Aside from not really knowing what Freenode is/was (a bunch of IRC servers?) none of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee is actually doing that is so objectionable.
Yes. Freenode was the largest public IRC relay network, something like 30 servers, 80k+ users, 40k+ channels, originally directed to open source software but e.g. I would mostly hang out on ##math and ##physics and help students out with problems. This is not a "back in the day" situation, like, it continues to be extremely popular as far as non-Web non-Email internet usage goes.
As for the situation, if I understand correctly:
- Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain names without telling the community of maintainers who actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers running.
- The maintainers perceived the company that now held the domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the company but it looked like its corporate filing status was out-of-date or something.
- In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name" (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks which documented the transfer, and other such things... there was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain that the main burden is on you rather than on us?"
- And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came across as a domineering outsider.
For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on over to the new domain.
> Freenode is a non profit organization that benefits from support from Private Internet. It is not owned by Private Internet. We are serious fans of IRC and the open source community, so it makes sense for us to divert profits to orgs like freenode among others.
They're all a bunch of shady scammers. I don't understand why people trust the freenode staff either, since they evaded or demured when challenged about selling freenode to scammers years ago.
I don't think anybody trusts christel anymore, but I'm not sure why any of the other staff would be implicated in the sale. As far as they all claim, anyway, they were not aware that Andrew Lee believed/claimed he had ownership of the network; and in fact they claim they were all promised by christel that this was not the case.
They knew he got the domain name, not that he claimed to own the rest and the users data. They had his promise that he would not involve himself in the governance.
Said promise is in writing, but only has a few chats message, nothing official (they are a bunch of volunteers doing that for a couple decades as friends, hard to fault them).
Christel seemed to sell out, and when she got kicked out of her op at freenode by other staff Lee came out of the shadows.
"The rumors of a 'hostile takeover' are simply untrue - I've been the guardian and owner of freenode since 2017, when Christel, the former owner approached me and asked if I was interested in purchasing it, as we had in previous years discussed this."
I love how everyone skips the part that freenode's democratically elected former leader was the one who simply sold something they shouldn't have been able to - blame should first be directed at them.
It's not so much a question of possession so much as ... if the good was stolen, you simply have no contract, because the seller didn't own it. It's not your good to begin with. You may not have stolen it, but you still need to return it.
Interestingly enough, there are drastic differences written in law regarding this.
In some countries, you are in fact allowed to keep purchased stolen goods, if they were bought in good faith. While in other countries, you as the buyer can be in serious trouble, even if you couldn't know if it was stolen and at least need to prove that you were misled and did everything you could to prove ownership.
I guess you were arguing morally, just pointing out this isn't legally true everywhere.
They weren't stolen though. They gave someone leadership power and that person entered into contracts on behalf of the organisation. Multiple blogs mention there is no legal recourse so they have asked lawyers and it's all legit.
I have no special knowledge, but I think it goes roughly like this:
- a few years ago, the previous head-of-staff ('christel') became an employee of Andrew Lee's company
- sometime last year they left the company and also stopped being active as a staff member
- the rest of the staff elected a new head ('tomaw')
- Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's successor (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of successor)
So I think it isn't so much about anything Lee has done, so much as the fact that he's no longer taking a hands-off role, as (the staff apparently think) he promised.
Also perhaps that his claim to be in a position to take charge is based more on his ability to pay for lawyers than a solid legal foundation (it's clear that he bought something, but not so clear what, and not clear that it was the seller's to sell).
I think the underlying problem is that freenode's previous parent organisation was dissolved in 2013, apparently without setting up an official successor.
Seems he hasn't done much of anything and it's more that he rubbed everyone the wrong way. And is being opaque in his decision-making to the point that the volunteers believe he's being dishonest. I get it, but it still seems like an overreaction.
Paying the staff isn't something that happened before, so I dunno about that. I am assuming none of the donors are daft enough to keep donating compute to this new "freenode". The community seems to be moving over to irc.libera.chat so regaining their trust seems rather unlikely at this point.
If you assume that none of the donors are daft enough, why would you at the same time assume people would become staff for free? (I'd guess there will be some for both though)
tomaw did no such thing, staffers tried to operate the network as normal. But after publishing a blog post about how freenode developers will start to collaborate with oftc developers, tomaw started receiving threats.
Putting adverts on the website, apparently. Some projects just fiercely want to stay noncommercial, so they will object at this. I am reminded of a comment from the time when Wikipedia was trying to figure out how to cover their costs: The bigger danger isn't advertisers manipulating content, but that people will no longer see Wikipedia as theirs, they will see it as yet another place that corporations bombard them with adverts. — Sid http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2007/01/02/wikipedia-advertisin...
Interestingly, at the bottom of freenode's website [0] is a link to a non-comercial CC license [1]. So not sure how anyone could "sell" freenode. At the top of the site is a link (not given in this post) to a commercial product, so again, not sure how they can do that given the CC license.
That said, I am no legal expert.
CC no-commercial does not mean the owner of the content can't commercialize it. The owner is explicitly granted all rights by law, regardless of how they license it to others. In this case, the license is to the content of the site, so someone else can reuse that content elsewhere, but not in a commercial context.
Freenode was a very popular (for its target) irc server used by a lot of open source projects and communities over decades.
Freenode was managed by volunteers without any official organisation. A couple years ago, the person that the volunteers considered their "head" informally made a UK company that would own at least the name and domain name, merely out of a wish to have some legal structure instead of random staff users owning random parts of it. How much of it is owned by the company is very vague, staff are not on contract, servers are loaned without any paper signed by third parties, ...
Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew Lee's company, who made the promise to the staff to not involve himself. Then that head pushed for profits ads on the website, with no warning nor explanation, and with the profits going to said company. Staff complained a lot, head is removed from the freenode staff and then removed from the board of the company she had sold.
Conflict of management erupts, and was justified freenode having no clear admin structure. But Lee comes out of it acting as if he was the boss and owner of the entire platforms, ask that servers and users data gets transferred to him. When staff rebels and refuse that, he "removes them", which ends up with the hilarious moment of him asking them to de-op themselves (remove their admin status) which he can't do himself since he doesn't even have the authority. On several occasion he claims that "the board of freenode voted to have you removed", while he means the board of his private company freenode ltd (which the staff have no relation of any kind with), and he is the only member of said board.
Most of staff agrees about a need for a proper structure, but refuse to see everything transferred to an opaque and for profit company. Lee argue that's it's the only solutions. Several head of major communities or projects hosted on freenode make the suggestion of transferring the control and data to an official not for profit like the FSF and Lee and staff being given the lead in the interim to a proper governance.
Lee reacts by trying to "bribe" some of them with admin powers and/or financial sponsorship for their project if they side with him, which goes terribly wrong, and them saying "Now I will never have anything to do with Freenode under Lee anymore".
That's a summary of the event as understood by me. It seems the governance issue was real, but it also seems one side is saying "it should be owned by a non profit with clear governance and clear rules for data protection" and the other side, Lee, is saying "all the data and admin privileges should be given to my for profit that doesn't report to anyone else than me".
Frankly, while there is gray on both side, his action made it pretty clear that I wouldn't want any of my data in his hands.
> None of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee is actually doing that is so objectionable.
I second this sentiment. Can anyone summarize objectional actions that Andrew has either taken or committed to taking in the future?
As far as I can tell, he found a way to purchase legal rights to Freenode. And, he's communicated this control in a way that pissed off existing mods.
But, as a Freenode user, what I really care about is how this will impact me as a user. If the only potential impact this will have on me as a user is a smaller user base, there's a clear solution: don't leave?
Freenode is a volunteer-run organization, with some volunteers doing the work for better part of two decades. There is no unique technology behind it; it's a community that's been successful for many years thus far.
From what has been revealed, Lee wiggled himself in from conference sponsorship side. He used this inroad to strike a secret ownership deal with a person who the rest of the crew reckons was not in position to decide. Freenode is not a commercial enterprise. It's more like a community soccer club sold to a sponsor by a guy who happened to be a secretary with a stamp - after the years you've been tending the lawn and volunteering with training.
Yes, they are understandably pissed off, as one would be with hostile takeover by some renegade crypto prince (yes he really claims he's a prince).
Also relevant is that while they might be able to fight it that would involve substantial personal outlay of lawyer money by volunteers (all so they could continue to volunteer) and as unpaid volunteers the first thing attacked would likely be questions of standing.
There are reports of Lee, or one of his contacts, offering admin roles for money basically to allow for paid harassment. Whether that is true or not isn't clear to me, but that would be a big issue if true.
His broken promise that FreeNode will be run independent of his control is pretty objectionable. Like others have pointed out, you can even find hackernews posts from him saying that. The fact he’s now asserting control to self appoint what would essentially be the leader of a decades-long group of volunteers without their say-so is pretty ridiculous.
However this is a statement of fact, not partisanship on my part. How do you suggest someone say this in a more neutral fashion? You can see some of the comments in #libera on the new network, and here is one of the staffers saying it in their resignation letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20210520142350/https://blog.bofh...
Is it supporting Trump which rubs people the wrong way, or that Trump supporters generally rub people the wrong way.
