Adapted from a comment I made in the wrong thread:
It's hilarious that rasengan is complaining about Libera "fracturing the FOSS community".[0]
For example, #newsboat members decided to move by June 5th, and we've been deciding between OFTC and Libera. Then this happened:
20:05 --> freenodecom [freenode-placehol] (www.freenode.net) (~com@freenode/staff) has joined #newsboat
20:05 -- freenodecom has changed topic for #newsboat from "We intend to migrate off Freenode. What do you prefer: OFTC or Libera.chat? Details here: https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1643" to "This channel has moved to ##newsboat. The topic is in violation of freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies"
20:05 <@freenodecom> This channel has been reopened with respect to the communities and new users. The topic is in violation of freenode policy: https://freenode.net/policies
20:05 -- Mode #newsboat [+o freenodecom] by OperServ
20:05 -- Mode #newsboat [+impsf ##newsboat] by ChanServ
20:05 <@freenodecom> The new channel is ##newsboat
20:05 <-- freenodecom (~com@freenode/staff) has left #newsboat
Great. Now none of us can speak on #newsboat, making coordination to switch much harder. New users might get confused and join the wrong channel operated by a hostile party. The community is more fractured now.
To everyone with a freenode channel: whatever you do, do not mention "libera" in your channel topic. That's the trigger for this action.
Libera is run by the same staff as ran freenode for years, until Andrew evicted them last week. We care about foss and if foss projects want to move from freenode, we will support them.
What's to stop, in 10 years, what happened to Freenode happening to Libera? Is there something concrete in place, or is it on trust? On trust is what happened with freenode.
Who runs Freenode and how it was managed was never really 100% clear, until now. On the other side, this is Libera:
> Libera Chat is a Swedish nonprofit organisation, feel free to read our bylaws. The organisation is run entirely by volunteer staff who are the members of, and have equal voting power in, the organisation. Libera Chat’s purpose is to provide services such as a community platform for free open-source software and peer directed projects on a volunteer basis.
So, as a common FOSS organization, Libera is governed by a non-profit instead of owned by a corporation. That step feels like a pretty good stopgap from enabling the same thing to happen again.
I'm glad to see the Libera folks _finally_ holding themselves accountable to some form of documented agreement (the Bylaws), though sadly it took a major, harrowing event like this. One of my major gripes with the old Freenode staff has always been how capricious their judgements were and how insular they were with each other (e.g. measurably treating the requests of admins in the "in-group" differently than the "out-group"), and having no definition of what it means to be a "member of the community". I'm still a bit dismayed that there seems to be no set of guarantees of due process offered to non-member network users, but I guess this is a start. I've thought about commenting on their Github repo but I'm afraid of the retaliation as the staff seem like an extremely passionate bunch.
And perhaps this is just an argument for a truly federated system, like Matrix. Rather than submitting to an operator, run your own infrastructure and federate with everyone else.
Or, better still, pick one but create channels on both - the other one just to tell people where the primary channel is. Or even to carry discussion on both simultaneously, until you reach the decision.
Do that to prevent a hostile party from doing it before you.
That's what happened during the decision-making process, but then one got shut down. Now new users joining #newsboat will be directed to ##newsboat, which is completely out of control of the #newsboat ops. They won't be directed to libera.chat.
> (I mean, it's an IRC channel, the servers might diverge in features and reliability but there's usually not much difference)
You'd be surprised. This actually strengthens the point you're making elsewhere: people can, and will, debate such choices endlessly. It's because they care about the community, about making things better for themselves and for everyone. This is textbook bikeshedding - there's no ill intent, just scope insensitivity. Debating important issues and debating trivialities takes the same amount of effort, and expands to fill available time of participants.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but the one I know works is to put a time limit on such issues, to prevent them from consuming more attention and resources than they deserve. That is, if consensus can't be reached in a short time, a preset choice must be made by default. If you reach that point and get strong pushback, you take the other option.
FWIW, there is some merit to raverbashing's argument. I know first-hand that maintaining a community of enthusiastic techies is just like trying to herd cats. They can, and will, debate the pros and cons until heat death of the universe. I know because in communities I've been part of, we could and did debate options endlessly - until someone with enough time on their hands just unilaterally implemented one and then everyone begrudgingly accepted it.
Some degree of "do-ocracy" may be necessary - when you can't get the people to decide, sometimes the best option is just to announce a choice and see if people follow you. If they put up resistance, you can revert the choice and pick the other option. But it usually turns out that the ones most eager to continue debating are the ones who actually care the least, and will accept whatever decision was made.
It's not bike shedding to make sure interested parties all get heard. My community didn't switch before this cluster fuck because we were waiting for someone who's important but only online for a weekend every few weeks or so. Just because you don't care, doesn't make it unimportant.
Because leaving X% of the channel that relies on Matrix bridges behind, rushing admins of bots etc, and making people feel like you didn't even give them a chance to say something about it are all great things for a community.
This has been the major reason why #haskell didn't try to move more forcefully.
We'd like to get some of the old logging bots moved over, etc.
We have some number of users who connect from tor, from matrix, or from webchat that simply can't move right now. These are things being looked at from the libera.chat side, but that work isn't done.
I very much value those users being able to continue to ask and get their questions answered.
That said, we used to have like 3-4 server ops lurking in the channel, and 15-16 channel ops that were active on the server. We just don't any more. This makes me rather concerned from a spam perspective.
On the other hand, there are < 80 people in the channel now, so perhaps spam is less of an issue now that we're a much smaller target.
It's hilarious that rasengan is complaining about Libera "fracturing the FOSS community".[0]
For example, #newsboat members decided to move by June 5th, and we've been deciding between OFTC and Libera. Then this happened:
Great. Now none of us can speak on #newsboat, making coordination to switch much harder. New users might get confused and join the wrong channel operated by a hostile party. The community is more fractured now.To everyone with a freenode channel: whatever you do, do not mention "libera" in your channel topic. That's the trigger for this action.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210525231635/https://freenode....