Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC network
devever.net
devever.net
Buy an IRC network, fine. If you want to use the domain for something else, just turn off the servers and do it. There's no need for this absurdly complex, Rube Goldberg-esque process of pissing everyone off, then impersonating services, then dropping the services database entirely, then partitioning the network and joining people to a new network, and pissing more people off, and passive aggressive global messages, and...
I cannot wrap my head around what they're even trying to do at this point. I've been on IRC in some form another for the majority of my adult life (including running my own IRC network for many years, starting out with some SE/30s), I'm quite tolerant of random stuff going on, but I literally cannot find any sense at all in what the new owners are trying to do.
It's like they had a great party going at their house, a few people started leaving, and then they started waving around a gallon of gas and a lighter, threatening to burn the house down if anyone else left. And people, reasonably enough, continued to leave. So, i guess this stage is the "And they lit the house on fire, but moved all their friends to the shed and pretended it was still the house" part of the analogy...
Surely Freenode's downfall was Kafkaesque?
Your analogy sounds right but I'd like to add the shed is full of oil soaked rags. And the host is still holding that lighter.
this allows him to blame the "botched" migration for the resultant failure and loss of users/channels/projects, instead of people wanting nothing to do with him (or the dregs of IRC that form his new staff)
1) Libera is catching Freenode.
2) Freenode has x users/y servers
3) If Freenode adds n servers it will gain n*x users.
IRC is mostly dead. It's not like there is huge marketing opportunity or any way to monetize this. We are not in the 90s/early 2000s with random mIRC people joining...
There is no "vendor lock in", and the only "vendor lock in" - the user and channels - were now effectively deleted.
So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?
I use it every day, and I use it for work, admittedly its not freenode but an internal server. I find IRC great for not having the focus of the general masses because of how disappointing the general masses really are.
It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.
I don't understand why people don't migrate even if it means they don't like commercial alternatives like Discord.
The ability to just drop in, ask a few questions and log out is great.
If I join a even a medium sized Discord server, I suddenly get tons of notifications unless I manually change the settings for the server (God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that)
Also, a lot of communities grew in and around IRC chats, which means a lot of people with the habit. With the usual Relevant XKCD [2]
No voice, no proper file transfer and can't even see messages when you're offline meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.
A survey of IRC users would likely indicate that none of them care about it, and it's part of the appeal of IRC - I can only judge people by how they type and what they communicate. It's more or less impossible to tell anything about age, gender, nationality, etc on IRC unless someone cares to disclose it. It's far harder to mask anything like that in voice as opposed to text, so while you may consider it a fatal flaw, I consider it a feature. It's one of the better borderless sort of protocols out there for communication.
> no proper file transfer
What's wrong with DCC? Still works, last time I've used it. However, with a lot of the various free pastebin/image/etc hosting services out there, I don't see nearly as much of a need for that as I once did. DCC is a rare thing now, as opposed to a common way of shuffling files around as it used to be. So, again, based on "I literally make a living on IRC" sort of experience with it, it's not just a big deal anymore. Plus, an awful lot of people on IRC overlap with "I have my own hosting somewhere."
> and can't even see messages when you're offline
Bouncers exist, work well, and consume very little CPU or RAM. You can fit a freebie ZNC bouncer in the Google Compute Engine free tier (micro instance, 1GB transfer outbound), and might pay a few pennies a month extra if it's a really busy month. However, most channels are also entirely useful if you're only connected part of the time. I mostly use a bouncer to catch any PMs - I don't read scrollback unless I've been mentioned, and it works fine.
> meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.
Again, this only matters if you care about that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have more or less rejected the modern "everything mobile" ecosystem with the constant stream of distracting notifications, and that IRC doesn't overlap with my phone is a feature.
However, there are plenty of ways to make mobile clients and ZNC interact such that you effectively have a modern style communication app, on a phone, with IRC as the backend - if you care to do so.
Yes, I'm aware I'm an older style greybeard at this point, but the very things you list as "ancient tech" are part of what makes it appealing. It's lasted for 30+ years so far, and I expect it will comfortably outlast most of the modern messaging clients, because it does what it does exceedingly well.
As for the rest, they work well on other services and you can simply completely turn off notifications if you feel it distracting.
