7 ms·

Kiwi IRC founder stops contributing to IRC after Freenode drama

101 points by buovjaga 5y ago

swiley 5y ago
I honestly don't really understand what happened but with all of this the internet just got a lot less free.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  s/less free/more fragmented IRC networks/
  - grumpy-cowboy 5y ago
    s/more fragmented IRC networks/more decentralized IRC networks
encryptluks2 5y ago
Unfortunately I see this in a lot of projects lately, especially cryptocurrency, where winning has nothing to do with technical excellence and logic, but silencing what they perceive as opponents or people that dare question their argument. It has turned into cult mentality, like mentioned in this post going as far as to find anything... often completely unrelated to the initial discussion, in order to try to discredit their viewpoints. It is simply a away to silence people that challenge them, even though in a healthy community constructive criticism should be considered a positive thing to help improve.
rootsudo 5y ago
That's sad, but I hope the website does not go down. The online web client is fantastic. There are still a few niche communities that still use irc chat clients and having it in a browser tab makes that connectivity possible.
vosper 5y ago
In case anyone was wondering (as I was) why the nationality of the founder matters: this is about a project called KiwiIRC, not about a New Zealander. Which made me think: To a New Zealander, Kiwi is our word for ourselves (or the bird). You'll never see BritishIRC or AustralianIRC. It's odd to see a part of our national identity used like that. (Not being too serious here: I also am well aware that our Kiwifruit exporters have done such a great job of branding that people overseas forget the "fruit" part, and just call them "Kiwis". So we did it to ourselves! Also, the bird came first)
- yreg 5y ago
  TIL kiwifruit is called kiwifruit.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Also TIL kiwifruit is from China ("Chinese gooseberry")
- sebastialonso 5y ago
  TIL, in my country the fruit's name _is_ kiwi.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  I suppose you could re-brand yourselves "Silver Ferns".
- dogma1138 5y ago
  Kiwi fruit is originally from China, its a Gooseberry. The name kiwi fruit seem to have come from US servicemen stationed in NZ and Australia during WW2 similarly to how Americano became a name for a coffee drink which is just a diluted espresso since the Americans stationed in Italy were used to weaker coffee and found espresso too strong.
  - chris1993 5y ago
    It was named 'chinese gooseberry' until Hort NZ rebranded it but they are unrelated botanically (European gooseberry is Ribes uva-crispa, Kiwifruit is Actinidia deliciosa).
lxe 5y ago
I'm having a hard time following this. Is there a summary of this "Freenode drama" from the sidelines?
- notRobot 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301
- guavaNinja 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/gKAIazAJuzQ https://youtu.be/gKAIazAJuzQ https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409/#ok-so-whats-going-on https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
- enriquto 5y ago
  The canonical references on all kinds of drama: Law of Drama: https://xkcd.com/1124/ https://xkcd.com/1124/ Drama: https://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/ ( after s/sex/irc/g )
- Macha 5y ago
  Christel, the previous freenode head of staff, sold freenode to andrew lee (then of PIA). This was downplayed at the time, both publicly and to staff, so this is effectively delayed drama that would have happened in 2017 otherwise. Christel stepped down, new staff lead shut out Andrew Lee, not realising the depth of his ownership - helped by both Christel and Andrew Lee downplaying it in the past. When it became clear that "Freenode" was owned by Andrew Lee, and not the volunteer run organisation they believed it to be, drama ensued over whether she had the legal right to (probably yes), whether it was morally appropriate to (probably not) and what she actually sold (Freenode runs via volunteer staff on loaned servers, none of which freenode ltd owns or has contracts for, so it basically just owns a domain and a website). After the legal discussions found that Andrew Lee did legally own whatever freenode itself owned, the staff all quit and formed libera.chat, their own network. Andrew Lee brought in new staff to freenode and some policy changes (notably allowing network ops to reclaim channels that were abandoned as redirects, and toning down the code of conduct portion). More detailed timeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236455
vasilakisfil 5y ago
I haven't followed on what actually happened, but this is only bad for IRC itself. And if we had IRCv3 + federation etc, maybe it wouldn't matter that much but we are not even close.
ionwake 5y ago
This is so sad, I have no idea whats happening but it doesnt sound good. Ive always used freenode to ask questions and 90% of the time it has been great. I did encounter some poeple with "issues" where weirdly, I guess because we all try to use our nick, the confrontations are harsher ( than on anonymous places like the chans). I had one person convinced for 3 hours that I was for some reason a bad person because I asked a simple question about libraries, and well that was non stop abuse. I cant imagine how hard it is to be a dev. On the other hand freenode is where I knew I could contact someone working at a big company who might be able to resolve an issue and also get the word out about something. One fond memory I have is witnessing the first real Bitcoin crash a decade ago, I think it was from $50 down to $5 or something, and just before it happened these random nicks appeared in the channel and started trolling everyone. Thank you to everyone who contributed to freenode, I wish I knew how I could help support it in the right way.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
