I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff (opens in new tab)

I did this many times, usually on the verge of a burnout. Almost every time, except for the final one, it helped me identify the pain points as well as the highlights, find ways to fix the underlying issues then get back to speed and regain satisfaction from work. I think it's a great way to gather more insight about yourself and your workplace. Try drafting one now especially if you do not intend to leave :)

> Yeah, I can't recall ever drafting and saving/keeping a resignation letter from a job (volunteer or otherwise) that I didn't intend to leave...

Writing letters that you don't send is an effective, practical, recommended way to manage anger and other emotions. It's even better than posting angry rants on the Internet. :)

I worked at a tech company where the management decided to move the offices to a new office park built on top of a toxic waste dump. We all printed off our resumes and left them on the laser printer, that was the end of that

Nevermind posting it on the internet, indexed or not.

OFTC is run by the OFTC board (of which tomaw is a member) on behalf of Software in the Public Interest, who originally organized it for Debian.

According to the current freenode people page, tomaw is head of staffing, projects and communities and also the overall project lead in charge of the other heads.

Edit: here’s the staff as of 23 Apr. tomaw is still there today, the rest are gone, including fuchs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231451/https://freenode....

Pretty sure it was edited, that's why I used the quotes. I could be wrong though so I'll modify mine.

Shouldn't your terminal handle this even if you were using netcat to chat? If the client was injecting newlines that would end up being rather unpleasant when pasting chats into a different channel.

You could access IRC via Internet2? I always thought Internet2 was limited to accessing smaller educational networks networks like Merit, JANET or CERN.

I'm a brazilian and I watched it. There were two major IRC networks in Brazil. The older and bigger with more users was Brasnet, the younger, smaller and with less proficient users was brasirc later renamed to redebrasil.

IRC in Brazil was mostly born on university campi but, by the second half of the 90's it quickly attracted teens who simply wanted to chat. Our version of the Eternal September.

Most used OS at the time was win9x and most used IRC client was mIRC. Actually, most users didn't know the difference between mIRC and IRC. So, it was very very unsafe for illiterate users. Self-reproducing mIRC scripts and people trying to fool others with netbus and the like was extremely common.

One day, by the end of the 90's, both major networks joined. The service quality went deeply down. Operators of big channels lost their status, illiterate users flooded the network and traditional brasnet channels got filled with users from redebreasil who weren't used to the established netiquette. To make things worse, redebrasil had advertisements and such ads went together with them when they joined brasnet.

That day was one of the saddest days of my life, that day I lost my operator status on #programacao on brasnet, I was 15 and getting that status was no easy task. It was the day I stopped using IRC in Brazil.

The thing just went downhill from there. Getting IRCop status was reason to act arrogantly, attacks were rampant and winxp came along been not much safer than win9x. Netsplit was common because of the attacks, bots tryied to fool people to shady and phishing sites, there was no control to stop abuse from IRCops...

Then, by the beginning of the 2000's IM became more popular, then social networks. Actually MSN messenger and orkut popularity were major blows in brazilian IRC. New people buying computers to get connected no longer even knew about the existence of what was once a major entertainment communication medium.

The quality of the service didn't improve, and users started migrating away from it. It commercially devalued, ISP's didn't want to host it and, in 2007, brasnet was closed: http://www.brasnet.org/2007/05/era-uma-vez-o-irc-brasileiro....

Nothing, this happened in Europe as well. IRC attracts this because of how the model works (although it has long since been mitigated through chanserv etc), if no one is in a channel and you enter it you are the owner. So if you can boot everyone else off of the network you can take over the channel.

I wouldn't say it's particular to Brazil but I can try to guess the biggest contributing factors. Brazil is huge (so lots of script kiddies) but it has only like 3 major ISPs (attending big cities). Also ISPs here have a lot of leeway on QoS matters, even after net neutrality laws.

A combination of Brazil being one of largest countries, while also being non-English yet retaining its linguistic identity (people using the Internet in Portuguese, so they don't have get lumped in with USA communities), and a dash of loose law enforcement, makes things happen there that are noticeably not the generic Anglo/USA Internet

HU3 HU3 HU3 BR

I don't think it's particular to Brazil.

