Needless to say, Freenode kindly decided for us whether or not we should move to Libera for good.
The would-be empire is tightening its grip, and more & more channels are slipping through their fingers.
You can buy hardware, trademarks, and DNS, and stuff.
YOU CANNOT BUY COMMUNITY.
YOU CANNOT BUY GOODWILL.
How much did they try paying people? I haven't received any offers, but I will happily idle in some freenode channels for a monthly fee.
I'll tell you where to put your money.
First off, I am not affiliated with freenode or libera. I am just an unrelated guy who happens to use IRC. I am not offering any money to anyone for any IRC related things.
Secondly, you claimed that it is not possible to buy communities or goodwill. This does not match what I have witnessed in life. Communities get bought all the time, e.g. Facebook buying Instagram. Goodwill also gets bought all the time, often by making a giant donation and then running a giant PR campaign to let everyone know about the good deed. Distributed organic communities like freenode aren't immune to this, as I showed by pointing out that I, a long time freenode user, would be willing to accept payment.
This is false. Communities get sold successfully all the time (thing of tech giants buying up unicorns or whatever). But doing that with a (predominantly) FOSS community was definitely doomed from the start.
We see fewer of those developed now precisely because it forces providers (free or paid) to behave well or else be easily abandoned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c., do not want that, for obvious reasons.
https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd...
Alleged crown prince of the Joseon Empire. Which hasn't existed for ~110 years, and is based on an ennoblement by one of several contenders for the current head of the former imperial family, so it's an even weaker claim than most pretenders of former monarchies have.
In this whole thing, one thing in particular is interesting to me since freenode was not just an IRC network, but an IRC network with a focus on FOSS projects: Freenode / rasengan seems to insinuate by his actions that a project does not have the right to choose an official realtime communication forum for itself; that it is freenode which brings the users to the project channel instead of the other way around.
HN should remove the downvote button, but the hivemind might lose its cohesion then
Hijack means removing those privileges from someone else and assigning them to yourself.
I'll not go into more detail as existing threads here cover it far better than I could.
In Reddit terms, imagine the Reddit administrators coming to your subreddit, deleting the moderators and then installing their own.
Administrators always had this power. Sometimes, this power was used out of necessity. But given how much this power was used in FreeNode in the past week, a lot of the community has lost faith in the administrators.
But yeah, if you control the server (the nature of being an administrator), you can do these things rather easily.
To be slightly more exact, the admins suing those powers properly for the past couple decades have been pushed out by the new guy, and said new guy has already abused those powers so much in a single week that nobody will ever have any faith in him
But that's probably an anachronism, given the age of IRC.
Now you've moved to another place but have no way to leave a signpost or redirect. And anyone who doesn't get that memo through some other means, will land in a confusingly-named place that looks official but is precisely the opposite.
So, instead, the various community groups are being forced to stay on freenode?
And the post-structural turn was like 50 years ago.. they have jumped (off) the clue train.
And the channel I was in wasn't +m until freenodecom decided to hijack it and make it +m.