[Syonyk]

I hope there's a good postmortem on this in 5-10 years that explains what on earth all this nonsense is about, because it makes literally no sense.

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...

[jcranmer]

After staring at the global message for entirely too long, I have a theory as to what rasengan is trying to achieve. It's an attempt to purge freenode of the remnants of libera (i.e., haters, at least so far as he believes). Killing off the old service list is a feature, not a bug, since there's no more hidden hate messages from libera or the like to discover. And surely the true believers won't mind the little bit of pain that is starting from scratch? This requires assuming that rasengan suffers from a victimization complex, which is somewhat bolstered by other comments out of band.

[junon]

This part of the global message kind of paints a specific picture for me

> 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.

[Seb-C]

I basically agree with this.

But to me it feels more like "I'm using those fancy words I don't care about because I think that's what you want and how I can lure you".

It is totally disrespectful to the intelligence of it's users.

[junon]

I think it's the exact opposite - I would imagine he thinks the loyal users are actually more enlightened and know the "real truth" about how some FOSS utopia should function, moreso than those that left for Libera/OFTC/Matrix/etc.

[blibble]

I suspect this last action (setting up the new freenode) was done deliberately before he lost to libera (only hours away)

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)

[marcan_42]

Libera was going to overtake Freenode at the end of the month; he still had some time. But yes, it's likely he did this so that he can turn a race to the bottom into something that looks vaguely positive, if you're naive.

[mulmen]

I think it was something like:

1) Libera is catching Freenode.

2) Freenode has x users/y servers

3) If Freenode adds n servers it will gain n*x users.

[shp0ngle]

Yeah. I don't get why all this nonsense... over IRC network?

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?

[silly-silly]

IRC might be 'mostly' dead to you if that's your definition, but it is not 'remotely' dead to me and many others around the world.

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.

[dwild]

> IRC might be 'mostly' dead to you if that's your definition, but it is not 'remotely' dead to me and many others around the world.

I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.

There was no value behind Freenode, except for the community itself (you), and it makes no sense for Andrew Lee to buy it, except for the name.

[_abox]

> I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.

There was never a commercial sense to IRC. In fact this is one of the things I really love about it. It's so cheap to run it can be run entirely for free by some enthusiasts. Some sponsors too, sure, but the costs of running it are never huge.

[nix23]

Since when are community's commercial? Debian Ubuntu anyone?

[mekster]

What is the reason to pick IRC?

It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.

I don't understand why people don't migrate even if it means they don't like commercial alternatives like Discord.

[Syonyk]

> It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.

This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior."

IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources.

It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration.

Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations).

If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486.

Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing.

[GekkePrutser]

Indeed, you describe so well what I love about IRC. It's no heavier than it needs to be. It's niche enough to be free of 'influencers' with nothing to say but on-topic enough to attract real experts. I can idle on 20 networks at the same time for little to no resources on my end. And nobody needs to pay anything as its resource use is just a rounding error. It is indeed amazing.

[ValentinPearce]

A lot of IRC networks didn't require registration. That was the use case chosen for Elite Dangerous' Fuel Rats [1]

The ability to just drop in, ask a few questions and log out is great.

If I join a even a medium sized Discord server, I suddenly get tons of notifications unless I manually change the settings for the server (God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that)

Also, a lot of communities grew in and around IRC chats, which means a lot of people with the habit. With the usual Relevant XKCD [2]

[1] https://fuelrats.com/ [2] https://xkcd.com/1782/

[Macha]

> God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that

It's not in discords interest to do so. More notifications leads to more user activity which leads to more VC money (and indirectly to more nitro income if users who would have forgotten about the service get drawn back in and eventually convert).

An open protocol allows decoupling the client and service provider which defuses these misaligned incentives, which is likely one reason this current wave of messaging services are against ilthem.

[GekkePrutser]

That's the thing. Commercial services like discord want you to pay for their add-on services. So, they try to make you use it as much as they can. They try to build 'user engagement'. Attract you with notifications just to make you aware of how much you miss them, and how much 'value' they can bring to you. In my case they accomplish the exact opposite but anyway... This is how they think.

IRC doesn't need to do that. It just does what it needs to do without all the BS.