I know its a bit of semantics but I have found that many (if not most) of the loud and proud DT supporters are incredibly irritating. I find them just as bad or worse than the hyper politically correct/SJW crowd.
I think we are exposed to the loudest and most annoying of these groups by media that has every incentive to showcase the nutjobs for clicks, and so this is what we remember, even though most people aren't this way.
Out of curiosity, why did HN bury that last one, with 555 points and 262 comments, eight pages down within twelve hours? Freenode and irc are of considerable interest to the hacker community.
I mean, clearly they are public since we are all looking at them.
I think this is a good reaction to accidentally publishing information that was intended to be private. Nothing is deleted, but you stop telling new people about it. People who already know can keep reading and talking.
When something that isn’t final or certain reaches the FP (such as rumors, predictions, or leaked drafts), the mods will often quash the post for being such, even when for example it’s an Apple rumors post with hundreds of comments. I’ve seen occasional exceptions to this, primarily when it’s lawmaking or RFC-type work, as those drafts are quite often newsworthy. A leaked FYIQ draft from an IRC admin wouldn’t have registered to me as newsworthy, not until it was published, so I would have made the same decision the mods did.
We downweighted the thread as soon as we became aware that the text was a draft that wasn't intended to be public. There were two possibilities: either (1) it would become public soon enough, in which case there would be the chance for a big HN discussion then, and there's no harm in waiting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) or (2) it was a false alarm, in which case it probably didn't count as significant, besides which none of us would want our private drafts on sensitive topics circulating on internet forums.
Life took path (1) as we all know, and so this has been the most-discussed story on HN in the last couple days, including being at #1 on the front page all day today, and still.
Gogs (and Github, Gitlab, etc) are different than Sourceforge though, SF's project pages are targeted towards users of the software, whereas Github/Gogs/etc are targeted towards developers. Now obviously when you have developers make that choice you get them show a preference towards developer-targeted services, but at the end of the day they are not the same.
Notice how in a typical Sourceforge page you get the name of the project right at the front with big letters, right below it a rating by its users, how popular it is and when it was last updated (though that date is misleading because it tracks all the project data and not releases) as the most important bits, with a big fat green DOWNLOAD button next to those and buttons to be notified for updates and sharing the software with others? Then the information panel below these describe the software, what features it has, etc followed by screenshots, category information, license, etc and then comments/reviews by users. This panel is just one tab with others being the files for users to download, reviews, support, forums, etc. The code, where you can see the repository, is at the last tab.
This is a design very strongly targeted towards users, unlike Github/etc that right in the front page of a project show the repository and rely on Readmes to show any information.
Some projects even use Github (or Gitlab or whatever similar tool/service) for the repository while keeping other functionality, like downloads, mailing lists (that AFAIK no other similar service offers, btw) in Sourceforge.
That is not to say that Sourceforge's UI doesn't need a bit of a cleanup, but replacing it with something like Gogs (or anything Github-like) isn't going to work since Sourceforge's UI has a different target and goal.
I'm always in the #python channel and I've been glancing at the peak time usage levels. Anecdotal, and it could be that channel is an outlier, but nothing much seems to have changed.
> When freenode announced that it was joining with Private Internet Access, staff were uncertain but assured that PIA was to have no operational influence
I mean, promises like that sound like obvious bullshit to me. ‘EA promises that Codemasters will continue to operate on their own like they did’. Yeah sure buds, who are you taking me for. Unless the company is a cash cow startup, why would anyone buy it with other aims than to try making it bring a bit more profit than the previous owners could manage? (Buying the team/the technology is pretty much the same, as it means the workings of the business will be thrown away.)
Private Internet Access commented on Twitter that they have nothing to do with this actually. They used to be in the same portfolio of companies (of this mr. Lee), they are not anymore.
I think this actually happened before with Freenode staff breaking off into another network. Around 2006 staff got pissed at lilo (I forget the exact reasons) and started the Atheme network. Later that year lilo was run over and killed. After this staff returned and Atheme became the testing grounds for their new services and is today what Freenode runs as their services suite.
That's a matter of perspective. Lilo's dead so it's not like we'll hear his side of the story. For other examples of forks which may or may not be considered hostile by some, see the ffmpeg/libav split from some years back (that just like Freenode, eventually reconverged).
ffmpeg and libav didn't "eventually reconverge." ffmpeg was always copying anything new that libav added when it made sense, and libav was eventually abandoned.
After the legal dispute, it appears that Andrew Lee owns the domains, website and any trademarks. This is about as much as Freenode "owned" for christel to sell.
The server donors own their servers and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The channel operators own their channels and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The staff own their volunteer labor and can take them elsewhere if they wish.
The users own their choice of platform, and can support whichever they wish.
There is an entire interesting rabbit hole dedicated to how much people hate Rob Levin (lilo). They talk about how he was a scammer, collected disability with his wife for ADHD, regularly misused his position in freenode to grift for money...
I've heard this before, but I've gotta add: about a decade ago, when I was a newbie in the FOSS world, I remember a pm interaction with lilo. He was kind, unassuming, and helped me with some basic nickserv commands. I only came to know who he was much much later. That stands in stark contrast to most ircops there who seem pretty unapproachable.
And the quibble about a couple of K's really grates on me. The guy founded freenode and kept it going. Let the donations fund his groceries.
I once met him in person before he started freenode, and he was a nice and passionate guy then as well.
Yes, he did try to make a living off freenode when he hit financial and professional difficulties, and people resented that, but he was unquestionably the founder and a major volunteer (though, by the time he asked for donations, one of many volunteers).
I have similar memories of lilo. Kind, unassuming, and helpful. Me and some college friends had a small channel back in the early 2000s, and lilo would occasionally pop in and say hello. He was always nice. At the time I wasn't sure how he was able to spend so much time on IRC.
FWIW, I was an annoying teenager and lilo didn't K-Line me when I went through that phase (flooding channels with nonsense and generally causing some trouble). He was patient and I grew out of it.
I never knew of the hate until I befriended a few of the atheme people and they told me some of their side. I do think he misappropriated funds to survive which is unethical but I'm not mad at the spirit of it. I used to troll the staff a bit that netsplits were caused by the /shakedown command lilo put in to collect donations.
Unrelated, but freenode is weird among IRC networks. Other networks I went on would sometimes just ban people because they felt like it, not for any particular reason. The server donors were not allowed to give themselves O-Lines (IRC staff privs), this was an important distinction as well as it kept servers neutral, and later on was the reason they did not require a foundation with overhead. There was an incident that I believe they deleted off their blog where I think the Newark, NJ server was punted from the network for giving themselves an O-line without permission. So yes, the sale is weird because the assets should have only been the domain name and website. My guess on PIA wanting more was recommendations from their lawyers over GDPR crap but I don't really know or care.
Unfortunately grifters have all the more incentive to be saccharine-- they want something from you.
Many OSS projects moved off freenode (including some I was involved in) specifically because Lilo was pulling donors into chant and trying to convince them to fund freenode instead of the oss project they were on freenode to discuss. It was really sleazy and created a lot of well earned bad blood.
I don't think I ever saw anyone too irritated that lilo spent some donations on his living expenses.
> Unfortunately grifters have all the more incentive to be saccharine-- they want something from you.
Not only that, but for people who get by through exploitation of trust, doing anything to attract scrutiny from anyone generally doesn't work in your favor.
I don't know if this is legit or not, but a Swedish non profit is pretty awesome, it means that anyone can be a member as long as they pay a yearly symbolic member fee. Everything is owned by the members and is fully democratic, where each member has equal voting power, where members usually select a board, and the board makes the daily decisions. When it comes to taxes, etc, non-profits pretty much don't pay any taxes, yet can make millions in profit - as long as you spend that money in ways that benefits the members.
To be precise, not everyone can join (indeed it is the non-profit bylaws that establishes this) but to be tax exempt it has to be what is called "open". I.e any person that fulfills the membership criteria can join (and it is the non-profit that decides on there should be a fee or not).
To be a non-profit you also have to spend at least 80% of the income on the stated purpose of the non-profit (which of course might benefit members in the way that the goals of the non-profit is worked on but not in the way of paying money to member).
The non-profit can still have rules in place on who is accepted as members and who isn't, as long as the rules don't break any laws (discrimination etc.). They also can have a mission statement and rules that are not up for vote. They can have members enter a contract with the non-profit when joining as a member.
Also, depending on who's "taking over" and who's "taken over", it can be argued that if the majority of members that provide the majority of the funding to the non-profit, shaping the non-profit according to the majority of its members is the right thing to do. If there's too much differences in opinion, the non-profit can also split any time.
Indeed this can (and does happen) but the non-profit can loose its status if it starts doing stuff that does not further its purpose as stated by the bylaws. And the tax authorities can decide that your stated purpose would not be tax exempt (for example a union would not be tax exempt and neither would a collector society [think for example a numismatic society])
I don't know but the according to the forms for registration you seem to need a Swedish identification number for the CEO of the non-profit. The same is true when you want to change the members of the governing council. These are hard to get a hold of if you do not live here. You also need to be based in some part of Sweden, and there is a fee associated with moving HQ to a different region in Sweden. These organizations can be insanely complicated in their nature and are allowed to own and operate very large companies (some of the largest in Sweden are owned this way).
