The End of Freenode | Hacker News Reader

The End of Freenode

ariadne.space

62 pointsgerikson37 comments

While self-hosting sounds fun, I think part of made for example freenode so fruitful is the concentration of projects. It's easy to pop over in a different channel when you're already on the network, and concentrating similar projects makes it likely that you find something interesting.

Yes, networks have a networking effect (duh).

First, its about discoverability - on many networks you can see in what channels someone is in by simply /whois'ing them - allowing you to find other channels you might be interested in.

Second, if you want to create your own channel - you will most likely choose a network where your target audience already is. Creating a channel there is usually easy - /join a channel that does not exist yet, and often register it with the services with /cs register.

Setting up your own IRC Network is not that hard - but you need a server you can run IRC on, pick one of the many IRCds, pick a services package (Atheme and Anope are the most popular). And then you need to administer that network. (Which often means NOT doing anything.)

Creating your own IRC Network can be fun, and you can learn a lot of interesting things. But it is also time consuming. Creating a channel on an existing network is usually 2 commands away.

how much effort it was to administer Freenode? They seem to have lots of volunteers doing something.

I think it's one of those things where 99% of the time there's not much going on, but you need enough volunteers for that 1% when things go sideways.

> It's easy to pop over in a different channel when you're already on the network

Most of the current irc clients make it possible to have multiple server connections simultaneously, so jumping between servers isn't a problem either.

I see a 4k user drop on the past 24h on https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ I wonder if that was the #python ban hammer

OFTC numbers look stable for the whole ordeal OTOH

Libera now has 2/3rds of the Freenode users, that number I think was 1/2 a couple of days ago.

I wonder when will the penny drop.

Uh, sounds to me like the penny has dropped already...? Or do you mean, when Andrew "rasengan" Lee will understand he fucked up and kill Freenode? I think that will take at least a year or so, probably more, and he'll probably try to sell it on first.

Yes, that's what I mean, when will it drop to rasengan. Though maybe it won't take a whole year.

It was probably the irccloud ban: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495358

Yes, it was the irccloud ban. I await the Matrix ban, as Matrix is around ~20K users.

For a long time the freenode debacle will complement my examples about why open protocols are important.

If you make it an example, I hope you point out how IRC being an open protocol (RFC 1459) is a saving grace for the Freenode community. (I feel that's not quite clear from your comment).

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1459

The erstwhile Freenode volunteers would have a far harder time setting up Libera IRC as an alternative if it wasn't for IRC being an open protcol and how that enabled the emergence of existing open source ecosystem of servers/clients/libraries/bots/...

In the same vain, FOSS projects who lost their home have a choice: setup a shop at an alternate IRC network, or start their own IRC network (self hosted). Which is still preferable to being wholesale forced towards adopting a different protocol altogether. Everyone still gets to enjoy the same affordances provided by the IRC ecosystem such as it is, that doesn't change.

Of course, that doesn't exclude debating the merits and limitations of the IRC protocol in it's own right, or it's future roadmap and design. But I feel that's a separate discussion, removed from the Freenode diaspora: I would argue that the latter is a discussion located one level up.

I guess this may not be the right place to ask this, but I have not seen any "explanation" on why the company who bought freenode is killing it and I am really curious why would one buy sth and then kill it.

Over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495358 are some hints what Crownprince Root Lee is up to (or up against):

> ratww 15 hours ago [–]

> There have been some weird messages from the dude lately, the latest was

> > "<root> The community on IRC is made up of some of the smartest, most beautiful people in the world. It's been an honor to be here with you all, friends and foes. We've been waiting for IRC's return for quite some time -- and for you, we deliver. A new genesis is taking place uncovering a new era. Freedom, and the people, shall rise to power. Freedom is not dead, it lives, here, with freenode."

> > jamincan 15 hours ago [–]

> > This sounds like the message you'd hear booming over loudspeakers in a shelled out, dystopian regime.

I'd say he's lost his way.

It's unclear to me that it's a deliberate effort to kill it so much as reshape it to suit his desires, and either genuine ignorance or absolute lack of care about the damage done to communities previously on there.

It would, after all, be relatively simple to just destroy the system with godlike power over it, unless you have some other goal.

I would speculate, from the multiplication of freenode-related services and the few attempted partnerships, that one goal is to monetize/reshape freenode's community into not being solely IRC-centered. A bunch of his pre-freenode actions seem focused around monetization, so it seems to logically follow.

