Ask HN: Good IRC Channels? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good IRC Channels?

6 pointseimrine6 comments

I used to have a great time on Freenode, sometimes. I appreciate the atmosphere of freedom which was there, I have never seen freeer internet community in terms of number of allowed topics. Also it used to have a broad list of CS groups full of really smart guys who are great even to read silently. But Freenode is dead for 2 years, there are few connections but no discussion anymore. Where are those boys? I don't believe they all migrated to rich services with cool emojies, ability to report something to moderators and proprietary protocol.

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Many of the users from freenode went to Libera [1]. Many have also moved to Discord and other communities. Finally, a lot of people have simply become older and many other things consume their time and thus use more specific communication mechanisms like sourcehut/gitlab/github issues etc.

A lot of what was difficult in chat of the past (irc isn't easily e2e encrypted and 'always on' connections aren't the default nor is there a default ability to connect to the same 'user/name' instance from multiple devices) has been solved by these proprietary protocols (signal, discord, telegram, etc.)

IRCv3 solves a lot of the cool emojies issues, e2e encryption issues (i mean makes it easier to solve), etc., but then IRCv3 isn't widely supported across clients and a standardization for the encryption hasn't been created...

But again, there are still significant users on IRC, whether on libera, dalnet, rizon, freenode, or the many smaller networks that absolutely have thriving communities - and I encourage you to check them out. It's a great place to meet some of the coolest people and make lifelong friendships!

[1] https://libera.chat/

I thought all that migrated to Libera ... or is it too strongly project-oriented?

I dread it but there are a lot of groups on Discord of all types.

I don't like an idea to have an account.

You can make a burner account. Discord will also try to get you to verify yourself with a phone number which some servers require, but you don't need that for most places

Well I did get an email from Discord about how a group I had joined had been shut down because it was considered a "hate group". On the other hand, my evil twin was investigated by the F.B.I. over things that went down over Freenode and when an attempt to entrap him failed ("... I understand that this is a major priority for the FBI in my country so I can't help you") they still managed to kick him out of the group.

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