Buy an IRC network, fine. If you want to use the domain for something else, just turn off the servers and do it. There's no need for this absurdly complex, Rube Goldberg-esque process of pissing everyone off, then impersonating services, then dropping the services database entirely, then partitioning the network and joining people to a new network, and pissing more people off, and passive aggressive global messages, and...
I cannot wrap my head around what they're even trying to do at this point. I've been on IRC in some form another for the majority of my adult life (including running my own IRC network for many years, starting out with some SE/30s), I'm quite tolerant of random stuff going on, but I literally cannot find any sense at all in what the new owners are trying to do.
It's like they had a great party going at their house, a few people started leaving, and then they started waving around a gallon of gas and a lighter, threatening to burn the house down if anyone else left. And people, reasonably enough, continued to leave. So, i guess this stage is the "And they lit the house on fire, but moved all their friends to the shed and pretended it was still the house" part of the analogy...
> It's a new genesis for a new era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom.
Here's my theory. Dude's got some sort of "spectacle complex". You know that feeling when you leave a movie theatre after watching something like "I, Robot" and you have that kind of inspired feeling that you need to revolutionize the world through robots or whatever? In a normal person it lasts about as long as it takes to walk out of the movie theatre, then you're reminded you're back in real life.
It's kind of like this vision of creating something great, a new hope, futurism fetish sort of thing. It's the kind of "visionaries" that always talk about how they're going to revolutionize something without having any clear steps for how to get there or even a clear idea of what the "problem" is.
It's meant purely as sensationalism, and as an appeal to some weird emotion that I still don't really have words for.
Anyway he wants to be the leader in this grandiose movement to... something, I don't even think he knows what. Almost as though he's doing people a favor by doing this.
Completely misguided, and I doubt he'll learn anything from it. Clearly he lives in his own world in his head.
this allows him to blame the "botched" migration for the resultant failure and loss of users/channels/projects, instead of people wanting nothing to do with him (or the dregs of IRC that form his new staff)
1) Libera is catching Freenode.
2) Freenode has x users/y servers
3) If Freenode adds n servers it will gain n*x users.
IRC is mostly dead. It's not like there is huge marketing opportunity or any way to monetize this. We are not in the 90s/early 2000s with random mIRC people joining...
There is no "vendor lock in", and the only "vendor lock in" - the user and channels - were now effectively deleted.
So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?
I use it every day, and I use it for work, admittedly its not freenode but an internal server. I find IRC great for not having the focus of the general masses because of how disappointing the general masses really are.
> So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?
And even that is debateable. I feel like this is the main point of confusion for most sane people involved in this whole thing. Who knows what Andrew Lees motivations are here.
Surely Freenode's downfall was Kafkaesque?
Your analogy sounds right but I'd like to add the shed is full of oil soaked rags. And the host is still holding that lighter.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for that. Even for those of us who are directly involved in it, it doesn't make much sense at all.
By this point, the remaining explanation is "Andrew went completely unhinged after his attempt to fulfill his childhood dream of owning Freenode went to hell".
Like the Disney song says: Let It Go.
Since he pointed the same domains at a new network, that means now a random user of every channel, upon reconnecting to the network, has now become the sole operator and is now free to register said channel and take control over it.
So it's not even that this allows random people to register channels; this is literally appointing a random user as the new owner, for each channel. Oh, and if that user quits without registering anything (and any other users joined in the interim), the channel is now opless and orphaned and cannot be moderated, registered, or otherwise controlled without admin action, unless all the other users leave.
So if you owned a channel on the old network with more than 10 or so users, there is a ~0% chance you'll be able to own it on the new one without help from the admins, unless you got extremely lucky and you were the first user to reconnect among the people in your channel, or unless whoever won the oper lottery is nice enough to give it back (and this being IRC, probably half the users are idle bouncers, so there's a good chance they'll be unresponsive, if not outright malicious).
This was actually an issue for Libera too, as people switching their Freenode configs wholesale wound up creating channels that didn't exist yet that they'd been a member of on the old network. But this time it's global, not just individual users changing their config, so it's infinitely worse.
Ask all the other users to leave is not enough! I tried to protectively reregister my channels on the new Freenode network. For a particular channel, the server doesn't give me OP even when nobody's there!
Apparently, the new IRC server implementation is different and the status is somehow cached. The channel remains orphaned until the channel record expires and gets dropped by the server. It means before the expiration, nobody should join the channel otherwise the channel remains orphaned.
It really sucks.
> 8. During this time, however, Plaintiffs became concerned with Lee's mental wellbeing and his ability to lead LTM and PIA. Plaintiffs noticed that Lee was a habitual user of marijuana and cocaine, and would frequently abuse drugs in the office in front of his employees. Lee often combined his drug use with alcohol and would act erratically.
> 103. Lee would frequently use cocaine in front of LTM's clients, colleagues, certain employees, and trusted advisors. Plaintiffs Ken, Jane, Michael, John, and James all personally observed Lee's pervasive drug use.
> 104. Lee would regularly leave cocaine and marijuana residue in the office. Ken, who . was typically the first to arrive in the office every morning, would find Lee's leftover food, drugs, and alcohol bottles on work stations, and would clean everything up before other L TM personnel arrived.