First a pandemic and now my online home of the last 20 years being torn apart. This is really upsetting. The people of freenode are something special. I really hope the community can manage the switch without loosing too much of everything. Already the channel registration on libera is throwing established communities into chaos.
I really hate that corporate shell game bullshit and attempts at monetization are being made by a dude that professes to love IRC. I wish andrew could acknowledge the hurt he is causing but it seems like saving face matters more to him at this point.
Knowing only the name Eris Free Net, and none of the history, this doesn't mean anything to me. I have no idea if this is a network that's free of Eris, or a free network named after Eris. While I have a vague memory of a server named Eris having existed in the past, I don't know if said server is the same Eris in the name, or a different Eris that may have a direct (ownership)/indirect (named in honor of)/no link with the server. Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife, not something you'd want in your community.
> On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the server for April Fools. Only a very few EFnet staff were aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only) server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018, eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on the "Eris Free" IRC network and accepted clients.[11] At the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to erisnet.org.[12] eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02 2018 at 19:50 UTC.
If he has caused that much of a problem, then just move on. Block him, stop mentioning him by name, and forget about it. For the open source community, he no longer exists.
I mean I feel like changing the domain name is less of a problem than the one all of the 4000 people named Andrew Lee who are not that guy now have. It's a lot harder to change a legal name. So they will have to live with his bad reputation potentially rubbing off on them. But luckily online most people use aliases so that should mitigate it somewhat.
More to the point, .chat is one of those latecomer TLDs that is thoroughly abused by spammers. If they send email and they want it delivered, they're going to have a great time with that, unless they have a .net or something they can use.
Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An unsettling number of people now seem to be under the impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.
Even if Gmail is currently delivering the messages (for now...), other service providers have to manage spam in their own way, and TLDs are sometimes a really strong signal for message reputation. For example, 99% of email traffic from .info addresses is spam, and the other 1% is mostly spam too.
I don't confuse email with gmail, thank you very much. I gave gmail as an example specifically because a) that's what I used, and b) gmail like all other big providers is anal about accepting email and quick on the trigger-finger about marking it as spam even when it does.
> Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An unsettling number of people now seem to be under the impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.
Even major services. I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a gmail address.
Luckly it turns out you don't need an account to order, and I was able to use my custom domain for an unregistered checkout.
> I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a gmail address.
This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?
I've noticed that some sites will specifically ban public domains from throwaway services like mailinator, but I can't recall having encountered a blanket tld ban.
> This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?
I wasn't using a weird TLD. It was a .us that only my family uses.
I didn't try too hard to get it to work, or figure out exactly what their criteria were, but I kept getting blocked until I used my old gmail. Their customer support wasn't very helpful, either.
Interesting. Out of curiosity, I just tried to register with one of my personal .us domains (g suite) and one of my work .com domains (fastmail) and both worked fine. Maybe they changed their validation after you submitted your case!
I thought I ran into the same issue with another site a few weeks ago, turns out I was just misspelling my domain name and their validation was checking that they could actually get an email to that domain.
I have considered removing SPF rules on my personal domain, as every time someone spoofs my donation to attack corporate emails, their antivirus will incorrectly bounce them all back, at which point they end up in my inbox due to my catch-all; they will then send me a dozen emails complaining about it. The only servers allowed by my SPF is Gmail and one of my personal servers (I usually I use ssmtp, but that doesn't help with software that directly speaks SMTP)
Well "libera" means free in Italian so it makes sense to me. There are also other projects with sound the same such as libre (spanish I guess) office.
I like it. But I'm biased being from Italy.
“Freenode” has only 1 possible pronunciation (and corresponding spelling) in English. “Libera” has 3 or 4 conceivable pronunciations and is harder to guarantee correctness when spoken.
Fortunately I doubt IRC servers need to be communicated vocally all that often.
It's really tough to find an unencumbered name these days. Even made-up names like 'eelo' (Android distro) got in trouble because a tiny human resources company in the Netherlands was using the name 'eelloo'. Not even the same name, totally different business type but still they lost. Trademarks are applied ridiculously wide now and because of that all the good names are gone.
Supposedly[0] all the servers and other network infrastructure are intact, and it's solely the domain names (freenode.{org,net,com}) that were compromised. Grain of salt, obviously, but they have at least claimed there isn't a problem there.
(Again, supposedly) it's now running at libera.chat with superficial cosmetic changes. I haven't investigated this in any real depth though, so don't quote me on that.
>The server hardware is sponsored free of cost; we will occasionally receive an invoice for $0, but that's only because of how the accounting systems at some of our sponsors operate. I can't possibly imagine that the few freenode live conferences cost more than 50k; and all of the other miscellaneous expenses (like the renewal costs for the domain names) are well under a few hundred pounds per year. Anything he would have donated before Freenode Ltd's acquisition is unknown to me, but that would have been from the position of a benefactor, not a supposed owner.
Yeah so Freenode went wrong and they created this.
Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? How do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode?
I know addressing a messy past on a new site is no fun / I saw the other articles on HN, but ... they should still address who is running the show and some level of assurances (as much as you can in text on the internet) that this is a good place.
It could go the way of freenode, in which case, everyone would move somewhere else. Things change, deal with it. It's not a one-off, it's a cycle. Everything eventually dies and is born anew from the ashes.
They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit. The people running the show are associated with many of the greatest open source projects. Projects where literal geniuses have donated thousands of hours to make software and services available to you and I free of charge.
You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that, except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example, actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in #nim.
The people running the show are those people and friends of those people.
The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the networking etc.
So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are problem solvers.
Because it's hyperbolic, most if it is just fawning about how great Freenode was which had nothing to do with the question, and it did not answer the question at all.
Original question: "there is not a single name of a real person anywhere on the site that I can find. there is only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in Sweden." Is it normal for the staff of such a project to be secret?"
Your answer: "They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit." Not named. And then you had a bunch of stuff about unnamed people who chose not to put their names or nicks anywhere on the site, when the question is "why wouldn't they associated their names/nicks with this?"
It's not hyperbolic, it was the literal truth, and all of it is relevant because the question implies they do not know what Freenode was.
The staff are not secret. They have names on the network. Those nicks are published (at least on the old site, not sure if that has been transferred to new yet) and well-known.
The one guy who's name everyone knows is undisputably trying to profit from a non-profit organization, which he previously lied and said he would not, and in so doing has caused the worst disruption possible. So that proves that names don't actually help us.
Freenode has been a positively awesome and welcoming group of communities. Was particularly pleased with the security enhancements over time compared to most IRC networks
While we're all switching to Libera chat, anyone have good recommendations for general channels they follow besides project channels? (the Lubuntu and Ubuntu channels where very helpful when I needed them!)
This is what it has going for it. It is meant to be a drop-in(ish) replacement for freenode. All the same clients, all the same protocols, all the same channels (in theory).
I run my own homeserver. It wasn't too hard to set up but it's fairly resource-intensive. I have it on a big Ryzen and barely notice it but I think it would crush something like a Raspberry Pi (especially if you tried to run it off an SD card)
I'm not really a fan of IRC (a federated network where some OSS projects were on their own servers or different ones would have limited the blast radius of a hostile takeover of one server like this), but Matrix is bloated and slow and the protocol makes no sense for chat (though it may have other applications); it's not a great fit for a large network with lots of people who may or may not have modern hardware. Not to mention that the servers would take a lot more resources to run on Matrix (assuming it eventually gets roughly the same size as Freenode was).
Wow, that's a lot of negativity. You forgot to disclose your XMPP/XSF affiliation, btw.
Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode.
Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated, but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo). Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are positively skinny.
I disagree, I don't click the bio link for every comment I read. I'd have never known they were the project lead if another commenter didn't call them out on it.
Sorry, but I agree with @gojomo. Making it public in your bio that you are afilliated with a project, is very sufficient disclosure in my opinion.
No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you read, but conversely we shouldn’t expect him to preface every single one of his comments with “Hey guys, I’m the project lead of Matrix.”
Arathorn is very active in comments, and it’s well known to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix.
You may want to make clicking through a habit when commercial & project interests may be involved.
HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such disclosures all the time - but making them available in bios is practical.
You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts may exist whenever there's no bio info at all – as with your user page.
Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their affiliations declared for when they're flacking their company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but things to think about.
When a commenter takes strong stands on the relative merits of projects or commercial products, and there's a whiff of involved partisanship, a clickthrough is pretty easy & wise.
And, it often has the added benefit of more useful credibility context than just revealing blatant conflicts.
It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for every comment, "how much involvement in these particular topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on topics for which the commenter often comments, or multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion - where such a standard would be onerous for both the author, and the readers.
Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're covered for comments related to those affiliations, as it's then easy to check for anyone observing any partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading with redundant disclosure-noise.
If you want scrupulous disclosure of relevant affiliations inline in every single comment where they could apply, I think you're in the wrong place.
As you note, it's not a site guideline. As I've noted in a sibling thread, it wouldn't fit the minimalist HN presentation, and would place an onerous burden on both writers & readers.