It's just IRC doesn't have modern features when one wants.
Still wondering why people need to stick to it other than just because especially even after such a hazard.
The only benefit of IRC in my opinion is that sign ups are optional and might keep you slightly more anonymous but the again, most people would stick to a same nick anyway.
(1) It requires so little computational power on the server or clients that it's a lot more environmentally friendly than some bloated pig of a modern chat "ecosystem." I can still use old hardware easily with it. And, unlike most of the new chat stuff, it runs on low power ARM boxes nicely.
(2) It's lasted 30 years, and the Lindy Effect would argue it will remain relevant far longer than any of the hip new platforms of the year.
(3) It's not centralized. Discord is centralized. Matrix is less centralized, but matrix.org is still pretty effectively centralized for most cases. IRC is distributed, has been so, remains so, and it's utterly trivial to start up new servers.
Clearly, you see no value in it. And that's fine. Plenty of people see value in it, and... as one of them, honestly, a lot of the new people who show up for 5 minutes and then leave when nobody answers instantly are pretty annoying anyway. There's several decades of established culture, and it's quite easy to find writeups on the proper way to interact with IRC, but a lot of people don't bother and get irritated and then leave. Fine.
You appear to be making a bit of a "Other systems are better because they're new!" sort of argument here, and not everyone shares that viewpoint.
But Element, running on a modern machine, is using almost a gig of RAM. Hexchat, running on an older Pi, connected to quite a few networks, has expanded to almost 100MB.
It's not in discords interest to do so. More notifications leads to more user activity which leads to more VC money (and indirectly to more nitro income if users who would have forgotten about the service get drawn back in and eventually convert).
An open protocol allows decoupling the client and service provider which defuses these misaligned incentives, which is likely one reason this current wave of messaging services are against ilthem.
IRC doesn't need to do that. It just does what it needs to do without all the BS.
This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior."
IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources.
It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration.
Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations).
If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486.
Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing.
I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.
There was no value behind Freenode, except for the community itself (you), and it makes no sense for Andrew Lee to buy it, except for the name.
There was never a commercial sense to IRC. In fact this is one of the things I really love about it. It's so cheap to run it can be run entirely for free by some enthusiasts. Some sponsors too, sure, but the costs of running it are never huge.
> So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?
And even that is debateable. I feel like this is the main point of confusion for most sane people involved in this whole thing. Who knows what Andrew Lees motivations are here.
Cheers!
https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
"A year ago [2015], we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default."
Now obviously things may have drifted since 2016 but it definitely sounds like - at some point - WhatsApp was based on the Signal protocol.
"Over the past year, we’ve been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. [...] As of [Apr 2016], the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end-to-end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol – a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible."
> It's a new genesis for a new era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom.
Here's my theory. Dude's got some sort of "spectacle complex". You know that feeling when you leave a movie theatre after watching something like "I, Robot" and you have that kind of inspired feeling that you need to revolutionize the world through robots or whatever? In a normal person it lasts about as long as it takes to walk out of the movie theatre, then you're reminded you're back in real life.
It's kind of like this vision of creating something great, a new hope, futurism fetish sort of thing. It's the kind of "visionaries" that always talk about how they're going to revolutionize something without having any clear steps for how to get there or even a clear idea of what the "problem" is.
It's meant purely as sensationalism, and as an appeal to some weird emotion that I still don't really have words for.
Anyway he wants to be the leader in this grandiose movement to... something, I don't even think he knows what. Almost as though he's doing people a favor by doing this.
Completely misguided, and I doubt he'll learn anything from it. Clearly he lives in his own world in his head.
But to me it feels more like "I'm using those fancy words I don't care about because I think that's what you want and how I can lure you".
It is totally disrespectful to the intelligence of it's users.
Like the Disney song says: Let It Go.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for that. Even for those of us who are directly involved in it, it doesn't make much sense at all.
By this point, the remaining explanation is "Andrew went completely unhinged after his attempt to fulfill his childhood dream of owning Freenode went to hell".
I'm an outsider and wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
<root> jane_doe: hint the freenode network is its own sovereign state
https://freenode.net/news/taking-irc-further#canceling-cance...
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/IRC_channels
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-and-gnu-move-official-irc-chann...
