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Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC network
- gautamcgoel 5y agoI've never seen a company burn goodwill among it's users so quickly or effectively.
- andrethegiant 5y agoRobinhood?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vulcan01 5y agoPeople still use Robinhood. From Freenode, there was a mass exodus. From Robinhood, people mostly just complained and kept using the app.
- labster 5y agoRobinhood had legitimate, if hard to understand, liquidity reasons for stopping trading on $GME. As far as I can tell Lee has no strategy at all for Freenode, and just keeps trying different fuels to extinguish the fire.
- Clewza313 5y agoSpraying kerosene onto the fire doesn't seem to be working too well.
- arp242 5y agoWhat if we would try to take away its oxygen by covering it with dynamite?
- MartinodF 5y agoI know you're joking, but dynamite is actually used to extinguish oil well fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_th...
- arp242 5y agoAh yeah, I actually knew about this; there was a MacGyver episode about it! Weird that I remember this after 20 years...
- kunagi7 5y agoWell, this network reset (pretty much, suicide as the link says) seems like covering everything with dynamite and starting over. But the new thing will have fires appear anyway.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oliyoung 5y agoBasecamp gave it a shake
- GavinMcG 5y agoEh. Were many users affected at all by the shakeup? Seems like a vocal minority of employees left and that was that.
- AlexeyBelov 5y agoI wouldn't say a third of your employees is a vocal minority. It's a pretty sizeable amount.
- GavinMcG 5y agoSure, but odds are a good number of them were motivated by three or six month buyouts more than culture. And we're talking about a grand total of like 18 people here.
- darig 5y agoSomeone somewhere made $1 when they used to make $0... and they might even make another $1 before the well goes dry.
- 0_____0 5y agoRIP Freenode. Ye are yet one more IRC diaspora amongst the many before, but being one of the last major holdouts of IRC, I do believe this to be the end of an era. Godspeed.
- mulmen 5y agoSounds like most of the channels moved to the irc.libera.chat network. So the net change in IRC use is less than it looks.
- bigiain 5y ago> RIP Freenode Rot in hell, more like. (I haven't really used irc in maybe a decade, but I think I'll go work out what software I should use to chat on Libera Chat... Is scary devil monastery still a thing?)
- mulmen 5y agoYeah. I have been meaning to reconnect with IRC for a while. This seems like a good time.
- Doxin 5y agoThe libera.chat website has some guidance on IRC clients[0] but personally I'd recommend HexChat[1]. It's as close to a reference implementation of irc as you can get. [0] https://libera.chat/guides/clients https://libera.chat/guides/clients [1] https://hexchat.github.io/ https://hexchat.github.io/
- hprotagonist 5y agoirssi is more or less eternal. weechat (not wechat) is more or less a less shitty irssi.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago> We patiently await to welcome you in freedom's holdout - the freenode. Freedom's holdout. Astounding.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MattGaiser 5y agoI have to wonder if they just wanted the domain name for something else, as they have burned everything else down.
- swiley 5y agoI think some p2p tools used bots on freenode to cope with network partitions? I can't remember if bitcoin was one.
- windsok 5y agoThe original release of bitcoin from satoshi used the #bitcoin channel on freenode to find peers to connect to, this has long since changed though.
- rambojazz 5y agoBut even then, was all the BS and pissing people off necessary?
- Retr0id 5y agoAt this point, I'm just waiting for Lee to announce that he's been trolling us all along (rather than admit the reality of his incompetence).
- erk__ 5y agoThis comment from yesterday is probably as close to it as it will ever come: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27497019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27497019
- hallway_monitor 5y agoFlagged now, can't see the text
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoYou can see it by setting "showdead" to yes in your HN user settings. But in this case you're not missing much.
- ejj28 5y agoSo if I'm understanding this correctly as an outsider - Freenode is basically starting from scratch? Equivalent to a social network like Facebook being deleted with no warning, then having the brand used for a completely new network? If that's the case, that's pretty shocking, they've done so much to ruin Freenode's reputation already but I never expected they'd do this.
- wernercd 5y agoThis is the equivalent from less than scratch. Worse than from the beginning. In the beginning they didn't have a pissed off community and weeks of bad will.
- AlexandrB 5y agoIndeed. Who is the plausible user base for Freenode at this point? It's unlikely that IRC will ever be able peel users away from Discord/Slack, no matter what improvements Freenode makes. Meanwhile, anyone already using IRC is probably aware of this drama and will stay well away from Freenode.