It is not just IRC ports. Back when I wanted make my own MMO and went shopping for business ISP, I noticed one of the contracts I read even wrote a long list of all possibly IRC related stuff, they would ban you if you had: irc server seevice, irc server software irc client software, irc bots, tools to make irc bots, mirc scripts, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember (this was around 2007)

Yes. Communication software that can be set up by anyone with some technical skill is bad. Communication software run by centralized corporations is good. No drama possible when your entire chat system can be nuked with a press of a button from some anonymous "moderator".

That's for network-level drama, sure, but in my experience most of the day-to-day drama was at the channel level and anybody can start a new channel.

And back in its heydays there were enough big IRC networks that you could just hop from one to the other if the admins became a nuisance. Then you had an eggdrop bot synchronize both channels during the migration, good times.

Discord is a centrally controlled walled garden.

The whole point of Matrix is decentralisation and federation - which is closer to the spirit of IRC than what Discord is.

Also, Matrix is a protocol, not a centralised service like Discord.

> Discord is probably the closest spiritual successor to irc

Uh, some locked down corporate please-read-your-terms-of-service closed-source crapware?

That's pretty much the exact opposite.

Discord is a private company, IRC and Matrix are protocols.

Compared to mobile IRC clients? Element is a big improvement.

Discord is out, as others have mentioned, for being controlled by a single corporation.

Discord is also eventually consistent. It is centralised and offers weaker consistency guarantees than Matrix.

How do mobile clients for Matrix suck ?

Strange how often these FOSS dramas tend to end up removing the creators of the projects and replace them with people friendly to large multination corporations that pay lip service to the "correct" political fads.

A lot of politics, whether you're talking electoral politics in a democratic nation or just the drama in an open source project, amounts to little more than factional signaling and the narcissism of small differences.

The political modus operandi of open source, to the extent that there is one, has generally been to opt out of existing structures and try to create new ones, rather than altering or dismantling existing ones.

Perhaps can say the same for organizations of animals even. I know there are politics amongst some groups; don't know enough to state if there is always politics within any group of animals or not.

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/201...

I see what you mean, but people used to be angry about women not having the right to vote or the vietnam war. Getting outraged over grammar issues or bathroom policy is kinda new.

Yes, but if you are among mature adults, you can discuss opposite politic views without one of your friends leaving the dinner table and slamming the door.

Which apparently internet people have a hard time to handle.

I have parties at home with feminists and machists, cryto speculators and communists, vegan meditators and frat guys bbq body builders, atheist hedonists and muslim minimalists, yet they manage to have fun together.

When I read such title I can't help but thinking "what are they, 5 years old?".

Answering to GP.

Not too many engines indexing my drawer at home.

One link to your document will still get it indexed or no links but using chrome.

Having a resignation letter ready to go is understandable.

10 volunteers all having their resignation letters pre-written and ready to go is a bit weirder and points to some real problems at the organization.

You don’t form a quitting pact to leave your home of 20 years at the same time with 10 coworkers and start a rival service unless you’re REALLY committed.

But to then walk it all back as rumours and hearsay after this much premeditation and thought was put into it? Nuh uh! There is some kind of coercion here in my opinion.

It may never be used, but it's not rumors and hearsay if it comes from the actual person. This isn't outside people speculating, this is proof that at least some internal people are considering resignation.

It is very true. I probably still have a resignation letter at a company I ended working for 12 more months. Nobody knows about it (except the NSA)

That said, it did mean a lot about my intent and feeling at the time.

The think this seems likely. Threatened, or realized some immediate issue naming their replacement already.

It seems like someone only jumped the gun on this information getting out, not that it wouldn’t come to be.

Well, all the links at the bottom of the letter seem to 404, so it seems like they didn't mean to publish this yet.

That's a very good point. And how could that be rectified? Public service hasn't helped much nor more centralized state media. What do you do, require all news outlets be nonprofits?

Strange - maybe an attempt to publicise it again? The libra.chat only just being done - or someone else jumping on it, and hoping it would have some credibility?

Disagree. As an open chat platform -- ie. not for private/confidential communications, to me, IRC is still superior to Matrix. We use it at work in parallel to IRC, and it still happens today (at least with elements.io) that a message or two can get lost when you restart your client in an unfortunate moment, and sometimes channel user lists get out of sync, so you're addressing a person that's not there, or suddenly someone replies you don't see in the user list. It's happening rarely, but it does, and it is annoying.