It'd also especially encumber people with deep personal knoweldge and interest in some topics, if every related post required boilerplate "I'm employed by X"/etc inserts.
But putting it in the bio for the curious/suspicious is a very honorable thing to do!
You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP. Also I have no real affiliation with the XSF except being a volunteer and maintaining a library and having written a few specs (in the past I have had more strong affiliations, but never any financial considerations or anything that I'd need to disclose, I have just volunteered more in the past than I do now)
> You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP.
Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose their affiliation when advocating against renewable energy sources.
It's not about whether you are advocating for or against something specifically, it's about whether you have a vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious, nobody can be completely impartial).
To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't think the reason stated for not doing so is really evidence either way.
I was arguing that it makes no sense to use Matrix for this and they should continue using IRC, but yes, I have written some XMPP related specs in the past. But fair enough, consider this my belated disclosure.
This sounds really weird. What was the perf problem you were seeing? (aside from whatever has gone wrong with encryption failures) For context, message sending latency should be measured in tens of milliseconds, at worst, unless the server is completely overloaded with federation traffic.
I haven't investigated too deeply. It may just be the clients rather than the server, but it's been there from the beginning. Just a slow laggy experience on all three of iOS, Debian and OSX with Element. Spinning progress bars, blank appearing rooms whilst stuff waits to load. Messages sometimes appearing in different orders for different people in the same room. Messages just not appearing for other people occasional. Random undecipherable complaints about encryption keys leading to some people not being able to read other peoples messages in the same room.
I regret getting people onto Matrix now. I'm keeping it running with the hope that things improve and because I don't want to get people to move to another system which may also have problems.
Should have just stuck with XMPP and my Prosody server, and IRC.
If you can hook synapse up to a prometheus & grafana I would be super interested to see what it’s doing. Private servers should be lightning fast (assuming you use postgres and are on sensible hardware). It’s only when you have public servers which join massive public rooms when things can start to chug.
Overall, I would pick XMPP over Matrix at this point. it is rather bloated and the clients are a little bit obtuse for newbies. I do wonder what the DAU for Matrix is at this point. as I suspect that 32 Million number might be a little overstated.
frankly, as long as folks are communicating via open standards rather than being locked into some vendor silo then they should use whatever protocol works best for them - XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days.
Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major underestimate given other stats which suggest only about 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
> XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days.
I want to test this claim. After an hour of google searching I'm none the wiser:
1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP. I would love to integrate them into a single client, but afaict it does not appear possible.
2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the Element UI.
Yup, OMEMO and Olm are bit compatible. In fact XEP-0384 went through a phase of recommending Olm as the implementation to use (grep https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html for Olm).
(Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
The implementations might be bloated (js heavy, etc), and the non bloated implementations written in C++ or Rust or so don't have the full feature set yet, but is it really the protocol to blame?
In which way does the protocol make no sense for chat? IRC is extremely complicated as well and a giant pile of hacks.
For clients maybe not, but for servers the protocol itself is to blame, yes. A giant distributed graph database where everything has to be synced constantly means you use a ton of memory. IRC is definitely complicated, and arguably a pile of hacks, but an event based system (more or less) makes a lot more sense for chat where you want realtime communication (more or less), not to wait while you sync nodes in the graph to every place that wants them.
This makes no sense. Propagating a bunch of messages doesn't suddenly use a ton of memory just because you're organizing them as a graph rather than a linear pubsub-style stream.
Sorry, it was a bad explanation. The point is that you have to keep a lot of past state in memory for future messages to make sense and sync properly, unlike an event based system where you (more or less) only need to perform some action when you get an event then forget about it. This is an IRC thread though, sorry I got sucked in but let's not let the Matrix CEO derail it and try to score users. The whole point is is that it didn't make sense for them to switch to matrix because it uses more resources than most IRC servers and because they are trying to be a drop in replacement, not make users sign up for new things.
You don't have to keep that much state in memory at all, actually. I'm not sure why you think that you do.
Most of the state resolution (eg. the auth chain) involves calculations of which you can cache the result without needing to care about the inputs beyond that - at least, unless you need to recalculate them once later if delayed events come in.
Ultimately, the performance problems that Synapse has are problems with Synapse's implementation choices (especially around the database schema), not with the protocol nor with the state resolution algorithm.
I'm a fan of Matrix as a project, but I don't think that "the house is on fire, we must evacuate" is the correct moment to tell people to move to a different messaging protocol and ecosystem entirely. That's a big change for a community.
I think protocols are better than systems. Since matrix isn’t an RFC (yet?), I think there’s still value in using an open protocol over a particular system or project.
I think an open source project is more scalable and reusable than a proprietary one, but if the goal is long term communication among diverse users, then using a protocol is good.
To be fair, IRC hasn't had an accurate RFC in decades. https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ is the closest to accurate client<->server protocol documentation, but is fully outside the IETF process.
Matrix is an open protocol[0]. It's not managed by the IETF, but it has an open process for submitting changes. See the Spec Change Proposal instructions[1].
yup, much as the W3C and IETF "companies" decide what they want to do with proposals to their standards bodies. The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit foundation too.
I don't know why but comparing Matrix.org Foundation with standardization organizations such as IETF seems just not right. Maybe it would be more correct to compare Matrix.org with XMPP Software Foundation?
I'd genuinely be interested to know what the difference is between something like IETF / IEEE / ITU / W3C and a non-profit which was created as a standards body for a specific standard (e.g. Matrix.org Foundation or XSF). Is it just that you're recognised as a peer by the other long-established standards bodies? Or is there a standards-body-for-standards-bodies somewhere?
I mean, yes? The IETF has additional cachet as having created the internet. ITU and IEEE are international orgs relied upon not only by companies, but by governments. The W3C isn't as important as it once was, because people stopped listening to them (WHATWG is the new org). But I would trust the IEEE and IETF like I would the ISO, and Matrix.org as far as I would trust Microsoft.
I'd agree that skepticism was warranted if we hadn't split out the Foundation and the protocol was de facto controlled by Element. But instead we made damn sure to create the Foundation independently and frankly protect it from being sabotaged by Element or any other commercial entity building on Matrix. To suggest otherwise is pretty insulting to the other Guardians/Directors whose only role is literally to oversee and ensure that the protocol isn't sabotaged by commercial entities.
I for one do not trust the ISO at all. They are a profit-seeking organization with an opaque standardizing process. That the ISO9660 standard (you might know it as the .iso file format) from 1988 is still locked behind a 140chf payment is a disgrace. And that won't even give you the full standard, because ISO loves doing this thing where a standard will reference 5 others, which themselves reference 5 others, etc...
IETF is one of the best standardizing organizations out there, I'll certainly give you that. They have fairly transparent process, and a really good track record when it comes to creating robust protocols.
Thing is, I don't see why Matrix.org would have any more or less "cachet" than WHATWG, or Khronos Group. In the end, the identity of the standardizing org doesn't really matter too much. What matters is that the incentives of the standardizing org are aligned with those of the community.
XMPP is actually managed by the IETF. The XSF just develops extensions to the protocol (but it's not the official steward of XMPP, confusing as the name is)
Indeed; that's why I think this model has worked pretty well. You get a nice core protocol and then if you want fancy features that keep up to date with proprietary offerings that can be developed in a lighter weight way. Certainly not perfect, but I'm glad the IETF is in charge of the core spec and not the newer, less experienced, foundation (though at this point the XSF is well established too, but in the beginning it was the close relationship with the IETF that let it build that institutional knowledge).
https://matrix.org/foundation/ at the bottom of this page, you'll find the people who are actually in charge with accepting protocol changes (the Spec Core Team). It's true that most are part of New Vector, the for-profit company behind Element and Matrix, but Alexey Rusakov is not as far as I could tell. So there is at least one non-New Vector voice.
It honestly feels pretty likely that this is just a maturity thing - as more products are built around Matrix, the Spec Core team will likely become more diverse.
As I understand it, there's actually an explicit desire for more non-NV people to become involved with the SCT. There just aren't very many other organizations to fund it yet - SCT members need to eat too.
The situation here is that when we set up the SCT we deliberately picked a 50/50 mix of core Matrix team and community members. What we didn't anticipate is that the community members then were sufficiently sucked into Matrix that they were prepared to work on it fulltime, and a bunch joined Element as the only viable way to do so. Given the team is functioning pretty well and we're improving Matrix, it feels nuts to penalise people based on who they work for, hence the current blend.
This is one of the big issues with Matrix that doesn't get talked about enough: it's not managed by a real standards body. It was previously run by a company who kept trying to monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how to monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it). I'm not against the devs being able to pay themselves, that's great, but the specs themselves shouldn't be run that way. Existing standards bodies have more experience, more legal protections for the users, and are just generally better at developing standards.
> It was previously run by a company who kept trying to monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how to monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it).
This is just false. Speaking as co-founder and project lead for Matrix, it's been the same team all along since we began in 2013. We were incubated until 2017 in a company which never tried to monetize the protocol, and then we span out to set up Element (formerly New Vector) where we keep the lights on by selling Matrix hosting and support/consulting.
