Hacker News Reader

Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that Libera is New Freenode and Old Freenode is rapidly dying a death, this whole episode has soured me mightily against Freenode as a whole. This should never have happened in the first place and the blame for it lies squarely at the OldFreenode/Libera admin's feet, not whichever outside actor took advantage of it. The admins are an "old boys network" - not chosen by the community, or elected, but simply in-group appointment - and while Rasengan is certainly a loose cannon, I have seen enough chatlogs to note that "the admins" are not innocent of power-tripping and favoritism either.

If I were starting an IRC channel for a free software project now, I would put it on OFTC, which has a real governance model with elections and - mysteriously - also manages to be drama-free.

View on HN

For a little bit of ancient history: I was one of the admins who worked to create OFTC. We all knew each other from Open Projects Network (which rebranded as Freenode).

I was barely in high school when I came up with the name OFTC and I registered OFTC.net. Very early on in the process of creating OFTC, I agreed with all of the people I was creating OFTC with that I would behave as caretaker rather than owner of OFTC.net while we figured out our governance.

Ultimately we came up with a governance model, and we also managed to convince Software in the Public Interest to take custody of the domain name and have it managed in accordance with the governance model we designed.

We started with a pretty great group of both capable and well-intended people, and one of the things we figured out was that if OFTC was going to be a sustainable project, it needed more sustainable governance than the project we were leaving.

One of the key people behind the very early push for OFTC to have a stable governance model later became a Member of Parliament here in Canada.

As the maintainer of one of the more popular IRC server implementations I know a giant chunk of the Libera Chat (formerly freenode) staff pretty well and whilst we may disagree frequently on technical choices they're decent people who were appointed based on technical merit. They pretty much didn't have any say in rasengan seizing control of freenode as Christel sold out the project and lied to the other staff about what what had happened for several years. After Christel was ousted they reorganised and elected teams internally and after the network switch have developed a governance system which requires strong consensus to avoid this ever happening again.[1]

OFTC and Libera Chat aren't as different as you seem to think. There is also a lot of cooperation between the two projects which has been going on for years. Solanum is being developed as a joint project and some staff members are involved with both networks.

1: https://libera.chat/bylaws

Hey Saber,

Thanks for everything you do on inspircd and IRCv3, I've been using the former for my network for nearly 15 years now.

I'm glad you find my work useful. :)

Apparently rasengan likes it too

    <@root> inpspiricd is a good project
    <@root> but we'll make it way better
    <@root> sadie is pretty good for a noob
    <@root> but obviously its time to take things serious

Yeah I heard that. It's GPLv2 licensed so he's free to use it (if he can even migrate his services database without corrupting it) but his lackies have been informed that they will be banned on sight if they try to ask for support.

But how else will that troglodyte and his minions call you a "noob"

Seriously it's 2021 who unironically still uses that term?

Apparently their solution was to not bother migrating the services database at all.

I ... just ... lolsob.

They basically just nuked the whole thing. I had my nick for over 17 years and was kind of clinging to it...just pathetic.

Agree. It would have been great if the old staff and servers would have merged with OFTC, but it seems this wasn't even considered at any point. Nothing seems to have changed in that relation. But oh well, just another network to connect to until everything has maybe moved off freenode.

It would probably be risky to drag the only other foss-focussed network into the legal battle.

Andrew Lee has shown that he is litigious, so why expose another organisation to that risk?

Fair enough.

Merging two networks is problematic. The same nicks and channels are owned by different people on either side; in this case the server software is distinct as well with different features supported.

Speaking as somebody who dearly loves both libera and oftc, I'm glad there are still -two- major networks for open source stuff.

The past couple months has shown that having too many eggs in a single basket can have unfun consequences, and my ideal future would be things being about 50/50 between libera and oftc so only half my IRC world is likely to be on fire at once.

A clear instance of NIH-Syndrome. Besides, admins want something to admin... Moving to a new home and loosing your status as the guy who is allowed to set the rules isn't very atractive to most... And I even understand that. There must be some motivation to do volunteer work, even if the actual motivation is irritating when actually voiced.

OFTC as far as I know is much stricter about on-topicness and such than freenode was, and Libera is a fair bit less strict than freenode was, so merging the old freenode with oftc would've required drastically changing oftc, which I'm sure no one would want.

>If I were starting an IRC channel for a free software project now, I would put it on OFTC, which has a real governance model with elections and - mysteriously - also manages to be drama-free.

I'm not sure if it's completely drama-free. During the community meeting on the future of FSF's presence on IRC[1], someone shared these logs:

https://irclogs.thegrebs.com/oftc/2021/05/01

https://irclogs.thegrebs.com/oftc/2021/05/03

https://irclogs.thegrebs.com/oftc/2021/03/30

I don't know anything about the context of these exchanges, but nevertheless they make me worry about their moderation policies.

[1] - https://www.fsf.org/events/community-meeting-on-the-future-o...

bagira/phanes is an extremely well-known troll, banned from multiple networks, who is likely clinically paranoid. Their moderation policies are fine.

He's also staff on Leenode now.

Hi, I'm bagira/phanes. The only networks I've ever been banned from are OFTC and Freenode, most of which is recent.

I admire your courage, anonymous liar on the internet.

I should clarify, I'm banned on Libera as they are banning all of the Freenode staff. I am not banned on the new Freenode network.

I should also clarify that the people who banned me on *(old) Freenode and the people who banned me on OFTC are the same physical persons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com