[someotherperson]

I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things:

1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities

2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system

3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing

4. Reputation is everything

It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and further fragmentation of IRC, and hopefully the recovery continues. It was great to see everyone united for a brief moment though, regardless of your views against Freenode or any particular channel it was widely accepted that it was a horrible move and everyone resisted the hostile takeover.

[Doxin]

I wouldn't accuse him of having technical prowess. Pretty much as soon as the takeover happened freenode started suffering technical issues. Libera on the other hand dealt with the insane influx of users really well. There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly, but has been pretty much spotless ever since.

[aaronmdjones]

The most difficult thing to deal with in the first couple of days were the occasional server crashes. We would have liked some more time on our testnet to iron out the bugs in the IRC server software we were planning to migrate to (and started out with on the new network), but that didn't end up happening. In essence, we deployed a beta straight to production with >10k users on day 1 and had everything ironed out by day 4 if I recall correctly.

[Doxin]

Well from a users perspective, for all intents and purposes it looked like you got everything sorted by the end of day 1. I vaguely recall some netsplits happening after that, but that's just part of the IRC experience on most networks.

Props on the smooth switchover. It could have hardly gone any better as far as I can see.

[jasonzemos]

Aaron did a really nice job putting together Solanum (https://github.com/solanum-ircd/solanum).

[aaronmdjones]

Solanum isn't my effort; Ed has done most of the work on it. I'm more focused on services (NickServ, ChanServ, et al.)

[Macha]

I believe this was criticising the initial operation of post-Lee-takeover freenode, not Libera.

[aaronmdjones]

I was responding to "There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly", most of which were caused by incorrect ulimits (easy fix; change limits, restart ircd) or server crashes (not so much; investigate, write patch, test patch, deploy patch to half a dozen boxes, restart ircd).

[Macha]

To be fair, when you don't own your servers, don't have any contracts with the volunteers who provide those servers, and then they exercise their ability to stop providing those servers, that's more a social problem than a technical one.

[Doxin]

I mean that's the second thing of course, but sponsors weren't pulling out on day one yet as far as I recall, but technical issues definitely did start popping up on day one.

[bsnal]

I was there and rasengan handled it extremely poorly. He could've taken over the network and most people wouldn't have moved out if he didn't screw so many things up.

[blibble]

it was almost a masterclass on how not to do it

all he had to do was change the top level administration and keep quiet for a few months, at which point he could have implemented his changes slowly

[bsnal]

He is not right in the head, that's pretty clear from all that he's said and done. What I mean to say is that someone sane could've handled it well. iirc freenode was already "taken over" by the guy who sold it to rasengan years ago and nobody noticed.

[coldpie]

Yeah. When the first reports of problems a-brewing were coming out, I mostly ignored them as dumb Internet drama that would blow over. Then the channel take-overs started happening...

[usrn]

Twitter is not IRC. Switching from Freenode to Libra means changing a config and possibly sorting out some channels that switched faster than you expected.

Switching from Twitter to Mastodon means abandoning the (pretty terrible but familiar) software and an entire mode of interaction. Mastodon is much more about interacting with your peers than celebrities.

If anything this shows how superior IRC because of its flexibility.

[tinus_hn]

It shows an advantage of an open protocol over a closed system:

You can just host it somewhere else if things go sour.

[fps_doug]

Is there any hints at this being the case? I could just as much see him somehow doubling down on everything, twisting it as purging the network from bad actors and that the current state of freenode is actually what he wanted in the first place, or god-knows-what...

[grvgr]

0. Do not threaten and steal from the guy who runs the show, or you're going to have a bad time.

Sincerely,

Gaurav Giri

Ex-CIO Private Internet Access Inc. (5.5 years)

PS: War is expensive, his costs are mounting.

[dark-star]

You assume that resangan wanted to continue running FreeNode the way it was.

To me it looks like he had some issues with the people behind FreeNode and decided to take it over simply to destroy it (and/or change it into the right-wing gaslighting pro-trump "community" that it is now). If you look at it this way, it all makes sense: It's all just a personal vendetta project for him