A bunch of the actions seem to just be petty, though - as cited in the last thread about freenode, he klined all of irccloud, presumably because irccloud posted something in support of Libera chat, and was quoted as saying "fck irc cloud". He's apparently been klining anyone who submits things he dislikes on the freenode HN-alike.

From their point of view, it's everyone who is resisting this takeover (or simply deciding to leave freenode and avoid drama) who is killing freenode.

It's not a company, it's pretty much a single person, Andrew Lee. And Lee appears to have some narcissistic tendencies.

I'm not an IRC person, so I have no idea myself about any of these things, but I notice that this blog post links to an earlier post where the author speculates about what's driving these changes:

https://ariadne.space/2021/05/20/the-whole-freenode-kerfluff...

The DALnet is still around though

The current drama around Freenode is completely disproportionate to what its importance in 2021 is.

Sure, IRC was huge back in the day. Today it isn't.

That's just like, your opinion, man. The tens of thousands of users that migrated to other networks feel differently about the matter.

Tens of thousands of users is not actually that large these days for a worldwide chat app though? I don't know exactly how many concurrent users apps like Slack or Discord have, but I'm willing to bet it's at least two orders of magnitude more than ten thousand. Let's not even compare it to the real giants like Whatsapp and WeChat.

Most of those Discord and Slack users are nontechnical and not the target for a developer-focused IRC network. It's like discussing IDEs and then saying "but I bet many more people just use Notepad to write quick notes".

IRC is not developer minded

You're free to not engage with content you find irrelevant to you. You're not in a position to judge what is relevant for others.

You are pretty young, right?

IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.

> You are pretty young, right?

No.

> IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.

I don't understand why when I make a statement about the overall state of something, there's always this one guy who replies "oh yeah, you're wrong because I something, something".

I understand every person is a universe and to them their PoV is the only thing that matters, but we need to be a little less egocentric when analyzing overall trends.

I didn't claim there's not a single person using Freenode in this thread. In fact I've also used IRC from time to time recently. And I can compare how it was 30 years ago and how it is today. Today, it doesn't matter. The regulars who were there decades ago are still there and literally using IRC to their last day on Earth. And the rest have largely moved on. And thing is, the regulars don't make a self-sufficient community on their own.

You can be all like "them kids and their Slack, Discord, etc." all you like and these services DO have short half-life. What you fail to realize is that IRC is not an exception.

To me, IRC is an exception because it has no inherent accessibility problems, like all the modern chat platforms have.

Here is an experiment: Find a blind person and make them join your favourite discord or slack channel. Make them participate for real. Not just login and logout again. Now, do the same experiment with IRC.

10 years ago, this phenomenon was called digital divide. These days, people like you call it the inevitable future.

I like the concept behind IRC as a protocol with a set of independent networks, clients.

You see, I'm not arguing what we have today is better. In many ways, it's worse, and I'm sick of proprietary HTML-based interfaces and this endless flood of pointless features and monetization attempts.

But there's the fact: a social platform lives or dies based on the "social" aspect of it. This is why Facebook is making the billions. Not because it's the best, but it has the most people.

Maybe I am just different. I never liked the mainstream. I never liked too well known festivals. My experience is, if almost everyone is there, I dont want to be.

Great. But let's roll back to my initial point that the drama around Freenode is disproportionate to its relevancy. The fact you don't like too relevant things kind of isn't a counterargument.

I dont know how you want to measure relevancy. The topic is likely relevant to those which are still using IRC actively. Since you seem to imply in your messages that you have moved on and left irrelevant technologies like IRC behind, I guess it is save to assume it isn't relevant to you as much. However, standing up and claiming "this drama" (with a derogatory tone) is irrelevant smells a bit of egotistical behaviour. Of course it looks irrelevant to you, and apparently the world has to agree with your view since you are a member of the majority.

Why are you wasting your time talking here, when Facebook has billions of users?

I don’t care what happens to this site.

From the site guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate

The major problem is not that your opinion on the state of things is wrong (which it can't be, it's just a value judgement). But such comments do not belong here, regardless of if others agree or not.

I have no idea how these quotes apply to what I said.

So does that make email the only exception? What about HTTP? or FTP (now sftp)? Are they exceptions too, or maybe they're not actually the same, and are just base protocols?

There are exceptions and probably in a parallel universe IRC is all the rage with very few changes.

I think the issue is that HTTP and the web platform are so flexible, that we've stopped evolving dedicated protocols and just slap everything on HTTP and then eventually use mobile and desktop apps to cover the rest.

This also allows companies to build walled gardens where you register with them, they provide the service, and they control it. Which obviously has a strong investment/monetization incentive, compared to an open protocol like IRC.

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