Good on him, it's still not clear what caused anything in the first place .. very weird. People should go away and come back when the storm is over. Thanks for their work too, as many kiwirc helped me many times.
naikrovek 5y ago
what I'm learning here is that IRC hasn't changed in 20+ years. there are pockets of wholesome communities, and the overall IRC "culture" has been pretty toxic in my experience. it has always been far easier to find a drama queen on IRC than it has to find a person with normal reactions and thought processes. there's just something about IRC that either brings out that side in people, or attracts that type of person, or both. it really is sad. it could be such a useful resource, and maybe it is. maybe I just had back luck 20 years ago. I don't miss IRC, I do know that.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  IRC was social media before it was cool. The drama and poison is just part of that.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Looking now at my experience of hanging out in IRC 20 years ago, it looks the same. Very low entry barriers, toxic hierarchical culture by design (even codified in client UI conventions, putting channel ops at the top), lack of safe space unless you cut yourself off the community, lack of commercial incentives to develop moderation and grow user base, perceived lawfulness and so on and so on.
Seirdy 5y ago
Worth noting that nearly the same thing happened to Snoonet in 2019 as well. Some choices that prawnsalad made caused some Snoonet staff members to step down. A letter of resignation signed by three staff members with some context: https://archive.ph/2TpKi https://archive.ph/2TpKi If anybody is looking for a FLOSS web-based IRC client, I recommend checking out TheLounge.
- buovjaga 5y ago
  No, prawnsalad did not make the choices you are referring to. Quote from the farewell letter: "(Tiny bit of context, The Snoonet network was sold by its founder, didn't explain to the network staff, then I had to explain to the staff (i think roughly a year later) what had happened as clear possible, I still get blamed for selling the network though)"
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    This was post-sale.
wut42 5y ago
Some history! In December 2016, rasengan (via Private Internet Access) sponsors it (https://snoonet.org/posts/2016/12/15/introducing-our-newest-partner-private-internet-access/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2016/12/15/introducing-our-newest-...). In May 2017, Snoonet joins the the PIA family (https://snoonet.org/posts/2017/05/11/snoonet-joins-the-privateinternetaccesscom-family/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2017/05/11/snoonet-joins-the-priva...). At that time, rdv, a co-founder of Snoonet, was hired at LTM as (among other titles) "Community Relations Manager", and announced to the staff that he could now "offer LTM's resources to Snoonet; the same resources provided to Freenode", while reassuring that "the idea is to keep IRC networks in tact and operational as they always were". His goal at LTM was to "protect and keep in tact what matters most: underground communities". bloodygonzo, a staffer, precised to the staff that "LTM has bought Snoonet and will officially cover snoonet and make sure we have the legal and administrative aid of LTM. LTM has agreed to leave snoonet as is and continue to allow us to run things as we see fit.". In October 2018, Snoonet partners with IRC.com (https://snoonet.org/posts/2018/11/22/important-changes-to-snoonet-and-a-partnership-with-irccom/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2018/11/22/important-changes-to-sn...), linking the two. noeatnosleep (who worked at LTM, at a role to safeguard LTM's investment) then the head of staff (allegedly not installed in this post by a general consensus), commented on [hn](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376571): "LTM provides servers for us, with no asks or meddling". prawnsalad says to the staff that "so yea, snoonet.org will still be independant as mcuh as it can be. the branding, the communities here, etc, wont change. and noeatnosleep is still running that side of thigns to grow snoonet". In February 2019, prawnsalad clarifies the IRC.com partnership (https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/e61069c23e9fc0ed0e4658cbf47a4c4a https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/e61069c23e9fc0ed0e4658cbf...), including that "Snoonet is a project under the IRC.com company". This is discussed in an irc channel with the staff (https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt), where some reproach that he had previously said that "While for the most part Snoonet is entirely free to do as it pleases,". In October 2019, prawnsald decides to bring IRC.com and Snoonet more "inline" (https://web.archive.org/web/20191021113301/https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/7b3f5929dadc81c39228e373fa0ca569 https://web.archive.org/web/20191021113301/https://gist.gith...), prompting some staffers to resigns: linuxdaemon (https://gist.github.com/linuxdaemon/9555cc4c2c73eefc4dfec00da3861aa8 https://gist.github.com/linuxdaemon/9555cc4c2c73eefc4dfec00d...), iownall555 (https://gist.github.com/iownall555/69543286e9ed31ef70362429d23aa362 https://gist.github.com/iownall555/69543286e9ed31ef70362429d...), A_Dragon (https://gist.github.com/A-UNDERSCORE-D/66dcf27eaf14ecc0b07a642c34811269 https://gist.github.com/A-UNDERSCORE-D/66dcf27eaf14ecc0b07a6...). It is also worth noting that during theses years, it has been asked to the staff to give server access to unknown people at random times, and that rdv had been expelled from the network due to very questionable behavior, and noeatnosleep has left the staff. Dates for theses events are unknown to me. Make your opinion, and any resemblance to other current events is fortuitous.