At the same time we set up The Matrix.org Foundation as a non-profit neutral standards body, with an independent board where the original founders are deliberately in the minority - and when we set it up, half of the spec core team were independent of Element too. (This changed as folks on the team opted to join Element so they could work on Matrix fulltime).
Rather than spreading FUD about Matrix, why not collaborate and work together? Or at least spend the energy on improving XMPP rather than negging us...
https://matrix.org/foundation is intended to be the single source of truth for this, and has bios of the foundation board members (or Guardians, as we call ourselves as 'board members' or 'directors' sounds boring :)
I am not advocating for XMPP, nor am I nagging you. You showed up to advocate Matrix on a thread about IRC, stop accusing me of things and collaborate yourself instead of reinventing the wheel in terms of specs and in terms of standards bodies. Everything I said about the company and foundation is accurate as far as I can tell. I am very glad there is a foundation, but it's still not okay: submit to an existing standards body and stop advertising on threads about IRC.
Oops; either way, I was doing neither. They asked, I answered, then they had a hissy fit because it turns out they're apparently the CEO trying to score some users. Let's just end this line of discussion and keep it related to IRC and stop talking about Matrix.
I think you're being completely unreasonable. They didn't have a hissy fit.
You're trying to moderate discussion that you don't like, because it's not about IRC. Matrix is relevant in a discussion about IRC because it's a valid alternative. You can't police natural and useful discussion you don't like.
Fair enough, I shouldn't use such strong language. That being said, the CEO of a company making money off Matrix showed up to advertise, then complained about how I hadn't disclosed that I do some volunteer work at the XSF while simultaneously not disclosing that they have an entire company based on the thing they're asking about). That seems rather egregious and made me quite mad. My original answer I still think was perfectly reasonable too.
All that being said, you're right, I shouldn't get drawn in every time this person (whom I've just realized is the same person who goes by another name elsewhere) jumps in on every chat across the internet trying to advertise their product. My own fault for getting drawn in and using language like "hissy fit" that is, as you said, unreasonable. I'm sorry about that.
> Existing standards bodies [...] are just generally better at developing standards.
Speaking in a strictly personal capacity, I don't think that point can be taken for granted. The W3C's missteps with HTML5, and WHATWG's success, is a particularly notable failing of a dedicated standards body. The Rust programming language is also developed and codified outside of a traditional standards organization.
That's fair; I don't mean to suggest that all standards bodies are perfect all the time, or that they've never made mistakes :) just that it's better than making up a foundation spinoff from a company that doesn't have any experience and will re-invent the wheel yet again instead of submitting the standard to one of the existing standards bodies.
Matrix as a protocol is still in active development. Unlike "low-level" protocols such as HTTP, the Matrix protocol is much closer to end-user experience and so it must be able to move relatively quickly to remain competitive with proprietary systems. This generally does not fit into the process of standards bodies like the IETF very well.
There's a reason why eg. the WHATWG exists, basically.
Sure, it doesn't have to be the IETF, that was just an example. But even they tend to do this well (by eg. spinning off a smaller more agile standards body to keep up with building extensions more rapidly).
Also, rapid development has its own set of problems as we've seen with XMPP (where no two clients support the same set of features because new ones are being developed to keep up with various proprietary things all the time).
Anyways, point is, don't reinvent the wheel, I'm sure one of the standard bodies could have been a good fit if we needed this at all, but Matrix definitely isn't a good fit for this Freenode replacement and this is one of the reasons why (the other is that Freenode works just fine and the point is that this is a drop in replacement).
I don’t think there’s a bright line or litmus test, but I judge for myself.
Single standard organizations created by the dev group are just naturally biased certain ways.
I don’t think there’s a single perfect body, but it’s definitely curious to me why someone would start a stand-alone foundation rather than use w3c, ietf, or others that seem to work pretty well.
I also judge the number of different clients and servers implementing the spec for whether it’s real or just a controlled intermediary. Sun/Oracle seemed pretty bad about this back in the day with JSR stuff although I haven’t paid attention in 10 years.
Projects can make their own choices and set up foundations if they are willing to fund and monetize, etc. But that stuff isn’t as robust as IRC or protocols that have independent standards bodies.
Seems like there are lots of different clients [0] and a couple of different servers [1].
The idea of a single dev team being VC funded means that there’s a drive to monetize. That’s bad pressure on a protocol and one that doesn’t exist for IRC and other protocols. There’s multiple members in the matrix foundation and that helps but there’s just not much diversity of interests.
Again, not the end of the world, and the project seems to me to be going to great lengths to collaborate. But I feel the same way as if Microsoft started up an independent foundation to drive development of the Skype protocol. Good on them, but it’s not as robust as an independent protocol.
It just happens over many years and many successfully published and adopted standards. I don't have a good definition for you (although that's a really interesting thing to think about, maybe it's worth writing about) but I suspect most people know them when they see them.
So only "standards bodies" should create standards, and you have to create standards to become one? Then standards bodies cannot come into being and therefore don't exist.
You're making giant leaps from what I said. I didn't say it's an absolute truth forever and always throughout the universe that you can't create new standards bodies. I said this was a bad place to do it.
Good standards bodies, I think, allow lots of bee SME members who can propose new standards.
I think IETF is a good example of how anyone can propose standards on a plethora of topics. When they were very young it was hard to trust but now they are decades old with hundreds of standards demonstrating how easy it is to propose and work on new standards. Maybe even the “gold standard” of standards bodies.
I don't understand what you want; it's all true as far as I can tell, do you want a detailed technical breakdown of the protocol in an HN thread? This doesn't seem to be the place but the graph protocol mechanisms are pretty easily verified from their spec
Indeed. IRC is closed federation and the server admins are in a great position of power. In an open federation like email or matrix, the power of server admins is much smaller, and this kind of takeover wouldn't happen. Or if it did happen, it would be less of a problem.
This freenode thing shows they have less power than they think. If they abuse it, it's super-simple for their users to move elsewhere. Every sane client supports connecting to multiple networks at the same time.
it easier to change what server you connect to in your client, especially if all the channels you connect to move over, than to adopt a new protocol/client/ etc..
Wasn't there always the the argument of bridges whenever people tried to convince others to switch to Matrix?
IMO it doesn't need to be "better", there are different requirements and preferences among users and between Matrix, IRC and Jabber, each of those ecosystems got their own set of issues.
I'm interested in the fact that, given all the shadiness about ownership etc with Freenode, there is not a single name of a real person anywhere on the site that I can find. Indeed, there is only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in Sweden."
I don't know enough about Freenode. Is it normal for the staff of such a project to be secret? (Or, at least, secret if you haven't been following the previous history of Freenode?)
A year or two ago the Freenode admins were subjected to an intense and somewhat bizarre campaign against them where unsubstantiated and false claims about them were spammed into Freenode channels (also incredibly annoying for those of us trying to run free software through Freenode channels at the time). So I can kind of understand that they might want to remain anonymous.
I mean, "Fuchs" for example means far more to me than whatever the name on their drivers license is. Typically the only time I find out someone's real name on IRC is when their obituary gets posted!
How do you expect me to accept a privacy policy of your website if two parties are not identified? Every legal(-looking) document begins by identifying the parties (not necessarily names, though a quick lookup on https://www.allabolag.se will get you the names of the directors). Also, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-37-gdpr/, p. 7 requires DPO to be identified.
Maybe you are right there as well, but the Privacy page says "This page was last updated 2021-04-24." That made me post the HN comment in the first place, as I think the information gets updated pretty fast in Sweden.
fwiw: the privacy page states that it's a non-profit under Swedish Law, mentions the GDPR, sets terms regarding your personal data which ought to be aligned with the GDPR and refers to the Swedish Authority for Private Protection if you want to file a formal complaint.
It's odd to only get a mail address - policy at libera dot chat - and no further formal contact information of the non-profit as a legal entity in Sweden.
I suppose you could try an inquiry via the Swedish tax office asking them for a formal statement from the public record. I don't know any Swedish but I suppose there might be a search engine which lists public information about non-profits?
Even so, there are other hints: the footer features a link to a Github organization where you can easily track development in the open. Of course, that still doesn't give the project a clear, identifiable "face" or formal point of contact.
Other commenters argue "anonymity is how Freenode got big, and how the Internet used to work and that's perfectly fine since it fosters trust."
I think this only holds so much water today. It's not about a relationship between users of a service which provides the affordances to hide behind an anonymous handle. This is about the relationship between users and the operators of a service. You trust that an operator "won't do harm" when you log onto their service.
Such trust is tenuous at best if the decade has demonstrated. Legal frameworks such as the GDPR and privacy laws exist for the exact purpose of protecting users, and creating a legal liability on the part of all too zealous operators of services.
Moreover, the GDPR framework actively tries to de-incentivize gathering and storing any personal data which can be tracked to identifiable individuals without due cause.
Testing Libera Chat's trustworthiness would be, theoretically, as easy as sending a formal subject access request under the GDPR rules to the listed mail address.
Now, I'm aware that all of this are round about ways of figuring out whether this service is legit. It would help if their website just listed formal contact and legal details that identify the legal entity which can be held liable.