> 105. Lee made a habit of barging into Ken's living quarters in the middle of the night to play loud music, entertain random women, and use drugs.
> 106. In or around February 2015, Lee wanted to hire an assistant. After interviewing a particular female candidate, Lee-a married man-insisted on hiring her because he wanted to have sex with her. Ken and Park talked Lee out of it, advising Lee that his requested conduct was wrong and could cost L TM in a potential lawsuit. Lee retorted that he did not care about any sexual harassment suit or potential liability for LTM because. he would pay any settlement out of his own pocket.
> 107. Lee also stated that he wanted to start a "modeling agency" under the L TM umbrella called "Breakout Agency." Lee rented a house in the Hollywood Hills for the "models" to live in. Before renting the house and starting the agency, Lee circulated a draft memo to the male LTM executives advising them to make sure to "wear a condom" when having sex with the "models." The draft memorandum was outrageous and, like the incident above, could form the basis of a potential sexual harassment suit. Again, Ken and Park were forced to talk with Lee and insist that he refrain from sending such communication.
> 108. Lee further indicated to LTM personnel that he planned to move the company's workspace to the house in Hollywood Hills, where they would work alongside the models. All LTM personnel recognized that moving the company would create an unstable and unprofessional work environment; and Jane in particular, as one of LTM's few female employees, was not comfortable with the rampant sexism that this move presaged.
> 109. Making matters worse, Lee also had an ongoing relationship with a mistress that he brought to company functions and the LTM offices, despite people knowing that he was married. Lee met his mistress through a company offering female companionship for money. Lee abandoned his wife and newborn child to spend time with this woman, and their relationship was toxic. His mistress was physically and verbally abusive towards Lee, erratic and unpredictable, and caused Lee to act over-emotionally.
> 110. The two fought on a daily basis. And this happened in front of LTM employees, including Plaintiffs. For example, a few days after the February 2015 Meeting, Lee and his mistress had a violent altercation at a club in front of Park, Ken, James, and other L TM personnel. His mistress became infuriated and violent when Lee did not pay attention to her to attend to a conference call concerning L TM business. She punched Lee in the face, causing Lee to lose a tooth.
TLDR: Money can't buy class, yo.
Every time I read an article on Freenode I hear her voice in my head, in a thick African accent, "What is happening now?"
Someone very confused had the resources to do what their confused mind told them to.
This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look.
Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all.
If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent).
If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2]
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210612224853/https://nitter.ni... 83
[1]: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/ad...
[2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bri...
I would encourage anyone to get involved in real open infrastructure through efforts such as https://opendev.org. Yes, resources are donated, but by a range of providers who have a vested in interest in what the community is producing. ARM64 has been a great example; Linaro providing hardware resources, which has enabled services to perform functional testing and build ARM64 Python wheels for publishing for a number of projects. This is a rising tide that floats all boats. No need to send a resume [2] and you can start contributing immediately [3,4].
It has been good run with IRC but I forsee moving to Matrix as the medium-term future and there's plenty of opportunity for others to get involved with that (building home servers, admining, writing bots that provide the services we current provide on IRC, doc updates, community building).
[1] https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq
[2] https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities
[3] https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/
[4] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-conf...
The point of being 'open' isn't to prevent implosions, but to facilitate continuity when, for example, a proprietary commercial interest attempts, say, a hostile takeover.
1 - I trust there was good reasons, the Zuul folks are great, but it means potentially another chat client for me for channels I use infrequently at best
This will hint at where the money came from, and what's up with the exceedingly poor judgement.
...which is apparently a related but different tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_salicina
Karpeles Labs??
He is not involved in any legitimate venture, he's involved in Andrew Lee's wallet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044256
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155
(It wouldn't surprise me if some other portion of that money had a causal role in causing 'rasengan to get the blessing of one of the pretenders to the throne, though.)
[...]
It's literally open season for anyone who wants to impersonate someone else, steal their nickname, or take over someone else's channel."
That's astonishingly short-sighted thinking, even by the already rock-bottom standards of the current Freenode management team.
Instead, I am insanely curious about why they are doing such a large amount of very inflammatory actions in a short timespan!?
They must for sure know that they will 100% certainly destroy their platform. Why are they doing it anyway?
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Freedom's holdout. Astounding.
Serious question: why? I'm sure there exist perspectives where Lee is not the villain, but they're hard to imagine and I'm really curious.
So they take the network with the few FOSS teams that still support them, and then basically wipe everything. Meaning every chanop permission is now in the hands of whoever happened to be the first idler that happened to auto-reconnect to the channel in question.
Really nice way of dealing with the teams that were still supporting you. No I'm not one of them. But I sure would be hella pissed if I were running a project channel on it.
Rot in hell, more like.
(I haven't really used irc in maybe a decade, but I think I'll go work out what software I should use to chat on Libera Chat... Is scary devil monastery still a thing?)
[0] https://libera.chat/guides/clients [1] https://hexchat.github.io/
Last remaining 1000+ user community channel seized by Freenode staff
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength?
He only attempted to take operational control last month.
It wasn't Discord/Slack/etc, but for an awful lot of people on it, that was a feature. Text. Lightweight. Simple. Doesn't require a bloody Electron app with hundreds of megabytes of memory to connect.
irc.libera.chat is the new Freenode.