- wernercd 5y agoBasically. There's a small community of IRC. That small community is now going to have a large portion that says "freenode is a nogo". What's the realistic community remaining in freenode? Who's going to donate? invest? I'm an outsider and wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
- Grinnz 5y agoSome hints (root is rasengan): <root> jane_doe: hint the freenode network is its own sovereign state https://freenode.net/news/taking-irc-further#canceling-cancel-culture-or-why-anonymity-is-important https://freenode.net/news/taking-irc-further#canceling-cance...
- imtringued 5y agoHas there ever been a sovereign state that deported all its citizens?
- ChrisArchitect 5y agorelated/discussion: Last remaining 1000+ user community channel seized by Freenode staff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501512
- Arbalest 5y agoWhy did they fail to communicate anything? What a good way to destroy trust. I'm now observing one channel who previously supported lee, and am curious if the stance will change, now that they have to jump through hoops to get their channel reregistered. It's currently full of unopped idlers.
- andrewflnr 5y ago> one channel who previously supported lee Serious question: why? I'm sure there exist perspectives where Lee is not the villain, but they're hard to imagine and I'm really curious.
- Arbalest 5y agoI don't know, all I know is their quit message includes some lee-side.pdf
- lamontcg 5y agoSome people love to be contrarian and believe in things just because they don't want to be part of the herd/sheep.
- marcan_42 5y agoAt this point he's less of a villain and more like utterly unhinged. Given his past drug usage documented in court records, I wouldn't be surprised if he's literally been on hard drugs throughout much of this whole saga.
- gerikson 5y agoIs it #techrights?
- asdfaoeu 5y agoI mean freenode was already in a slow death before. This just seems to have speed it up.
- Syonyk 5y agoWhat was slow death about it? It was quite active, and had a huge number of popular and quite active channels across a range of technical topics. It wasn't Discord/Slack/etc, but for an awful lot of people on it, that was a feature. Text. Lightweight. Simple. Doesn't require a bloody Electron app with hundreds of megabytes of memory to connect.
- kadoban 5y agoI believe they're referring to when rasengan originally stabbed it in the gut as the start of the slow death, at least that would be my reading.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoThis has been the strangest saga in tech that I can remember in a long time...
- hlandau 5y agoAuthor here. These lawsuits involving Lee are also of interest: https://corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compressed.pdf https://corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compressed.pdf https://distfiles.dereferenced.org/stuff/ltm/1760687104.pdf https://distfiles.dereferenced.org/stuff/ltm/1760687104.pdf
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 5y ago32 + 271 pages, is there a TL;DR available somewhere?
- blibble 5y agoallegedly: hookers and cocaine (in the office), and many, many broken promises
- ohazi 5y agoFrom the first link: > 8. During this time, however, Plaintiffs became concerned with Lee's mental wellbeing and his ability to lead LTM and PIA. Plaintiffs noticed that Lee was a habitual user of marijuana and cocaine, and would frequently abuse drugs in the office in front of his employees. Lee often combined his drug use with alcohol and would act erratically.
- LambdaComplex 5y agoAnd don't forget: > For example, he told-LTM 18 employees that he wanted to hire a female candidate simply because he wanted to have sex with 19 her. Similarly, Lee expressed his desire to set up a "modeling agency" in the Hollywood Hills that 20 would actually be a front for illegal prostitution (i.e., the "models" would be paid escorts). To that 21 end, Lee circulated a memo to male LTM executives advising them to make sure and wear 22 condoms when having sex with the "models." Lee went so far as to state that he planned to move 23 LTM's offices to the Hollywood Hills mansion once the "modeling agency" was set up.
- justaj 5y ago
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 5y agoAt this point I am not even angry anymore. Instead, I am insanely curious about why they are doing such a large amount of very inflammatory actions in a short timespan!? They must for sure know that they will 100% certainly destroy their platform. Why are they doing it anyway?
- rambojazz 5y agoFor the same reasons why some people like ballbusting, I guess...
- xupybd 5y agoMy little pug dog goes crazy sometimes. Like proper crazy running back and forward, tail down ears back and grunting all the way. The first time my Wife's best friends mother say this she looked on and said "What is happening now?" Every time I read an article on Freenode I hear her voice in my head, in a thick African accent, "What is happening now?"