101 points by buovjaga 5y ago

swiley 5y ago

I honestly don't really understand what happened but with all of this the internet just got a lot less free.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago
s/less free/more fragmented IRC networks/
- grumpy-cowboy 5y ago
  s/more fragmented IRC networks/more decentralized IRC networks

encryptluks2 5y ago

Unfortunately I see this in a lot of projects lately, especially cryptocurrency, where winning has nothing to do with technical excellence and logic, but silencing what they perceive as opponents or people that dare question their argument. It has turned into cult mentality, like mentioned in this post going as far as to find anything... often completely unrelated to the initial discussion, in order to try to discredit their viewpoints. It is simply a away to silence people that challenge them, even though in a healthy community constructive criticism should be considered a positive thing to help improve.

rootsudo 5y ago

That's sad, but I hope the website does not go down. The online web client is fantastic. There are still a few niche communities that still use irc chat clients and having it in a browser tab makes that connectivity possible.

vosper 5y ago

In case anyone was wondering (as I was) why the nationality of the founder matters: this is about a project called KiwiIRC, not about a New Zealander. Which made me think: To a New Zealander, Kiwi is our word for ourselves (or the bird). You'll never see BritishIRC or AustralianIRC. It's odd to see a part of our national identity used like that. (Not being too serious here: I also am well aware that our Kiwifruit exporters have done such a great job of branding that people overseas forget the "fruit" part, and just call them "Kiwis". So we did it to ourselves! Also, the bird came first)

yreg 5y ago
TIL kiwifruit is called kiwifruit.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Also TIL kiwifruit is from China ("Chinese gooseberry")
sebastialonso 5y ago
TIL, in my country the fruit's name _is_ kiwi.
dsr_ 5y ago
I suppose you could re-brand yourselves "Silver Ferns".
dogma1138 5y ago
Kiwi fruit is originally from China, its a Gooseberry. The name kiwi fruit seem to have come from US servicemen stationed in NZ and Australia during WW2 similarly to how Americano became a name for a coffee drink which is just a diluted espresso since the Americans stationed in Italy were used to weaker coffee and found espresso too strong.
- chris1993 5y ago
  It was named 'chinese gooseberry' until Hort NZ rebranded it but they are unrelated botanically (European gooseberry is Ribes uva-crispa, Kiwifruit is Actinidia deliciosa).

