
Leaving irc.perl.org - mdom
https://sungo.wtf/2019/07/05/leaving-irc.perl.org.html
======
simias
Both Perl and IRC have suffered heavily from a massive loss of popularity over
the past decade, I can't say I'm too surprised that irc.perl.org is going the
way of the dodo.

I really like IRC and I'm really sorry to see it go, and I still have an irssi
running full time on a handful of servers. Freenode is basically the only
server that manages to maintain its user base, but even for them it's not
really growing anymore. I used Mozilla's IRC server pretty heavily when I was
learning Rust and it was great (the community is really helpful and well
moderated), but AFAIK they plan to get rid of it in the near future. Can
Freenode single-handedly keep IRC afloat? For how long?

Clearly these days it seems that people want something a little more advanced
than the pure text chat of IRC, and the federated architecture is not seen as
a killer feature anymore.

From my point of view the centralization of the web seems to be unstoppable at
this point. You can argue all you want on HN but people will still ditch IRC
in favor of Discord or WhatsApp. I was talking with a bunch of geeky people in
their early 20's the other week and for some reason I mentioned IRC and about
half of them didn't even know what it was. All of them used Discord and
WhatsApp however.

~~~
CalRobert
I've been trying to get back to IRC, but the clients seem dated for the most
part. Do you have recommendations for something with a UI that feels
reasonably modern?

~~~
simias
Not really, I'm generally fine with "dated". I use irssi with a config file
that hasn't change in a decade.

Not that I think that you're wrong for wanting a more modern experience, it's
clearly one of the main reasons IRC is losing traction. Some things can be
solved client-side by, for instance, auto-fetching some URLs to display image
links inline (although it could cause privacy concerns) but you also have
limitations caused by the IRC protocol itself.

For instance IRC has no notion of "replies", if you want to quote somebody you
generally copy/paste their comment and put your reply at the end. That's
clearly primitive and makes it hard to find the original context.

~~~
jrockway
> That's clearly primitive and makes it hard to find the original context.

Maybe. I am positive I miss 99% of replies (in "threads") in Slack. I always
felt like the feature is designed for the case where you've already decided
something, but people want to show up and bikeshed it, so they get a little
area that nobody can see where they do that. Maybe that's not what it's meant
for. But when I want to reply to someone, I say "@whoever, regarding foo that
you were talking about earlier..." I think this is the IRC way of handling
that and it seems correct to me. The reality is, sometimes you've missed your
window to contribute to a conversation. No tool is going to change that.

------
mdom
I think we tend to forget that running infrastructure is more than just
keeping the servers working. Initially i thought 'oh maybe i could help with
keeping irc.perl.org alive', but my motivation quickly went away as I kept
reading the article ...

Thanks for all the work, sungo!

------
em-bee
i'd like to thank you for years of selfless service to the community. (i am
not a perl user, so this means the FOSS community as a whole)

we all benefit from work like yours, even if only indirectly. it is people
like you that make the FOSS community what it is.

thank you, and all the best on your further endeavors.

------
floatingatoll
I miss the chat social culture of the 90s, and all of my IRC nostalgia is
really just for that. ICQ, IRC, it was all different then. After the 90s we
had the blog era and that was fine until Google and Facebook indexed and
monetized searches and networks. Now there’s Slack and Discord, which are
still too persistent to be truly safe but have regained much of the
undiscoverability that makes small communities possible. Perhaps someday we’ll
regain safety, and then it will be like 90s IRC but with good UX and more
wisdom about the harm tech did to us in service of feature creep. Good luck
and be well, sungo.

------
dijit
if sungo is reading this: I'm happy to take over or help the new opers.

I've got some experience in IRC administration (Myself being in a similar
position as sungo in a similar sized network).

The centralisation of IRC to places like OFTC and Freenode leads people to
think that all IRC networks are similar to those, I'd rather help keep it more
spread if possible.

That said, I'm sad to see another IRC operator burn out (since, it really
sounds from his words that he's burned out with comments like "who cares, let
it rot"), I wonder how we can support people better who are in "solo"
positions like this in general.. :\

~~~
em-bee
curious, why do you think separate irc networks is worthwhile?

if they are FOSS community then they should be all the same. of course,
different channels, and different people, but all with the same shared
ideals...

~~~
Crinus
What if the people work on FOSS but do not share the same ideals?

~~~
em-bee
working on FOSS is the shared ideal. granted, this argument is aiming for the
lowest denominator, but i believe that the idea that code should be FOSS
licensed, for whatever reason, is already a good common ground.

moreover, those differences won't split along irc network lines. you choose
the irc network based on where the project hangs out. for debian that would be
oftc, which ironically was created because a number of people didn't like how
freenode was run at the time. but anyone who was involved with debian had to
move, regardless of where they stood on that issue or on their FOSS ideals in
general.

if you work on multiple projects, you may be forced to be on multiple servers.
no choice in the matter and different ideals have no influence here.

------
Hendrikto
TLDR:

> I put myself out there, worked with people I'm not really fond of, and all I
> got for it was to be the target of everyone's rage and bullshit. No one was
> willing to contribute towards change in a constructive positive fashion.
> There was no reason to continue putting myself out there, to continue
> putting effort into services that no one else was willing to improve.

------
jpswade
Why does Perl warrant its own network?

Why not join freenode instead?

~~~
daneel_w
There already is a well-populated #perl channel on Freenode. Unfortunately
it's a socially unwell place that in a way has been taken hostage by a small
tight-knit group of regulars - users like MST, Grinnz and pinkmist, to name a
few - who go about managing and policing the channel in not only unfriendly
ways but also in very unwelcoming ways in relation to new and casual visitors.

(ps. I'm a regular of the channel since the late 2000s, and can confidently
state that its environment is today unhealthy and degraded)

~~~
em-bee
i am not sure it's appropriate to name names here. it doesn't really help the
discussion. (is there a way to alert moderators (dang)) to have the names
edited out, or is downvoting the only option?

~~~
daneel_w
These are anonymous IRC aliases, not real names. What I've mentioned isn't a
secret or in any way outing or revealing; keep in mind that #perl on Freenode
is a _public_ channel, and anyone who's frequented the channel for more than a
few weeks are familiar with what I described. If anything in this is sensitive
it's the way newbies and "casuals" are treated there, and that it's allowed to
go on without intervention from other Freenode staff.

~~~
em-bee
they are identities, and it's not clear at all if they are anonymous or not.
either way, the names don't really add to the story, so why take the risk?

------
sweetbits
ironman perl also followed the same path:

[http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/](http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/)

It has been down for some months now.

------
rurban
Good move, thanks. A very unhealthy place where you are bombarded with
hostilities by very juvenile folks, who generally have no idea what they are
talking about. I left it years ago.