- andrei_says_ 5y agoI think this is a perfect description. Thank you for sharing. Someone very confused had the resources to do what their confused mind told them to.
- type0 5y agoAs the saying goes "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog".
- Syonyk 5y agoI hope there's a good postmortem on this in 5-10 years that explains what on earth all this nonsense is about, because it makes literally no sense. Buy an IRC network, fine. If you want to use the domain for something else, just turn off the servers and do it. There's no need for this absurdly complex, Rube Goldberg-esque process of pissing everyone off, then impersonating services, then dropping the services database entirely, then partitioning the network and joining people to a new network, and pissing more people off, and passive aggressive global messages, and... I cannot wrap my head around what they're even trying to do at this point. I've been on IRC in some form another for the majority of my adult life (including running my own IRC network for many years, starting out with some SE/30s), I'm quite tolerant of random stuff going on, but I literally cannot find any sense at all in what the new owners are trying to do. It's like they had a great party going at their house, a few people started leaving, and then they started waving around a gallon of gas and a lighter, threatening to burn the house down if anyone else left. And people, reasonably enough, continued to leave. So, i guess this stage is the "And they lit the house on fire, but moved all their friends to the shed and pretended it was still the house" part of the analogy...
- mulmen 5y agoI'd watch that documentary. Preferably on whatever open content platform replaces Netflix. Surely Freenode's downfall was Kafkaesque? Your analogy sounds right but I'd like to add the shed is full of oil soaked rags. And the host is still holding that lighter.
- J-Kuhn 5y agoKafkaesque? Yes. https://christine.website/blog/final-chapter-2021-05-20 https://christine.website/blog/final-chapter-2021-05-20 https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26 https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- optimalsolver 5y agoThank God there's still Reddit.
- mulmen 5y agoOr, you know, IRC. irc.libera.chat is the new Freenode.
- Seirdy 5y agoAdapting a comment I made in the wrong thread: This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look. Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all. If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent). If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210612224853/https://nitter.nixnet.services/plainoldchair/status/14027451442191564 https://web.archive.org/web/20210612224853/https://nitter.ni... 83 [1]: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/admin_room.html https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/ad... [2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bridged-IRC-networks https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bri...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aftbit 5y agoMost channels have moved to irc.libera.chat so all hope is not lost.
- samatman 5y agoIn my humble opinion, the question everyone is asking can be answered, more or less, by examining the following website: https://imperialfamily.com https://imperialfamily.com This will hint at where the money came from, and what's up with the exceedingly poor judgement.
- broknbottle 5y agoI think the bigger story here is how Mark Karpeles is involved.. If I wanted to be taken seriously then there’s no way I’d involve him in any legitimate venture. Karpeles Labs?? https://www.shells.com/l/en-US/team https://www.shells.com/l/en-US/team
- MertsA 5y agoThere's a reason why any time the subject of Mark Karpeles comes up on HN rasengan comes out of the woodwork to astroturf and lie about how great his fraudster of a friend is. After Mark was unfortunately let out of incarceration Andrew Lee decided to hire the pariah as the CTO of London Trust Media (Private Internet Access). He is not involved in any legitimate venture, he's involved in Andrew Lee's wallet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17378640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17378640
- geofft 5y agoIt seems clear enough that the money came from the sale of Private Internet Access. (It wouldn't surprise me if some other portion of that money had a causal role in causing 'rasengan to get the blessing of one of the pretenders to the throne, though.)
- Clewza313 5y agoAm I the only one who's seeing a Japanese Imperial chrysanthemum in the middle of that logo? Seems an odd move for what seems to be an almost entirely Korean-American company, even if it is slapped on top of a Korean rose.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoI wonder if this all would have ended differently if Freenode had been purchased and nothing changed initially for 12 months.
- geofft 5y agoThat's what actually happened, though. The guy's VPN company acquired Freenode in 2017: https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn He only attempted to take operational control last month.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoOh I see. What a shame.
- simonw 5y ago"The old services database (registered nicknames, channels, etc.) is apparently gone. All of your registered nicknames and channels are gone. Anyone who wishes to continue to use Freenode (though at this point I honestly can't imagine why anyone would want to) must re-register their nickname. [...] It's literally open season for anyone who wants to impersonate someone else, steal their nickname, or take over someone else's channel." That's astonishingly short-sighted thinking, even by the already rock-bottom standards of the current Freenode management team.