Then there's Freenode Ltd which is a UK company. Since Brexit, the GDPR doesn't apply. Given the latest publicly published updates, I don't feel similarly confident about the credibility of any statements regarding the safeguarding of personal data, nor backed by a similarly strong legal framework as far as my own rights go (I'm not acquainted with British privacy laws).
Registering your Swedish non-profit with the authorities is required for many useful things (e.g. having a bank account), though technically not mandatory. There are several free services for querying the registry, e.g. https://www.allabolag.se/.
I wasn't able to find Libera Chat there, though it might simply be the case that the registration has not been finalized yet.
According to The Swedish Tax Agency there are no civil laws regulating exactly how to form a non-profit organization. But it’s customary to create a ”decree” (stadgar) that declares such things as location (”säte“), purpose, rules for how to operate the organization, rules for how to elect the board of directors, etc. Not sure if they have done any of those things.
If the organization hasen’t created a decree and elected a board, then it will not count as juridical person.
What personal data are you actually sending to the IRC server? They can associate your IP with your Nick, and that's... It. I suppose chat logs are also your data? And the results of the port scans, if those are saved? But this seems honestly less than what the average website visit sends out
The GDPR has been replaced by the "UK GDPR" with the same requirements as part of Brexit. Unless the UK government decides to change it, you have the same protections.
The Old Internet way, you knew people by their nicks. The only thing that mattered was what they are bringing to the table in terms of valuable input. Sex, race, nationality, education, believes, age, etc. were irrelevant.
Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if not offensive.
I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for participating online.
I have anecdotes both for and against this from women who were on the internet before anything that could be considered a “women in tech” movement existed.
I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it.
The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care.
There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female.
So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.
> The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care.
Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.
> A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently.
This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.
Is it not apparent in the description that you were also assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and balls or GTFO' being a thing.
The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.
When the more puerile culture of The September that Never Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what that place was like and agreed it was a seething cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs.
Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online.
Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups.
(I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
Well that's just an awful pretentious revisionist bit of rose colored navel gazing.
Now granted, I have only been online in various forms since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine" name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30 years of online activity under my real name, I can tell you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate through the university mail system, and probably even before then.
Worked with a guy named Nikita who was on phone support. So many people in the US who couldn't wrap their heads around that normally being a mans name in Russia.
I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird people out there.
Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and largely only psudo-anonymous.
The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users. And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited connection range. People were locals.
I'm going to avoid commenting on your writing style and vocabulary and instead focus on this one word:
> we.
Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to represent, utterly fucking failed. You point the finger at the The Eternal September, but how many of those 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that? Failing one time after another until you give up and realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.
> we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of writing I actually just did.
> we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time
Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed masses finding the internet.
--
I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has changed. I dare say it's worse.
It likely originated there, but I observed it all over the place. MMOs, IRC, other message boards, etc. From my experience, it was a common fixture of the late 2000s internet culture.
The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care
That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.
I don't doubt that in those days women experienced harassment online. There was a running joke, "there are no women on irc", implying that anyone claiming to be female was actually a male pretending to be female to gain attention, or even channel ops. What is an IRL female to do in such a culture? It wouldn't surprise me to learn any of the people I used to chat with were females pretending to be male to avoid the drama.
This is true, and the expectation of "real names" has made this enormously worse. If you were "snopes" or "diogenes", nobody could harass you online for being a woman, because they didn't know you were a woman. Even a feminine name was no guarantee that your real-life gender identity was female. Contrast Fecebutt, which extorts photos of your government ID from you by cutting you off from your social network, then publishes your walletnym for every wanker to see.
During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.
I can only speak about my experience and other people have their experiences, which do not want to invalidate.
Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java.
Ah the times of Nickbot.
Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else.
(this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)
The difference is that if you chose to have a male nickname, or if you otherwise decided to advertise your masculinity (bragging about your genitalia, talking about your wife, even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer), there would be no repercussions.
Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a job, she would be known as female and harassed.
Every single woman had to think about that, every single day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.
Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. No, you may not hit on every single person on the Internet just because you think they are female." They object, but to women, that's something they've done every single day of their online lives.
Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if they don't, or if they like other things, speaking up about those things isn't equally easy.
Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap point with an offhand accusation.
It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on various sites where people use "he" by default to refer to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when they're known only by nickname.
That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture of men and women.
> In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until around the 1960s
> More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, and singular they is becoming the dominant form
But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody flips a switch and everyone across the world updates their habits, so it takes time.
While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he or she" being the taught solution for a single person of unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is going out of favour.
In the 18th century do you think most women went to school or ever had a job outside the home? Easy assumption to make that anyone reading a textbook was a "he" lol
The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet. I don't think it was even a major contender for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun before then.
Epicene they has been common all along. That's why curmudgeonly grammarians could never shut up about it--because it was so common. The recent innovation is the use of singular they in situations where gender would normally be assumed. For example, "Jane went to the restroom to comb their hair." Until recently that was jarring for most people--some more than others--even when they weren't invested in the culture wars.
Are you trying to claim that Chaucer used "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun? That is extremely dubious considering that half of the Middle English speakers were still using <he> as the third person plural pronoun[1] (descended from Old English <híe> and unrelated to the third person masculine pronoun). Chaucer himself alternates between native Old English and Anglo-Norse forms depending on grammatical case and/or whim[2].
> The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet.
The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.
That depends on your translation - some translations will translate those to “They who do not”. Many of the ones who translate it as “he” are maintaining the Hebrew lack of gender neutrality, but that’s arbitrary. If the ancient Israelites spoke Finnish instead, the sentences would be gender neutral.
Indeed, but many other women experienced none of that because, while it may have been sexist, non-gendered nicks were assumed homogenous with the group (ie male).
It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.
But the other side of that is that potential targets of harassment can't bring all of their experiences to the table. Many people who didn't experience harassment still had to self-censor to avoid attention.
If you doubt this, create an alt with a woman's name and try participating in programming, hacking, or gaming groups. Prepare to be covered in drool, get lectured condescendingly, and get lots of dick pics.
I have run this experiment in several communities, including Xbox Live (which is full of annoying teenagers). My experience wasn't much different from choosing my normal male-coded nicknames. Instead of assholes calling me, "fag", they called me "bitch". Also I got more comments related to sex instead of violence. I didn't keep track of actual numbers, but the amount of harassment and trolling I received felt about the same.
Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1]
Yup. People are generally quite shitty, but not because of gender. That doesn't mean they won't use gendered language to be shitty (because that's a more natural way to be shitty), but it's about the same amount for both.
There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.
One of these is not like the other. Programming and hacking are usually much more respectful groups than gaming.
Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women.
That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.
The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.
That was the ideal, and in my experience, the norm at the time.
The Hacker Manifesto said it nicely:
"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
I recently tried to join a discord that was tangentially relevant to the trans community and the amount of self-identification they wanted was troublesome to me (region, age, sexual preference, opinion on pronouns/pronouns, etc).
EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News karma scores are fucking cold.
S'ok. I was asked for my preferred pronouns on an application (for a job I didn't care too much about, but the pay was OK) so I put my preferred pronouns as he/him/dude, which are my actual preferred pronouns. I was told never apply to the company again. They make video games...
My first response to reading this was "dude isn't a pronoun", but after thinking about it, I realize it is being used more and more as a pronoun and not just as a noun.
I wonder what other words can be used as a pronoun?
A name for the male segment of this class of words is "bronoun," which includes things like bro, man, guy, etc.
Basically anything you can use in place of a name, so long as the grammatical usage is namelike.
"That guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a noun
"Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can tell because "he" also works grammatically)
However, I think these would need to be in the initial position(s) when slash-delimiting one's pronouns, because the final position is for a possessive form. That is, they're analogous to "he" but not analogous to "his" (and using them like "him" would be a stretch, as far as I can figure...), which might be what got GP in hot water.
> "Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can tell because "he" also works grammatically)
You don't think that's merely people being lazy and leaving off a word that can be inferred ('That')? This is something I often do in casual conversation, particularly vocal conversations:
"I am wondering what you mean" - 'I' is a pronoun
"Wondering what you mean" - 'Wondering' is now the pronoun??? Clearly not. It's just a way that people are lazy and sloppy with grammar when correct grammar isn't important.
It really isn't a pronoun, but goes into the implicit versus explicit thing. If your pronouns are "He/Him" you want to be called "Man", implicitly. If I don't say "Dude", explicitly, how are they to know?... Plus, I've met several people who chafe at being called "Dude", and I prefer it TBH. "Hey, dude" or "Dude's got good coding practices" are perfectly fine by me, but I'm also in my 40's and it shows =/
When I first read this it did sound a bit funny - I'm guessing they thought you were trying to be humorous, but, like the other reply, I can also totally understand that you actually enjoy being called dude.
I mean, most spaces have those as roles that you can fill in, but don't have to. wrt pronoun roles, they are used for figuring out how to refer to you -- it is after all, a trans space where appearance and expectation won't match up with people's preferences, and where people are tired from the water-drip torture* that is constant implicit and explicit misgendering.
* - that is to say, each individual instance (drip) wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can cause a lot of anguish.
In this case they were mandatory. I get that it represents an issue for that community but I'm merely describing a schism compared with earlier internet attitudes and some spaces today.
I left the community because it just upset me to have to do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does.