[mekster]

Well, it has been well over a decade after competitions have become common and if people can't change the habit for the better, stuck in an ancient tech, not sure what to say.

No voice, no proper file transfer and can't even see messages when you're offline meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.

[Syonyk]

> No voice,

A survey of IRC users would likely indicate that none of them care about it, and it's part of the appeal of IRC - I can only judge people by how they type and what they communicate. It's more or less impossible to tell anything about age, gender, nationality, etc on IRC unless someone cares to disclose it. It's far harder to mask anything like that in voice as opposed to text, so while you may consider it a fatal flaw, I consider it a feature. It's one of the better borderless sort of protocols out there for communication.

> no proper file transfer

What's wrong with DCC? Still works, last time I've used it. However, with a lot of the various free pastebin/image/etc hosting services out there, I don't see nearly as much of a need for that as I once did. DCC is a rare thing now, as opposed to a common way of shuffling files around as it used to be. So, again, based on "I literally make a living on IRC" sort of experience with it, it's not just a big deal anymore. Plus, an awful lot of people on IRC overlap with "I have my own hosting somewhere."

> and can't even see messages when you're offline

Bouncers exist, work well, and consume very little CPU or RAM. You can fit a freebie ZNC bouncer in the Google Compute Engine free tier (micro instance, 1GB transfer outbound), and might pay a few pennies a month extra if it's a really busy month. However, most channels are also entirely useful if you're only connected part of the time. I mostly use a bouncer to catch any PMs - I don't read scrollback unless I've been mentioned, and it works fine.

> meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.

Again, this only matters if you care about that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have more or less rejected the modern "everything mobile" ecosystem with the constant stream of distracting notifications, and that IRC doesn't overlap with my phone is a feature.

However, there are plenty of ways to make mobile clients and ZNC interact such that you effectively have a modern style communication app, on a phone, with IRC as the backend - if you care to do so.

Yes, I'm aware I'm an older style greybeard at this point, but the very things you list as "ancient tech" are part of what makes it appealing. It's lasted for 30+ years so far, and I expect it will comfortably outlast most of the modern messaging clients, because it does what it does exceedingly well.

[op00to]

I’ve been disappointed by IRC over and over. Too many racists. Like every damn channel.

[Doxin]

I mean if over 90000 active connections is dead to you I suppose.

> 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.

[swiley]

What other chat protocol that you've decided replaces IRC handles misbehavior of network owners as easily as IRC does? Whatsapp certainly doesn't.

[corobo]

Isn't WhatsApp the same protocol as Signal under the hood?

[joepie91_]

No. Both use some form of double-ratchet for E2EE, but the messaging protocol itself is completely incompatible.

[corobo]

Fair enough, I don't even remember where I saw it. Some random internet guff information I guess.

Cheers!

[zimpenfish]

> Some random internet guff information I guess.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

"A year ago [2015], we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default."

Now obviously things may have drifted since 2016 but it definitely sounds like - at some point - WhatsApp was based on the Signal protocol.

"Over the past year, we’ve been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. [...] As of [Apr 2016], the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end-to-end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol – a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible."

[spinax]

Your memory is probably remembering Facebook Messenger, who adopted the Signal protocol some 5 years ago: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/

[mulmen]

I'd watch that documentary. Preferably on whatever open content platform replaces Netflix.

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.

[J-Kuhn]

Kafkaesque? Yes.

https://christine.website/blog/final-chapter-2021-05-20

https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26

[joepie91_]

> I hope there's a good postmortem on this in 5-10 years that explains what on earth all this nonsense is about, because it makes literally no sense.

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".

[vr46]

So glad you said this because the last month feels like a continual stream of ‘WTF is going on’ for me as every day brings a new event of chaos and disorder.

[1337shadow]

On one hand, the maintainers of the IRC server code freenode used stated that they would ban any of Lee's "lackies" if they ask for support, on the other hand, some trolls published on hn that they were expecting a reply from their RGPD request, I suppose they got a lot of these nonsensical requests. Considering these matters, it seems starting fresh was the only sane solution.

[iratewizard]

Yeah. At this point you could create your own WebRTC with less headache from scratch and avoid the entire dumpster fire.

[drivingmenuts]

Will anyone even care in 5-10 years?

Like the Disney song says: Let It Go.