The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.
My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually.
Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.
We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc.
I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was.
Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well.
> We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust.
This is a half-truth. Some people (in a community I'm in) had implicit trust in the team that did such a great job running freenode, though not everyone. I'd say you already had some trust (just like some IRC software, I guess); and we're glad we chose to follow to libera.chat in the end.
I sincerely applaud focusing on positivity instead of negativity. You all are not putting in your current efforts because of FreeNode. That's long in the past and completely irrelevant to current efforts. You're all doing it to enable the wonderful communities that are out there and thrive on this fertile ground.
> We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.
This really helped. You focused on "getting life back to normal" from the get-go, looking to move forward instead of looking back at the anger and despair. This really helped to make Libera the home it always was within a matter of weeks. Really well done and thank you.
For me this mature and positive mindset only increased my trust in the team, there was never any need to rebuild it because none was lost :)
I agree that history is in your favor (and so does everyone else who moved to Libera), which is why it was a bit odd to not see Freenode mentioned at all. It's nothing bad, it was just a bit "hmm, I wonder why they did that".
You may want to make it a 'clean cut', but that's not how it comes off as. When I read it (as well as everyone in our Libera channel who commented), it comes off as sounding so terrified of the clown prince that the word 'Freenode' can't even be mentioned, and the huge lacuna looks hilarious (especially the parts about growth).
Yeah this is what I thought also, but fuchs's answer makes a lot of sense, and I have seen how that approach to looking forward really worked. But you're right, I did get that feeling too from the blog post.
Perhaps just a line about wanting to look forward and not dwell on the past would have clarified it.
I'm completely uninitiated to this topic but I'll give it a shot from what I've read in this and the parent comment: It seems like there's some denial about the past/roots of Libera, in this blog post. The "acceptance" phase is yet to come.
I've been part of a community which forked in the past and it was so cringe (at least to me) for one of the sides to keep explaining the origins and such on each and every presentation even 10 years later.
Anyone who knew Freenode knows the story already, and does any newcomer need to know, on that very blog post? I'd say no.
I wonder if they're afraid Lee might sue them if they did or something
Edit: Or maybe they don't want to drag the whole drama into this celebration again :) Libera moved on so quickly that even after 2 months it felt like everything was in the distant past and the community was just as it had always been.
But then it would have been better to not elaborate on the history. I agree it's a bit weird like this.
> This time, instead of this awful cycle of disempowerment of the people, it's time that the people of the world, together, plant the flag of the power of the people on the Internet. The internet changed everything and leveled the playing field. This cannot be taken away.
By his own manifesto he wouldn't do that, and he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite.
I'm not sure that's actually true. Clearly he very much liked taking power away from a specific set of people. The guy really likes constructing this narrative where he's some sort of free speech savior, but when you look at his actions the opposite seems true. E.g. during the switch to libera if you had any mention of libera in the channel topic on freenode you'd end up with all the channel operators banned and replaced with friends of Lee. That's hardly a pro-free-speech thing to do.
Just realized taht "/s" is a de-facto standard recognized almost everywhere in the international tech world - perhaps it would be viable to submit a RFC for it that can be referenced? Plenty of time before next year's April.
Thanks. JLG attributed it to politicians, I think, but I was (a) too lazy to find the source, but also (b) don’t speak French. I just didn’t want to appear to be taking credit for such a sharp observation.
> Hello (do not) @buyvpnservice from (dirty) @Kape_com
> I hope you’re enjoying the ride.
> You are now at KAPUT, you are booked until the final destination, FUBAR.
> Please fasten your seatbelts and return your tray table to its full upright and locked position.
I'll be honest: I have absolutely no idea what this means. It's obvious the @buyvpnservice is meant to be a play on "buy VPN service", but everything else looks like mindless mumbling to me. Could you explain it, please?
Given all the not-false-but-absolutely-misleading advertising I see/hear for VPN providers¹, I suspect they are all scammers or as near to as makes no odds.
[1] including in sponsored segments in the output of technical influenzas who don't help their reputation in my view by parroting the words themselves instead of letting the sponsor do it, or by being more choosy about exactly what they are willing to parrot
> it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.
Yawn. All I have seen is some angry techbro who can dish out an hour of time for an attorney to write angry letter when he does not have things his way. That is not to say this is a criticism of victims but rather a damn shame more people do not stand up to this nonsense.
Incidentally this 'notoriously litigious' individual is also being sued over alleged sexual-harassment committed by him at his previous company London Trust Media[1]. However not sure of the latest status given the sale(s) of certain companies.
IRC has inspired most major chat protocols, even as much as they've deviated. The fact that there are major networks with tens of thousands and hundreds of users that are running with minimal funding is a testimony to the protocol and the communities around them.
> But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.
Is it? I'm not on it every day, but I don't really notice a change. Isn't it just that it isn't growing, at least not as much as the explosions of web-based, proprietary platforms like twitter or slack?
Well first of all there was no "it" when it came to IRC 15 years ago. There were many huge servers that I never visited like Efnet, Quakenet, dalnet and more.
Me and my little group of hackers would also host our own, and link with other groups around the world.
I think it boils down to accessibility. Even back when I started certain people just couldn't handle the terminal clients so they used Xchat or Mirc. In school in Sweden IRC was actually often pronounced "mirck" because people would refer to the mirc client.
So when web chat came along, with mobile apps too, it just reaches a much wider audience.
So the ones who are left on IRC are old farts, and terminal junkies.
In 2004, top 10 networks had together around one million of users. now, it's around 150 000.
Top reason of this decline is gamers leaving the network. Quakenet and GameSurge had like 300K users together, now less than 10K (and probably mostly bots or bouncers).
Slower probably. I doubt there aren't new people getting into IRC. You could've made your comment back when I just got into it, and IRC doesn't really seem any more dead now.
Technically speaking, Libera Chat did start from scratch. It isn't their fault that another IRC network was in the process of imploding at the very same time and many projects and people felt the need to move to a less deranged foundation, therefore fueling the effective userbase of Libera.
Mentioning it somewhere is good for history, but it's confusing and meaningless info for most people. People don't care, don't know and would rather have something "fresh", also from an internal perspective in the org.
Do we have any reliable info on how freenode is even doing today? At least some accurate user counts? Who is using it? When the Exodus started, it seemed to turn into some right wing cesspool, but that was also more hearsay iirc.
It's had a bunch of guises as a website. For a while it was a blog filled with shouting about how removing the administrators will allow for real Free Speech and the future of everything will be freenode (and cryptocurrency, please buy our shitcoin maybe).
Someone was editing that wiki, but to be clear Pissnet is not affiliated with Freenode, though it was born from its collapse. It is a small but active community, and has a couple hundred servers.
It's very hard to explain, but it is a real network that currently operates as an anarchic sandbox for doing weird things with IRC software/protocols and just generally goofing around.
Pretty much every single active user is a netadmin. It's the network where you register a nick by linking your own server.
I'm idling in the top 10 channels, it's semi-active in that people pop in and say stuff, but there's no interaction. Most connections are from old bots, or from community pages that haven't been updated.
Yeah, I lurk in a community that _also_ has a Libera channel now, but they keep a bridge-bot in the old Freenode channel because all their old videos implore people to join them on Freenode.
It gets a bit of traffic, meaning those folks might otherwise be lost without the bot, so I understand it. It just sucks.
It seems to be alive. My client still connects to it. I saw a lot of trolling that seems to have simmered down now. I have had some odd/interesting conversations in the #freenode channel. 417 users in the channel at the time of this writing.