- marcan_42 5y agoIt's not even open season; the way IRC works, a random user has now been appointed the sole operator and owner of each channel (whoever connected first). You don't even need someone to want to take over your channel; it's been taken over for you. If you're lucky, and they're a nice person (and not an idle bouncer) they might give it back to you. Maybe.
- leoh 5y agoThis all would make an awesome South Park episode
- delsarto 5y agoSad to see something implode that has been taken for granted for literally decades. Shows that we should never forget someone is paying for the electricity in the background and finding ways to provide open infrastructure to our projects is an important endeavour. I find [1] similarly odd and it does not fill me with hope for the future. I would encourage anyone to get involved in real open infrastructure through efforts such as https://opendev.org https://opendev.org. Yes, resources are donated, but by a range of providers who have a vested in interest in what the community is producing. ARM64 has been a great example; Linaro providing hardware resources, which has enabled services to perform functional testing and build ARM64 Python wheels for publishing for a number of projects. This is a rising tide that floats all boats. No need to send a resume [2] and you can start contributing immediately [3,4]. It has been good run with IRC but I forsee moving to Matrix as the medium-term future and there's plenty of opportunity for others to get involved with that (building home servers, admining, writing bots that provide the services we current provide on IRC, doc updates, community building). [1] https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq [2] https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities [3] https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/ https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/ [4] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-config https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-conf...
- mugsie 5y agoI really don't see all of OpenDev moving to Matrix - I saw Zuul was considering it, which is unfortunate[1] :/ - now the various projects are going to be fragmented. 1 - I trust there was good reasons, the Zuul folks are great, but it means potentially another chat client for me for channels I use infrequently at best
- Arathorn 5y agoMoving to Matrix really shouldn't be disruptive, given how easy it is to then bright Matrix back into IRC on whatever network. (Admittedly the Freenode mess has made bridging problematic given the loss of identity/access data on the Freenode side means we don't know who has permission to re-plumb, but we're working on that)
- foxes 5y agoTo be honest, who on HN actually uses IRC anymore? Going on feeenode 5 years ago, it already felt lifeless. How can something already dead commit suicide :smile:. Maybe there were some obscure side hold outs?
- Clewza313 5y agoThe stats in the article show ~150k users on the "old" freenode... and ~6k tops on the new one.
- foxes 5y agoAre they actually active discussing things for a substantial period of time? Or just lurking afk in the background. I recall joining and then there barely being any discussion in chats, mostly just user action spam.
- tephra 5y agoI'm an everyday IRC user and most channels (7+ or so) I'm in are very active.
- mousepilot 5y agoonce every year or two, I find an irc client, join undernet, and refresh my ban from #politics. sort of a ritual for me. (edit, had wrong irc network)
- kadoban 5y ago"user action spam" suggests to me that you had join/part messages displayed. Turn those off in your client. With those on, no wonder you couldn't see any signal through the noise. After that, just find the good channels, there's quite a few depending on what you're into.
- brian-armstrong 5y agoDoes anyone know where I can short Freenode? Any arbitrage opportunities here?
- smichael 5y agoYou'd be a bit late..
- mukti 5y agoThis whole situation makes me really angry; but I suppose I should be happy that enough of the ops left and formed libera ~a month ago. I think it is something about the snark in root/rasengan's messages, portraying this as "saving FOSS," and "doing it for the users." It's upsetting to see (what seems like) one person with a lot of money and control destroy something that has existed and helped so many for decades. RIP Freenode, and thanks for the memories.
- mr_vile 5y agoWow, that's a very insensitive title.
- hprotagonist 5y agoI met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- swiley 5y agoDoes anyone have access to the Amtrak/VRE speech synth? (the dispassionate one they use for PSAs in the Alexandria station) I'd love to hear the global messages in that. I could hear the voice saying "freenode is FOSS" as I was reading them.
- echoradio 5y ago“It's a new genesis for a new era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS.” War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThey do this, and there isn't even a single note on the freenode website about it. So they take the network with the few FOSS teams that still support them, and then basically wipe everything. Meaning every chanop permission is now in the hands of whoever happened to be the first idler that happened to auto-reconnect to the channel in question. Really nice way of dealing with the teams that were still supporting you. No I'm not one of them. But I sure would be hella pissed if I were running a project channel on it.