I also think asking for some of those things is absurd and intrusive. I would feel a little (*not deathly) uncomfortable baring my soul like that to some anonymous Discord admins. I'd like to know what others feel/why this is a downvoteable comment.
I participate in a Discord that is kind of similar. Not the same one, because my example has totally optional pronoun choice. But they have reason to be cautious of newcomers: before they added an interview/onboarding step, they were continually brigaded by trolls of various levels of sincerity. The internet can be a harsh place, and I understand the desire to create a refuge.
I am guessing you are downvoted because a transforum is arguable one of the very few places where that question makes sense.
I would find it deeply wrong if HN were to ask for the gender of their users, let alone their sexual preferences, but I would expect the same of a dating site.
But I don't disagree with you in general. I also miss the intimacy a nick could afford you. Somehow you could talk about deeper things when nobody knew your name.
The beautiful era where everyone had to either adopt the persona of being a cis het white western man or be subject to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. I tried being a girl openly on the early internet when I was young and naive but after constant jokes like "how are you using IRC from the kitchen?" and "tits or gtfo" you just give up and learn to talk like a guy.
> being a cis het white western man or be subject to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes.
Believe it or not but cis white western men were and still are subject to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. As a cis white western man myself I personally have experienced harassment online.
I didn't say they couldn't be. You're doing the thing where you assume that a implies b means that b implies a.
"If you did not pass as a cit het white man you would likely be harassed for it on the early internet."
is not the same thing as
"If you were harassed on the early internet then you must not have passed as a cis het white man."
During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
The way you worded it sounded like you were as explicit as you can be without explicitly saying that men are not harassed. You said you either adopt the persona of a man OR you are harassed. You also said you gave up and learned to talk like a man (to stop certain harassment). Both of these implies that you are not harassed if you act like a man.
>During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."
There is a difference in your original post and your analogy due to the use of the word 'or' in the original post. If you go to a restaurant and they ask if you want salad or soup as a side dish they are not implying you get both, but one or the other.
It is too bad in English we do not have xor to prevent such confusions.
People are too forthcoming on the internet today, with some divulging almost their entire being to the megacorp spy machines. It's easy for stalkers, let alone adtech and three letter agencies, to find and track people.
I prefer today's tech, but yesterday's freedom, mindset, and lack of tracking.
I'm not 100% on board with today's tech either. I miss when every instant messenger supported XMPP so I could just use Adium/Pidgin to handle all my communications in one program.
There was a time where the 'hackers' where in the minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was never a real thing in western/northern europe
Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s
In my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels.
No, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was the default.
In my experience the "a/s/l" question has only ever come from people who wanted to have text sex with you, and outside of those sort of chatrooms was only ever said as an awkward joke.
When I got the asl question i found it rude and told them i don’t like answering the question. It often had a sexual / dating connotation in my mind, which i didn’t like.
And that is exactly what led to the current problem with freenode, right?
I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal organization or legal rights that let one person who had enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he owned it.
You want that not to happen again, you might want to do something different. And indeed the announcement acknowledges that, that's why there is "a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).
No. Freenode was purchased by an entrepreneur and former Mt Gox employee supposedly to facilitate a conference called "Freenode Live". It had nothing to do with use of real names.
Somehow I think we're not having the same conversation. It's not that it had to do with use of real names on freenode. It's that it had to do with no formal legal structure for freenode (and a formal legal structure requires real names associated with it).
The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... they got away with it.
The comment at the top of this thread was talking about how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that sort of thing happening again before investing energy in this new thing, one would want to know more about the formal legal structure and who is behind it.
The "old internet" way is "We're just some people cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to know each other's real names." That has plusses and minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone else for personal profit, even though all the people informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns out it's hard to stop them.
Freenode was registered under Freenode Limited out of Britain, the head of staff was effectively the president. There was definitely legal structure, voting, etc... People knew Christel's name, the rest of the staffers knew each other's names, it's just not circulated outside of that circle.
I don't know what IRC you were using, but it isn't the IRC I knew.
I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry) and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted with.
Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had established enough "rapport" to do so.
I have been on IRC for a long time (since 1995) and I can attest to the truth of this. The same thing was also true of Usenet. Back then tech was far, far less politicized than it is now and most users had connections and collaboration with people that had nothing to do with off-internet life.
I remember one time that after having been in the same channel with a user and chatting to them almost every day for 10 years, they finally revealed that they were female not male. That was a real revelation. The same could be said for people who you assumed were from the Anglosphere but turned out to be Indian, African, or from other far-flung places. The point is, none of this mattered. What mattered was your intelligence, knowledge, problem-solving ability, and programming chops.
In many respects, the Old Internet Way was better than the New Internet Way.
Not just gender and race. Age as well. When I revealed my age to my friends/guildmates there was always shock (I was 12-16 at the time). Some of them I'd known for several years before I told them.
The internet was the only place I was treated as an adult, an equal. As I got older I no longer felt the need to hide my age to be treated that way, but I really hope kids of today can find a similar place.
People on the Old Internet assumed you were "like them". If they're a white, 25 year old american male, they're going to assume you are a white, 20-something american male by default. You can correct them, but… why would you care? Back then we didn't really try to paint a picture of who we are in real life. Like you said, all that mattered was what you would concretely bring to the table. Trying to emphasize your age, gender or nationality would be seen as rude in an "is that what you're bringing to the table?" kind of way (less of an issue in the case of nationality as RL meetups became more common, and especially less of an issue in europe-centric international groups where your location could in fact be something you're bringing to the table).
There's a lot of valid criticism of the Old Internet and it wasn't a perfect place. Sexism was certainly rampant. So was ageism. But in a much more practical sense, it was way the fuck more egalitarian than what we have now.
Trust is built over time. The same complaints exist even if they provided all of the information requested. “How do we know these people are really the real people that worked on freenode?” Etc.
The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat, but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a more complete story will emerge.
I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat.
With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service is more clearly documented and understood by everyone.
At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit they have established should be clearly displayed on the web page somewhere.
Yes. Look where it got us: fb, twitter, reddit, etc taking it all over, because people "trust" them - see ominous zuck quote. Why? Because ordinary people need faces and names. So unless libera is aiming for the oldschool nerds, like us, they need to align with 2021.
> without knowing a single name or face behind it.
That's because we are ensconced in a framework of corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses happen all the time.
Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed solution is basically to do this out the gate.
Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC funded chat service with lots of users and a looming prospect of having to be profitable without losing them.
Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather used it to set up new events like freenode live.
That's not the point (edit): the only thing I'm missing from libera is an impressum. Mentioning a nameless swedish nonprofit is actually worse in my eyes, than calling it xyz's server in the basement.
That is the point. People don't use Facebook because they like using real names, people use real names on Facebook because they were forced to in order to stay on Facebook.
When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require real names.
If it's unevenly enforced, then it's not "required" in any practical sense. Nobody I know has ever been kicked off for a fake but reasonable looking name. Facebook is not a government authority. If you ask for a picture of my ID, I can generate a fake one without consequence.
Meanwhile Discord is one of the most commonly used platforms for young people, where everyone is an anime girl named after their favorite song. I wouldn’t be so sure about your assumption. Facebook is becoming increasingly known as an uncool boomer thing.
OK, it looks like nobody understood my point, fascinating.
Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their community there trust the entity running Discord.
I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity behind them.
I was never talking about the community on top of a platform, but the platform itself.
That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the persona and back to the person behind it. A single person can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains this kind of gaming of the system and so makes trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.
This is not to say that the costs of using real names outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of establishing trust is just wrong.
Irrespective of real/fake name, behavior is most critical factor in trust, furthermore behavior changes, so interactions is your only information for degree of trust. Your real name is just label nothing more.
Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title, etc ...
It's also established by pointing to one's past behavior to demonstrate a track record of trustworthiness, of certain values, etc. If it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg is leading the charge, here, you'd be unhappy.
If new product/service is not lead by Mark Zuckerberg you should not trust it ether, since you have no track record, furthermore past performance is not guarantee of future results.
This is (at least) time number two, that OSS projects have used the "Libre/Libera" term in community reboot/rebrand efforts. Nothing against speakers of French which have given us so many beautiful words, but there is something off putting about libre/libera for me in "brand names". I like what they stand for even! They just don't roll off the tongue for me. Is this just a "me thing"? Maybe there's something inherit about the actual phonetics that makes it off putting for me?
Interesting, when I hear libre, I think Spanish. It comes from a common root word across all the Latin languages, and that has also given us "liberty" in English.
Anyway, it doesn't bother me. It's better than "Free", which is mostly misunderstood, RMS's rebranding attempts notwithstanding.
I agree that "libre" does not roll off the tongue well. It's a rare pattern in English, shared with words like cadre, timbre, and macabre. Those are nouns, so they're not followed by another word in the same way as e.g. "libre software". We have other words like theatre or acre or lustre that we pronounce as if the e and the r are switched. That could work for libre, pronouncing it like "mediocre" (the only other adjective I know of that is spelled that way).
Libreoffice rubs me in a particularly wrong way, because until someone explained it, I did not know whether it was "libre office" or "lib re-office". Either one is strange (the former especially awkward because of the two vowel sounds back-to-back).
