I'm agreeing with you in the larger sense (Debian + IRC are way more 'community-run' (both in the literal sense and the community feeling you get after spending 3 years in #openbsd (i.e. Deb/IRC == Woz)), and Slack + Apple is refined, user-accessible, and designed with traditional capitalist values (i.e. Steve Jobs). But your comparison of IRC leafs = the state/commonwealth gov't :: IRCs hub (assuming there is one) = the federal gov't is real flawed.
>> Yes, a proper federated IM network would be better than Freenode. But there isn't one.
Ah the short term memories of Silicon Valley.
http://xmpp.org/ + Pidgin. Support for DNSSEC. Support for TLS[1]. OTP is provably uncrackable. Support for that too! Though it has no major company backing it, the protocol's RFC has been published and there is public source code for both clients and servers. (There was support for Google until they realized 'uh we can make more money by Walling in our Garden' and in 2013 Hangouts came out, but there is a proper federated IM network that's secure(ish), agnostic and fairly robust).
>> But a good way to think of it is as a federated protocol that has a central point of control at the federation level.
Eh. IRC is inherently only as federated as the opers who choose to run their links and leaf nodes in a united fashion. In the late 90s/very early 2000s -- back when Freenode was OPN and even blackbox took tens of minutes to compile! -- there was so much drama with where people would fork off networks over trivial BS. I have a disagreement with my bud John, and drama ensues and a network gets forked. I can't just 'fork' off from the US. Some gentlemen in the 1860s tried to do it and didn't fare quite well.
[1] To be fair, STARTTLS can be chunked into basically any protocol. My point stands.
Pidgin is awful for group chat. So is every other jabber client out there. I want to like it because it's open-source, but it's just unusable for many use cases (e.g. try to participate in a conversation using a home and a work computer, or just try to find a groupchat UI that isn't awful).
>> Yes, a proper federated IM network would be better than Freenode. But there isn't one.
Ah the short term memories of Silicon Valley.
http://xmpp.org/ + Pidgin. Support for DNSSEC. Support for TLS[1]. OTP is provably uncrackable. Support for that too! Though it has no major company backing it, the protocol's RFC has been published and there is public source code for both clients and servers. (There was support for Google until they realized 'uh we can make more money by Walling in our Garden' and in 2013 Hangouts came out, but there is a proper federated IM network that's secure(ish), agnostic and fairly robust).
>> But a good way to think of it is as a federated protocol that has a central point of control at the federation level.
Eh. IRC is inherently only as federated as the opers who choose to run their links and leaf nodes in a united fashion. In the late 90s/very early 2000s -- back when Freenode was OPN and even blackbox took tens of minutes to compile! -- there was so much drama with where people would fork off networks over trivial BS. I have a disagreement with my bud John, and drama ensues and a network gets forked. I can't just 'fork' off from the US. Some gentlemen in the 1860s tried to do it and didn't fare quite well.
[1] To be fair, STARTTLS can be chunked into basically any protocol. My point stands.