Since he pointed the same domains at a new network, that means now a random user of every channel, upon reconnecting to the network, has now become the sole operator and is now free to register said channel and take control over it.
So it's not even that this allows random people to register channels; this is literally appointing a random user as the new owner, for each channel. Oh, and if that user quits without registering anything (and any other users joined in the interim), the channel is now opless and orphaned and cannot be moderated, registered, or otherwise controlled without admin action, unless all the other users leave.
So if you owned a channel on the old network with more than 10 or so users, there is a ~0% chance you'll be able to own it on the new one without help from the admins, unless you got extremely lucky and you were the first user to reconnect among the people in your channel, or unless whoever won the oper lottery is nice enough to give it back (and this being IRC, probably half the users are idle bouncers, so there's a good chance they'll be unresponsive, if not outright malicious).
This was actually an issue for Libera too, as people switching their Freenode configs wholesale wound up creating channels that didn't exist yet that they'd been a member of on the old network. But this time it's global, not just individual users changing their config, so it's infinitely worse.
Ask all the other users to leave is not enough! I tried to protectively reregister my channels on the new Freenode network. For a particular channel, the server doesn't give me OP even when nobody's there!
Apparently, the new IRC server implementation is different and the status is somehow cached. The channel remains orphaned until the channel record expires and gets dropped by the server. It means before the expiration, nobody should join the channel otherwise the channel remains orphaned.
It really sucks.
> 8. During this time, however, Plaintiffs became concerned with Lee's mental wellbeing and his ability to lead LTM and PIA. Plaintiffs noticed that Lee was a habitual user of marijuana and cocaine, and would frequently abuse drugs in the office in front of his employees. Lee often combined his drug use with alcohol and would act erratically.
> For example, he told-LTM 18 employees that he wanted to hire a female candidate simply because he wanted to have sex with 19 her. Similarly, Lee expressed his desire to set up a "modeling agency" in the Hollywood Hills that 20 would actually be a front for illegal prostitution (i.e., the "models" would be paid escorts). To that 21 end, Lee circulated a memo to male LTM executives advising them to make sure and wear 22 condoms when having sex with the "models." Lee went so far as to state that he planned to move 23 LTM's offices to the Hollywood Hills mansion once the "modeling agency" was set up.
Say what you will about botched copy & paste, but I very much lol'd at this.
> 103. Lee would frequently use cocaine in front of LTM's clients, colleagues, certain employees, and trusted advisors. Plaintiffs Ken, Jane, Michael, John, and James all personally observed Lee's pervasive drug use.
> 104. Lee would regularly leave cocaine and marijuana residue in the office. Ken, who . was typically the first to arrive in the office every morning, would find Lee's leftover food, drugs, and alcohol bottles on work stations, and would clean everything up before other L TM personnel arrived.
> 105. Lee made a habit of barging into Ken's living quarters in the middle of the night to play loud music, entertain random women, and use drugs.
> 106. In or around February 2015, Lee wanted to hire an assistant. After interviewing a particular female candidate, Lee-a married man-insisted on hiring her because he wanted to have sex with her. Ken and Park talked Lee out of it, advising Lee that his requested conduct was wrong and could cost L TM in a potential lawsuit. Lee retorted that he did not care about any sexual harassment suit or potential liability for LTM because. he would pay any settlement out of his own pocket.
> 107. Lee also stated that he wanted to start a "modeling agency" under the L TM umbrella called "Breakout Agency." Lee rented a house in the Hollywood Hills for the "models" to live in. Before renting the house and starting the agency, Lee circulated a draft memo to the male LTM executives advising them to make sure to "wear a condom" when having sex with the "models." The draft memorandum was outrageous and, like the incident above, could form the basis of a potential sexual harassment suit. Again, Ken and Park were forced to talk with Lee and insist that he refrain from sending such communication.
> 108. Lee further indicated to LTM personnel that he planned to move the company's workspace to the house in Hollywood Hills, where they would work alongside the models. All LTM personnel recognized that moving the company would create an unstable and unprofessional work environment; and Jane in particular, as one of LTM's few female employees, was not comfortable with the rampant sexism that this move presaged.