It's just a you thing. Much of the world is not English speaking, and many languages (including English, by the way) use the libre root. It has a well established meaning as a specific meaning of "free". I'd even go so far as to say that "libre" itself is virtually an English word now. Sorry you don't like it. Maybe learning a second language will help.
Amurhica. :) However, I do speak Norwegian (and can limp med Svenska). Even if I tenk på det på Norsk, det fremdeles er samme :D. GratisNet would have been kult I guess. Or ÅpneNet.
It might prove foolish to move decades-old communities to something that can’t withstand HN front page, or freenode jumping. (Libera is currently down for many people.)
One thing I learned with my own community is that building one on negatives isn’t sustainable. Think about it: all of the big communities had a positive purpose for being created. They stood for something. What does Libera stand for?
Mission statement is crucial, and it seems to be absent here.
The part I don't get is there was the same drama when freenode was founded...
The org structure (wasn't it a non-profit at one point?), the donation drives, etc. There was a lot of "much larger irc networks don't need all this", "its a cash grab", etc.
Now, it seems to have fallen victim to the very issues the organization was supposed to prevent ?
Interesting...I wasn't even aware they had moved to the UK.
It does seem anything more then 10 years old now is forgotten as 'ancient history' :-P The whole purpose of the original freenode organization seems to have been lost in the mists.
The network policies, and Guidelines, recommendations and best practices are already fraught with subjectivity and the unsolvable dichotomy of carrier v publisher (at least in the USA).
"While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, Libera.Chat does not operate on the basis of absolute freedom of speech". Ah I see: https://libera.chat/policies
I would feel way more confident if they defined all the terms used in this document e.g. "various forms of antisocial behaviour are forbidden", "discrimination", "any other behaviour meant to deliberately put upon a person harassment, alarm or distress".
The vagueness is rather alarming and distressing to me.
The problem with extremely well defined limits is that those who choose to be assholes will ride up to that line and push it constantly.
Then use the defense "the rules don't say I can't call you a butthead", so the rules get updated then they push some more and the cycle repeats.
With fuzzier boundaries if someone is being an ass you can kick them the first time. This does of course mean you need a decent set of moderators and an appeals process to prevent people power tripping.
In my experience those kind of clauses are more often used to silence wrongthink than to rid communities of people who are truly disruptive. You can count me out. The chilling effect is real.
I suspect IRC will always have a place in my heart, but it doesn't seem to be what it once was. Is there some hip new place where people hang out to discuss and help with stuff like JS frameworks and the like? I don't necessarily want to go there, but I'd like to know where it is.
If you’re going to switch a bunch of servers anyway, why not start over by partnering with someone like Matrix.org? Dead simple to create an IRC<->matrix bridge for people who just love the old protocol, and decentralization efforts always have strength in numbers.
A lot of people find Matrix completely unpalatable. Why would they support it in this way?
IRC works and has worked for decades. Its minimal, text-only, no bs, no distractions nature is its greatest asset. Client support, programmability, and ease of integration too.
The folks that like Matrix are already using it. The folks that have stuck with IRC for decades will not abandon it for a protocol they deem to be inferior.
Trust me, I get that; the main argument is that, in protocol wars, there's strength in numbers; IRC is a waning protocol, Matrix is a waxing protocol. I'm not saying people must change what's working for them already; my only case is that _if_ what _was_ working for you is now broken (the freenode network), you have a new opportunity to re-evaluate your position. That's all.
You don't even have to go "all in" on all the fancy new Matrix stuff; just write a wrapper to comply with being a "homeserver", and continue using the IRC API with no changes. If not, that's also fine, I'm not that invested in this personally.
For example, if your lines on the matrix side are long it converts them into urls. So people on IRC end up seeing you talking with 1/4 of your messages just being urls to some random server's pastebin.
When the matrix gateways go up and down you'll have 1000 random users thunderously join and part the channel at once.
Matrix comment edits flood the channels.
Matrix is unhelpful with abuse reports, in my experience.
I generally ban matrix from IRC channels for these and other such nuisances.
TBH it's silly that IRC clients and servers still respect the 512-byte limit for messages. Clients should send a command (e.g. something like PROTOCTL NOMSGLMT) to let the server know it supports messages of arbitrary length. And the server should cut off messages as before for every client that hasn't sent the command in question. Or there could be a limit matching the limit in the Matrix protocol if there is a limit in e.g. Matrix.
Seriously, I think message length limits are the main thing that's holding back the IRC protocol. If you can send e.g. 65536 byte messages, anybody will be immediately able to create scripts for sending images or code snippets.
fwiw we've just added stuff to the IRC bridge to let the pastebin, edit & reply behaviour be configurable on a per-room basis so that if folks have strong opinions they can enforce them.
In terms of abuse reports; Element hires a fulltime team of folks to man abuse@matrix.org on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation and chase down the tickets as they come in. Please ping abuse@matrix.org if we've dropped stuff.
First it needs to be merged & deployed. Then it'd have to be configured from the Matrix side as a one-off (a bit like configuring ChanServ stuff is a one-off on IRC). You'd log in on Matrix, give the Matrix user ops from IRC, and then twiddle the settings (for which there isn't a UI yet, but will get added soon). Also, we'll be setting the defaults to be pretty conservative based on the preferences of the target IRC network admins (potentially disabling pastebins & edits & replies entirely, to minimise impedance mismatch between Matrix & IRC), so the chances are you wouldn't need to configure anything.
Splendid, this sounds exactly like what we need in our channel. Is there a specific project page/Github issue/… I can keep an eye on, so that I know when this functionality is deployed?
Do we know why there has been no update to IRC protocol to ensure end to end encryption?
I understand that doing e2e for public chats is extremely complex - so these could remain public, but private messages could easily be encrypted.
I think group e2ee is overblown and self-defeating in principle. Good luck auditing a ratcheting e2ee algo. Plus it breaks often, and group encryption is defeated by any user in the chat.
Direct e2ee is far simpler and can be expanded to small groups without the need for complex ratcheting trees. Anything larger and you may as well fall-back to client-server with e2e communications.
but as far as I know there is only one implementation, and it's underdocumented. The protocol itself seems well specified, but it doesn't use "standard" primitives https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.1.1.html
And UIs are usually not great (you have to check a shared secret via a trusted channel).
There are also talks of an OTRv4, shared by XMPP and IRC: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-ideas/issues/67 but the protocol is even more complex, I even have a hard time following the introductory sections of its specification.
It's a huge pain in Matrix with even a small amount of users in a chat. At least for me, I've never used IRC where I cared about e2e. There are other services for that, including just encrypting with the other party's public pgp key.
It's worrisome to me that one of the stated objections I've seen to Freenode's new owner is related to his personal politics: https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461
My own personal politics are probably very very similar to the above author who was complaining about the new owner being "Trumpian", but what will happen if/when we disagreed about something? Would I get the boot from Libera? I totally don't care about Orange Man's fans enough to leave a network over it.
e: You gotta appreciate the irony of which group is censoring me right here with downvote-as-disagree :)
IDK man, it's not just politics. Trump supporters also often seem to be misogynistic/bigoted/racist. Are those the kinds of people you want being in charge of online communities?
That person is completely within their rights to not want to work for someone like that.
> Are those the kinds of people you want being in charge of online communities?
As long as they do a good job running the servers and don't censor me, sure. Life's too short for me to add more hate to the world in anticipation of receiving hate even though I am several flavors of minority in the tech world.
To be fair (and I'm not a Trump fan), there's more than one reason someone might support Trump.
I know a fair number of people who supported Trump because he was a departure from the Bush/Clinton oligopoly and promised no more "wars like Iraq." He also promised to push back on grossly unfair trade policies with China.
Had Trump not run in 2016 it's entirely likely that we would have had, starting in 1992: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama (more or less Clinton), and then a race between (drum roll...) Bush and Clinton!
Though I gotta say... many of them didn't vote for Trump the second time because even if he did have a few good points his personality is too repellent and humiliating to tolerate.
Voting for trump and being a trump supporter is not the same thing though. If someone is publicly saying that they're a supporter, that means that they support trump's policies and practices. Which includes bigotry.
I voted for Joe Biden, but do not support all his policies and positions.
Racism is awful, but American racism has not killed anywhere from 500k to 1m people (depending on who is counting) recently. The Iraq war did that along with setting fire to over a trillion dollars.
Sometimes I think Trump was worth it to make sure nobody named Bush or Clinton ever inhabits the White House again.
I don't see how being even a little racist is good in any way. I honestly feel like a lot of people don't realise what being subjected to racism is like in our present day.
RIP freenode. This is never gonna take off. Terrible name. I have zero temptation to type `libera.chat` into my IRC client. I feel like I got chlamydia from typing that just now.
It looks like the DNS is still propagating through the internet, and from some servers it does not resolve yet. Also it looks like they are just generally down a lot right now.
Leaving Freenode for a new network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440 - May 2021 (253 comments)
Freenode resignation is official, not a draft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926 - May 2021 (10 comments)
The Freenode resignation FAQ, or: “what the fuck is going on?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 - May 2021 (8 comments)
I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338 - May 2021 (262 comments)