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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's so clearly a terrible move. In some respects, IRCcloud is like a metastasized cancer, growing in user count and connecting to every ircd, then moving all that communications traffic through a central service. That's antithetical to the idea of self-hosted, private chat networks which irc allows for. Allowing irccloud makes me think "should have just used discord".

Edit: Okay, on reflection, I was being harsh and... incurious, maybe hyperbolic. Being able to freely connect to a service with whatever client you want is important, maybe especially so for Freenode. I'm still concerned with IRCcloud's effect on the "ecosystem", if you will.

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And here I was thinking the beauty of IRC was that it's an open platform people can connect to however they like.

That's part of it, and may be the most important thing for Freenode, but is the self-hosted and non-centralized part really lost on HN readers?

You do realize Freenode, Libera, etc, all the big networks, are not self hosted, and that all traffic goes through them, right?

"All traffic" only goes through them in aggregate, because they are separate. You're saying they're not "self-hosted" because... why? They are independently hosted, that's the same thing. So, I realize there are several big, but separate networks that are part of the makeup of the ircd space. IRCCloud is bigger and spreads across lots of them, including many of the small ones.

By your argument Facebook is self-hosted because they host it themselves.

There's only one set of Facebook implementations.

I think smoulder means "it's a documented protocol with competing client and server implementations" when they say "it's self hosted".

There's only one Facebook. Other groups and individuals apart from Freenode host their own ircds, so I consider ircd to be in the category of self-hosted things, even if sometimes it is a large "self" like Freenode.

I detected a hint of sarcasm

You are correct. It's about choices, and the fact of irccloud not having the same choices a proprietary protocol/client vendor would have available to hurt users.

> That's antithetical to the idea of self-hosted, private chat networks which irc allows for.

It seems odd to hold both the “we should use de-centralized (or less centralized) systems” and “users MUST use these systems and no others” at the same time.

People find utility in IRCCloud - I know I did (when I used it) as it helped me keep up + provided a good mobile experience on top of that. IRCCloud existing doesn’t take away from those who wish to connect directly or use their own bouncers.

It does take away from users who want to directly join a private channel. As soon as a channel is joined by an irccloud user, that channel becomes transparent to irccloud, a big, opaque, centralized service who is a giant attack surface for broadly spying on irc servers.

Unfortunately, the privacy model of an IRC private channel is only as private as the privacy precautions taken by members of the private channel.

Someone could run a ZNC bouncer on their own server, and have it connect to Freenode. Then, they could connect to their own bouncer using the IRCCloud web client - effectively gaining access to Freenode via IRCCloud, and Freenode would never 'know' IRCCloud is 'listening' in on the channel.

That's a good point.

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