lxe 5y ago

I'm having a hard time following this. Is there a summary of this "Freenode drama" from the sidelines?

notRobot 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301
guavaNinja 5y ago
https://youtu.be/gKAIazAJuzQ https://youtu.be/gKAIazAJuzQ https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409/#ok-so-whats-going-on https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
enriquto 5y ago
The canonical references on all kinds of drama: Law of Drama: https://xkcd.com/1124/ https://xkcd.com/1124/ Drama: https://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/ ( after s/sex/irc/g )
Macha 5y ago
Christel, the previous freenode head of staff, sold freenode to andrew lee (then of PIA). This was downplayed at the time, both publicly and to staff, so this is effectively delayed drama that would have happened in 2017 otherwise. Christel stepped down, new staff lead shut out Andrew Lee, not realising the depth of his ownership - helped by both Christel and Andrew Lee downplaying it in the past. When it became clear that "Freenode" was owned by Andrew Lee, and not the volunteer run organisation they believed it to be, drama ensued over whether she had the legal right to (probably yes), whether it was morally appropriate to (probably not) and what she actually sold (Freenode runs via volunteer staff on loaned servers, none of which freenode ltd owns or has contracts for, so it basically just owns a domain and a website). After the legal discussions found that Andrew Lee did legally own whatever freenode itself owned, the staff all quit and formed libera.chat, their own network. Andrew Lee brought in new staff to freenode and some policy changes (notably allowing network ops to reclaim channels that were abandoned as redirects, and toning down the code of conduct portion). More detailed timeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236455

vasilakisfil 5y ago

I haven't followed on what actually happened, but this is only bad for IRC itself. And if we had IRCv3 + federation etc, maybe it wouldn't matter that much but we are not even close.

ionwake 5y ago

This is so sad, I have no idea whats happening but it doesnt sound good. Ive always used freenode to ask questions and 90% of the time it has been great. I did encounter some poeple with "issues" where weirdly, I guess because we all try to use our nick, the confrontations are harsher ( than on anonymous places like the chans). I had one person convinced for 3 hours that I was for some reason a bad person because I asked a simple question about libraries, and well that was non stop abuse. I cant imagine how hard it is to be a dev. On the other hand freenode is where I knew I could contact someone working at a big company who might be able to resolve an issue and also get the word out about something. One fond memory I have is witnessing the first real Bitcoin crash a decade ago, I think it was from $50 down to $5 or something, and just before it happened these random nicks appeared in the channel and started trolling everyone. Thank you to everyone who contributed to freenode, I wish I knew how I could help support it in the right way.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

agumonkey 5y ago

Good on him, it's still not clear what caused anything in the first place .. very weird. People should go away and come back when the storm is over. Thanks for their work too, as many kiwirc helped me many times.

naikrovek 5y ago

what I'm learning here is that IRC hasn't changed in 20+ years. there are pockets of wholesome communities, and the overall IRC "culture" has been pretty toxic in my experience. it has always been far easier to find a drama queen on IRC than it has to find a person with normal reactions and thought processes. there's just something about IRC that either brings out that side in people, or attracts that type of person, or both. it really is sad. it could be such a useful resource, and maybe it is. maybe I just had back luck 20 years ago. I don't miss IRC, I do know that.

LegitShady 5y ago
IRC was social media before it was cool. The drama and poison is just part of that.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
Looking now at my experience of hanging out in IRC 20 years ago, it looks the same. Very low entry barriers, toxic hierarchical culture by design (even codified in client UI conventions, putting channel ops at the top), lack of safe space unless you cut yourself off the community, lack of commercial incentives to develop moderation and grow user base, perceived lawfulness and so on and so on.

