15:04 <@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft
that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from
a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search
engine and found
15:04 <@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still
ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2
decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly
officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest
taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a
grain of saltEdit: Also compare to the staff listed in this deleted freenode blog linked by @gwd below.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode....
Edit 2: Who is OFTC and how do they fit in?
IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split[0]
Been involved with IRC a good 25 years, running a pretty popular blog about it "back in the days", i just couldn't be bothered keeping it up and updated because of all the constant fighting, arguing, bickering and people outright attacking each other all the damn time.
I'm not entirely sure what it is, but something about IRC gives people big egos, omnipotence fantasies which, again, leads to drama - i, myself, just concluded it wasn't worth my time anymore and moved on.
Mind you, this comes from someone who met his (former) wife on IRC, made great friendships with people all over the world - something i'm still grateful for to this very day.
But it wasn't made to last, sadly.
Reason for that is that Irc drama attracts brazillian hackers and script kiddies like flies, having an irc server is like having a huge DDoS magnet, having a irc server is an excellent way to make a whole ISP crumble under attack.
Last major irc network we had went bankrupt because of their DDoS protection costs rising and rising and rising until they went in debt to stay online and until they couldn't pay the debts.
Citation needed. Most ISPs ban IRC ports due to having a large amount of customers that are members of a botnet via a virus.
Any community with sub-groups and a privilege system for ops/voice/... will generate drama.
It's not a fatality either, I've been on many smaller channels that were focusing on a specific topic and mostly used for technical discussions and the only moderator interventions were to kick spammers or update the /topic.
It saddens me a bit that IRC is so unpopular with newer generations, now the discussion has moved to proprietary, centralized solutions like Discord. Yet another nail in the free, distributed, decentralized, non-ad-driven, non-HTTP-based internet coffin.
The fact that anyone can start their own group limits tin god syndrome on those networks. IRC requires moderate technical skill and either running or paying for servers, which is enough of a hurdle that admins can get away with quite a lot of bad behaviour before being ousted.
Well yeah but with IRC you used to be able to perform hostile takeovers by knocking people offline strategically.
You can't really do that with Discord so the drama tends to stay as an argument rather than a DDoS battle
Surely this is selection bias, you don't hear about -no- drama.
I run an IRC network which hasn't had any real drama for 15 years... (Current global users: 322 Max: 1514)
I say that as an IRC user for at least 2 decades and a recent convert to Matrix.
Discord is probably the closest spiritual successor to irc (the types of communities using discord are the same types of communities that used irc in the past).
It seems the whole business, filled with young opinionated people, really invites these kind of dramas.
Do something, or vote.
Fixed that for you.
I'd say it lasted.
But well, everything is political nowaday, and people apparently can't get political without creating drama. See: the last basecamp outrage.
I think you mean "polarized". And polarization is happening only in some societies, mostly in the anglosphere.
In many other places society was much more polarized 50 or 60 years ago.
<@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search engine and found
<@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2 decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a grain of salt
Why would someone who wrote that email draft now say his own email was "rumours and hearsay"?
That just makes the whole thing sound even sketchier.
Also, geez, how can anyone who's an IT professional in 2021 think they can put something on the public internet without auth and keep it private? Really?
Also at the time of writing it wasn't intended to be kept private, it's explicitly a message intended to be published at some point. It just never was and the situation changed, it's just an oversight.
2. The internet is much bigger than you think. The document is probably more likely to be found and publicized from your drawer at home than being found on a random server on the internet. People fight for visibility for a reason.
Only when several documents link to each other, the risk of being found goes up...
Not saying it is so, but...
Don’t tell me nothing is going on and everything is alright.
Seriously, wtf?
Here is their 2017 blog about resignations:
According to https://p.haavard.me/ the pastebins expire after 24 hours. But most URLs in the pastebin already are 404, which likely means that someone pasted an old text file for an issue that happened some time ago.
I'm guessing stuff behind '/privat/' isn't supposed to be, er, public.. oops.
From government kickbacks from oil companies down to community sporting clubs there is a tragic phenomena where if you have corrupt individuals in charge at a single point in time then there is a chance for an irreversible loss of a public good.
