to talk about the software. I’m sure you could distract yourself from your studies by going to #nethack or #erlang or #emacs, but most of the conversations being had there are much more productive than any discussion of pop culture.

First, discussion of pop culture is not inherently unproductive, especially if you are in a creative industry. Being productive about over-engineering an automated deployment cluster isn’t inherently more valuable than learning about the rise and fall of trends or the animation style of popular shows and games.

One of the biggest channels on freenode/open projects back in the earlier lilo days was #bay-oh, which, while populated with a bunch of proto-devops people, was almost wholly social.

Even purely social interaction is productive and valuable, the career success of many people after the first dot com crash relied on being friends with everyone they knew from Ironport or whatever.

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