Seirdy 5y ago

Worth noting that nearly the same thing happened to Snoonet in 2019 as well. Some choices that prawnsalad made caused some Snoonet staff members to step down. A letter of resignation signed by three staff members with some context: https://archive.ph/2TpKi https://archive.ph/2TpKi If anybody is looking for a FLOSS web-based IRC client, I recommend checking out TheLounge.

buovjaga 5y ago
No, prawnsalad did not make the choices you are referring to. Quote from the farewell letter: "(Tiny bit of context, The Snoonet network was sold by its founder, didn't explain to the network staff, then I had to explain to the staff (i think roughly a year later) what had happened as clear possible, I still get blamed for selling the network though)"
- Seirdy 5y ago
  This was post-sale.

wut42 5y ago

Some history! In December 2016, rasengan (via Private Internet Access) sponsors it (https://snoonet.org/posts/2016/12/15/introducing-our-newest-partner-private-internet-access/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2016/12/15/introducing-our-newest-...). In May 2017, Snoonet joins the the PIA family (https://snoonet.org/posts/2017/05/11/snoonet-joins-the-privateinternetaccesscom-family/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2017/05/11/snoonet-joins-the-priva...). At that time, rdv, a co-founder of Snoonet, was hired at LTM as (among other titles) "Community Relations Manager", and announced to the staff that he could now "offer LTM's resources to Snoonet; the same resources provided to Freenode", while reassuring that "the idea is to keep IRC networks in tact and operational as they always were". His goal at LTM was to "protect and keep in tact what matters most: underground communities". bloodygonzo, a staffer, precised to the staff that "LTM has bought Snoonet and will officially cover snoonet and make sure we have the legal and administrative aid of LTM. LTM has agreed to leave snoonet as is and continue to allow us to run things as we see fit.". In October 2018, Snoonet partners with IRC.com (https://snoonet.org/posts/2018/11/22/important-changes-to-snoonet-and-a-partnership-with-irccom/ https://snoonet.org/posts/2018/11/22/important-changes-to-sn...), linking the two. noeatnosleep (who worked at LTM, at a role to safeguard LTM's investment) then the head of staff (allegedly not installed in this post by a general consensus), commented on [hn](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376571): "LTM provides servers for us, with no asks or meddling". prawnsalad says to the staff that "so yea, snoonet.org will still be independant as mcuh as it can be. the branding, the communities here, etc, wont change. and noeatnosleep is still running that side of thigns to grow snoonet". In February 2019, prawnsalad clarifies the IRC.com partnership (https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/e61069c23e9fc0ed0e4658cbf47a4c4a https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/e61069c23e9fc0ed0e4658cbf...), including that "Snoonet is a project under the IRC.com company". This is discussed in an irc channel with the staff (https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt), where some reproach that he had previously said that "While for the most part Snoonet is entirely free to do as it pleases,". In October 2019, prawnsald decides to bring IRC.com and Snoonet more "inline" (https://web.archive.org/web/20191021113301/https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/7b3f5929dadc81c39228e373fa0ca569 https://web.archive.org/web/20191021113301/https://gist.gith...), prompting some staffers to resigns: linuxdaemon (https://gist.github.com/linuxdaemon/9555cc4c2c73eefc4dfec00da3861aa8 https://gist.github.com/linuxdaemon/9555cc4c2c73eefc4dfec00d...), iownall555 (https://gist.github.com/iownall555/69543286e9ed31ef70362429d23aa362 https://gist.github.com/iownall555/69543286e9ed31ef70362429d...), A_Dragon (https://gist.github.com/A-UNDERSCORE-D/66dcf27eaf14ecc0b07a642c34811269 https://gist.github.com/A-UNDERSCORE-D/66dcf27eaf14ecc0b07a6...). It is also worth noting that during theses years, it has been asked to the staff to give server access to unknown people at random times, and that rdv had been expelled from the network due to very questionable behavior, and noeatnosleep has left the staff. Dates for theses events are unknown to me. Make your opinion, and any resemblance to other current events is fortuitous.