> 109. Making matters worse, Lee also had an ongoing relationship with a mistress that he brought to company functions and the LTM offices, despite people knowing that he was married. Lee met his mistress through a company offering female companionship for money. Lee abandoned his wife and newborn child to spend time with this woman, and their relationship was toxic. His mistress was physically and verbally abusive towards Lee, erratic and unpredictable, and caused Lee to act over-emotionally.
> 110. The two fought on a daily basis. And this happened in front of LTM employees, including Plaintiffs. For example, a few days after the February 2015 Meeting, Lee and his mistress had a violent altercation at a club in front of Park, Ken, James, and other L TM personnel. His mistress became infuriated and violent when Lee did not pay attention to her to attend to a conference call concerning L TM business. She punched Lee in the face, causing Lee to lose a tooth.
TLDR: Money can't buy class, yo.
Every time I read an article on Freenode I hear her voice in my head, in a thick African accent, "What is happening now?"
Someone very confused had the resources to do what their confused mind told them to.
This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look.
Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all.
If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent).
If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2]
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210612224853/https://nitter.ni... 83
[1]: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/ad...
[2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bri...
I would encourage anyone to get involved in real open infrastructure through efforts such as https://opendev.org. Yes, resources are donated, but by a range of providers who have a vested in interest in what the community is producing. ARM64 has been a great example; Linaro providing hardware resources, which has enabled services to perform functional testing and build ARM64 Python wheels for publishing for a number of projects. This is a rising tide that floats all boats. No need to send a resume [2] and you can start contributing immediately [3,4].
It has been good run with IRC but I forsee moving to Matrix as the medium-term future and there's plenty of opportunity for others to get involved with that (building home servers, admining, writing bots that provide the services we current provide on IRC, doc updates, community building).
[1] https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq
[2] https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities
[3] https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/
[4] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-conf...
1 - I trust there was good reasons, the Zuul folks are great, but it means potentially another chat client for me for channels I use infrequently at best
For all/nearly all of the open infra projects the freenode mess won't be as bad, as we migrated en-mass to OFTC fairly quickly after it kicked off.
1 - From the email: > "I noticed that the rooms which are not bridged to IRC work the best as everyone get the same features."
The point of being 'open' isn't to prevent implosions, but to facilitate continuity when, for example, a proprietary commercial interest attempts, say, a hostile takeover.
This will hint at where the money came from, and what's up with the exceedingly poor judgement.
Karpeles Labs??
He is not involved in any legitimate venture, he's involved in Andrew Lee's wallet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044256
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155
(It wouldn't surprise me if some other portion of that money had a causal role in causing 'rasengan to get the blessing of one of the pretenders to the throne, though.)
...which is apparently a related but different tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_salicina
[...]
It's literally open season for anyone who wants to impersonate someone else, steal their nickname, or take over someone else's channel."
That's astonishingly short-sighted thinking, even by the already rock-bottom standards of the current Freenode management team.
Instead, I am insanely curious about why they are doing such a large amount of very inflammatory actions in a short timespan!?
They must for sure know that they will 100% certainly destroy their platform. Why are they doing it anyway?
But the new thing will have fires appear anyway.
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Freedom's holdout. Astounding.
Serious question: why? I'm sure there exist perspectives where Lee is not the villain, but they're hard to imagine and I'm really curious.
So they take the network with the few FOSS teams that still support them, and then basically wipe everything. Meaning every chanop permission is now in the hands of whoever happened to be the first idler that happened to auto-reconnect to the channel in question.
Really nice way of dealing with the teams that were still supporting you. No I'm not one of them. But I sure would be hella pissed if I were running a project channel on it.
Rot in hell, more like.
(I haven't really used irc in maybe a decade, but I think I'll go work out what software I should use to chat on Libera Chat... Is scary devil monastery still a thing?)
[0] https://libera.chat/guides/clients [1] https://hexchat.github.io/
Last remaining 1000+ user community channel seized by Freenode staff
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength?
He only attempted to take operational control last month.
It wasn't Discord/Slack/etc, but for an awful lot of people on it, that was a feature. Text. Lightweight. Simple. Doesn't require a bloody Electron app with hundreds of megabytes of memory to connect.
irc.libera.chat is the new Freenode.
(edit, had wrong irc network)