Here's a link about a community club in Australia where one of the directors ended up owning the clubs assets after some bad decision [0].
[0] - https://www.michaelwest.com.au/a-barilaro-affair-how-the-bar...
In the UK we had a referendum for more direct democracy. Something like 65% voted against, with a low turnout. Brilliant
[1] https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode....
https://twitter.com/liberachat
Their twitter was created last month.
Seems like there was an attempt at damage control more than anything else.
IRC was good, and I still use it, but even I as a 51 years old greybeard unix/linux accolyte realise that IRC has had its day.
If any of these chaps are reading this, move to Matrix - it'll be more resilient than IRC.
Also there are new modern irc servers around (such as Oragono) that integrate lots of things that are often missed/bolted on externally, like history, bouncer, authentication, etc.
I've found the matrix-synapse homeserver I run to be stable. Along with Element-desktop and the Element android app it's been a great experience for me.
With both of those, you don't need to worry about history or bouncers, as history gets synched even if you power down your homeserver and back up again like I do.
And authentication comes as a by-product of matrix-synapse/Element.
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.
I think IRC has had its day. At least with myself.
The difference is that IRC doesn't try to address these issues and just lets them happen, whereas Matrix does try and sometimes gets it wrong (more due to implementation bugs than protocol issues).
I don't think it's fair to conclude that IRC is "more reliable" on that basis - if anything, I would say that Matrix comes out on top here despite the existing implementation issues. At least it eventually gets things into the right state.
IRC is still alive and well thanks.
That’s not shady to you, especially for a company that sells privacy?
Best of luck.
> Sadly, some time ago, a holding company, Freenode Limited, was sold or transferred in some way to a third party by our previous head of staff
Apparently the third party is called Private Internet Access (PIA), according to other posts. Who's the previous head of staff, and how did they have the authority to sell Freenode Ltd.? How long ago did it happen? Was this ever announced or discussed among other staff, and are the exact details of the deal even known by anyone else?
Someone else also asked this, but, what are the "recent changes"? To what end is the third party company exerting control?
It feels to me like someone was at some point put in charge of Freenode, and then decided they could make a buck off of it. If that's the case then the "hostile takeover" already happened long ago the moment that person decided to sell it. But there are so many unanswered questions here that I can't be sure of anything. It's a totally vague and confusing letter, and it alludes to all sorts of troubling things without ever clearly stating exactly what they are.
Maybe in a little while all the drafts get published and we'll actually learn exactly what's going on. But then maybe there's something I'm missing, so if anyone knows please let me know.
You might want to consider to shut down the clearnet port, since users will send their account passwords and all their communication inkl private messages in plaintext over the internet. I don't think that this is a good idea.
(edit: At least, they certainly haven't resigned as of yet.)
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
But what I like about this feed is that I am constantly being exposed to new things.
IRC is "internet relay chat", it's a very simple protocol, you can even telnet into an IRC server. Though there are lots of IRC clients that make it much nicer to handle multiple channels and direct messages and so on.
IRC was super popular from the 90s up until Slack showed up.
What changes exactly? And whats the point in this message ?
You cannot add favorite channels to discord, it's hard to browse, electron is clunky, and discord is centralizing all that data.
I keep saying that this is something discord pushes subconsciously and it makes a lot more places unliveable.
On IRC chans feel more open and sociable than discord. On discord most servers come up with a lot more rules, a lot more steps (get a role) and people were often very tense. I had very sad and angry bouts on irc but it was rarer and about a topic disagreement / douche behaviour and not about bowing to a small group view on how to talk or laugh. It really gave a sect feeling. Then there are the slughtly5 political discord servers where you get a background check before the right to see rooms. Really odd (unless you're deep into anthropology)
What do people think volunteering is? Play time?
1) Penetration testers relentlessly scanned my IP address every time I connected.
2) Endless PMs pleaded for help recovering accounts with "forgotten" passwords on various servers.
I never fell victim, but got tired of feeling like a target.
You probably mean the very boring automated open proxy scan that every IRC network runs.
wish the entire staff godspeed with the new network.
Not really a huge surprise after the network was sold to a VPN company