One week of Libera Chat

Yikes.

It's also a good use case for a good old .vcard, which already has semantics for plenty of contact fields, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some for IRC.

I fully expected some blockchain nonsense opening your link, I'm pleasantly surprised.

It seems like an interesting project but I wonder if it has any chance of reaching critical mass. The incumbents have no incentives to interoperate with such a protocol as far as I can tell.

Thank you for the clear description of the change. It seemed like this was a teapot typhoon, but I was not quite interested enough to lift the lid myself.

Yeah, I did not like the change but it was a tiny change so I agree with that it was an overreaction.

I thought they seemed like trivial changes as well, although not being a user myself I couldn't really form an opinion.

Still, it should serve as a wakeup call that the users really aren't in charge and that it can potentially suck. It's a taste of things to come whenever Discord decides to more aggressively monetize themselves for instance.

But apparently the conclusion was more that they should insult the devs on twitter and reddit instead.

As a colorblind user, the redesign decreased the accessibility of the application. Other users with visual impairments have reported similar issues.

I use discord almost daily and didn't even notice any changes. The UI is still garbage and it still makes random notification sounds with no indication as to why.

You also forget to mention they changed the font of certain UI elements to the same as the wordmark, namely the server name. The legibility of the new font is objectively worse than the previous one, though as long as it remains exclusive to the server name I agree, it's not that big of a deal.

also fonts were replaced and the background colors of mentions/reactions made less prominent

You have to install it as an app on slacks side. Some employers don’t allow that.

Forcibly how?

The same thing happened with our local linux user's group #cialug

The move to Matrix was not a community decision, which is why it's now fractured slightly between the different systems. Maybe someone will bridge them in the future.

I thought Matrix group sizes are limited to 1024 members. I can't google if this limit still exists.

Indeed but note that if you search for "libera chat" or "libera.chat" (I think they are equivalent, github's search doesn't recognize punctuation I think), it filters out the commits that don't mention both "libera" "chat" in the commit message, and only turns up those that do. In particular, github's commit search does not search diffs, only commit messages, so even if the diff contains libera.chat, it won't turn up until the commit message also mentions it.

Run badly written weechat scripts, a lot of them.

I do realize you're being sarcastic, but to answer honestly anyway: best way is to use Matrix and bridge to IRC. This allows you to use almost all Matrix functionality without anyone you talk to on IRC being affected by that really at all.

Matrix isn't anything like as resource heavy as Slack is I don't think (and to me more importantly it's an open, federated protocol), but to many IRCers it'll seem similar in both the good and the bad ways, depending on what they find comfortable.

Not aware of how to do any of those things, but if you want some of the _better_ aspects: Lives in a browser tab, connect from anywhere, etc, look into TheLounge or Convos as your client. I'm a major version behind on TheLounge and it's still fantastic.

I think you are getting downvoted because you're making points that I've already responded to you. Libera is a week old. It may have been started to get in shape before the launch and mass resign of a week ago, but give them time to create the org properly (which, again, is in progress, and was already a week ago).

> Why is the domain owned by an icelandic entity instead of the nonprofit?

According to the WHOIS information, the registration of libera.chat was made 2021-04-23. This registration was made ~1 month before the organisation Libera Chat was announced. As far as I can tell, the organisation could not have made the registration as a legal entity before existing.

Seeing the registrar is Namecheap, I guess someone made the registration and made use of the zero-cost Whoisguard service available. Perhaps the registrant's contact details point to Iceland. Some of my domains point to Panama, what gives.

> Where is the company registration number of the nonprofit (required to open a bank account - where will donations be held, etc).

As the OP title suggests, Libera Chat was assembled a week ago. There is no Swedish law requiring that an organisation registers, but as you suggest, it will be necessary to register a legal entity for financial purposes. Fulfilling the paperwork of registering a non-profit organisation with Skatteverket and thus receiving an ORG number generally comes after the fact of the foundation of said organisation.

Non-profit organisations in Sweden are real and protected entities, registration or not.

The non-profit isn't really live yet, this may be why. I'm sure the libera.chat staff wants do to things correctly this time-- they have learned the mistakes.

As said, the entity isn't formally created yet because bureaucracy seems to be slow. This will happen, I'm 99% sure of this.

>It is not clear who the owner is

The owner are the members of the organization. Look up what an Ideell Förening is.

> Why does a nonprofit organisation need this privacy protection?

This isn't about keeping public information entirely secret. It's about controlling where and how public information is shared. As an individual, you might agree to have your telephone number and your address published in a paper telephone directory, but you might not be so keen to have that information published in an easily scraped online service leaving you with obnoxious sales calls, and junk mail.

The same applies to a non-profit as well.

> the information of the org is a matter of public knowledge

Yes. But the what and the how is typically explicitly outlined by local laws.

Typically, you could direct yourself to a local tax office or public registry where you could search and look into basic information about a legal entity as defined / outlined in a legal statute.

You might find that domain names aren't required to be divulged publicly by law, and doing so is entirely at the discretion of the organization. (Example in the same vain: a public office isn't going to outright hand you a list of employees at a company if it's not legally mandated)

Whether there's a moral responsibility is a different question.

> These issues are critical for the trust that the libera.chat domain isn't suddenly going to be pointing elsewhere due to it not being control by the "trusted" org.

The freenode.net domain name isn't pointing to anywhere differently over the past period. It's also still very much registered to Freenode Ltd. That hasn't changed. What really changed is the control over the Ltd as the a majority stake in voting rights changed hands some time ago, and how that majority stake is now suddenly behaving very differently.

In that regard, DNS records aren't a definitive indicator for trust.

You have to amend that by (a) looking at who's represented in the board governing the non-profit, (b) look at documents such as yearly account balances and year reports which are typically legally mandated to be made publicly each year to see how the organisation is governed and (c) gauging day-to-day operations.

Last week, I made a remark that the libera.chat website was precariously terse in contact information or mentions about it's legal status or whoever was behind this initiative. It's assuring to see that the website has been amended over the past week with the "bylaws" section and the "about Libera" section with mentioning full composition of the board as well as whoever actively contributes to the organiation.

My personal opinion is that if you can find it in an English dictionary, it's an English word. It's pretty common, in English as it is in all languages, that the pronunciation differs from that of the original language from which the name originated.

Everything is a word. Most words are informal, and may not effectively communicate both direct meaning and cultural implications.

Formal words can generally be found in a dictionary, and when used in those contexts, are more likely to effectively communicate direct meaning.

Ly-bār’-uh

Leeb’-er-uh

Lee-bār’-uh

Lib’-er-uh

I have no idea, and I don’t see how it can be construed as unambiguous.

> but libera have people who know how to deal with IRC spam so it's not gone nearly as well.

That says it all really doesn't it :).