IRC's concept of requiring an active TCP connection for your session is archaic but dead simple, and the only times you have to wonder whether or not someone received your message is if they got a ping timeout shortly after, and the user list might get out of sync once in a honeymoon when there's a net-split. Nothing about IRC changes anymore, so you won't get surprised by regressions and bug fixes every month. I can see how people miss long multi-line messages and animated gifs in IRC, but I just don't. It's straight forward text communications, no bullshit.

> I also love url and picture previews displayed directly in Element (and other clients) by way of synapse - far nicer experience than the text-only of IRC in my opinion.

What is the difference with IRC clients showing URL/picture in terms of experience?

How does one moderate a room if there are infinite home servers with infinite identities?

Yeah it's more about user psychology/ergonomy. A Blunt tool that expose its limit can be preferred to a potentially better one that create more unknown failures. (Not thinking about SDV)

Sure netsplits happen, but at least I can still communicate with people that are on the same side of the split (and know exactly who they are). I never had the same issues as with Slack, Matrix, etc. where I just couldn't communicate at all for > 10 minutes.

And frankly I don't really care about it magically back filling the log later on, since the moment has passed. I value "Availability" above all else. And here IRC is unparalleled.

And improving upon the netsplits without breaking this aspect is really quite difficult.

Wholeheartedly agree with the above.

Also remembering IRC's netsplits resulting in IRC Services being split off and resultant and inevitable chaos when the netsplits end.

I travel a lot (well, not right now because pandemic), and live in countries that I don't have a bank account in, or speak the language of.

This is a problem for a lot of web services. Apparently where your IP is located determines where you bank and what language you speak. Apparently people like me don't exist, or rather, are a small enough market to be completely ignored (which was the upshot of my conversation with Spotify support when I asked them to send me invoices in a language I understood, please, since they know I use the English client but send me bills in German).

So to make my life easier, I use a VPN and pretend I'm in Australia/UK/Jersey/USA/Estonia/wherever makes most sense.

I'm happy to pay for that. So far PIA have been great. They even have a good-looking Linux client that works with Wireguard.

But if there's shadiness, then I'd like to be aware of it. I was genuinely asking where the shadiness is here.

The economics make sense to me. I’ve ran a VPN for 10 (concurrent!) people on a $5 droplet. If I charged them PIA prices (monthly), that’s $95 a month in profit. The insane 3 year or 2 year deals are obviously subsidized by continuous sign ups, meaning constant in your face ad placement is necessary.

I’d even say they’re probably making direct profit from the $2.69 a month plan too. Essentially all VPN providers do is resell bandwidth, just at an insane upcharge in the name of “privacy”.

So what you're saying is, the people in charge are really good at privacy? And this is a problem?

/s

They should have used the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" model like Google.

Andrew Lee of Mt Gox fame is your guy. Also claims to be the crown prince of Korea.

They sell privacy but it would have been obvious from the very beginning that they’re going to be a magnet for illegal activity. I would probably do the same thing if I were them.

Sounds like they know how to keep private.

For anyone that wants a less shady VPN, I've found Mullvad[1] to be very good. They take privacy to the next level, where you can literally mail them an envelope full of cash with your anonymous login key and they'll top up the credit on the account. I also like Mullvad because they seem to spend approximately $0 on marketing (at least compared to the other guys) and don't do any of those bullshitty perpetual "limited-time offer" shenanigans.

If you're American and want a VPN based in America (not the Virgin Islands etc), I've found TorGuard[2] to be very good as well.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/

[2] https://torguard.net/

Or just get a dedicated server or vps somewhere and run OpenVPN or wire guard. There is no shortage of cheap vps providers so you could create deploy scripts and rotate your vpn endpoint regularly

Disclaimer: I’ve been doing just that for 13 years now

Thanks for the link :) Though that top comment seems to explain that situation fairly well? Reading the rest of the thread it looks like FUD and the usual HN mess, is there any actual evidence of shadiness since the merger?

There are irc daemons that have everything integrated such as oragono [1].

And if you just want an irc server for a couple friends you can just ignore ChanServ/NickServ.. it's not really needed (hell.. ircnet is still going strong and has no services at all!)

[1] https://github.com/oragono/oragono

Right, in order to see a discord you need to join it. That is very hostile to people trying to find info locked in walled gardens (yikes) but it does let people keep toxic people out if they want to (yay.) More importantly it drives Discord's user acquisition and gives the mods of a discord an ego boost when someone joins.

Most IRC networks actually advertise this on every login, so it seems like you failed to read that…