12 ms·

Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

302 points by mcwhy 4y ago

webring 4y ago
I was on freenode off and on for many years...the ex staff that now runs libera are some of the most sad toxic ego maniacs on the internet. These people were never professional or kind, they've always been immature and obsessed with power and control to the point that the old freenode owner had to sell quietly to try and avoid riling up these neck beards...her efforts were in vain of course because per mo one of the lead freenode admins threw a tantrum and locked out the new owner by changing passwords...liberal can celebrate all it wants, it's leaders are terrible people who love to abuse the little power that they have. Irc in general is inherently awful and I'm glad it's almost completely dead. Keep faking dem connection stats and spamming "off topic" whaaa
LeoPanthera 4y ago
The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.
- hericium 4y ago
  The text could actually mention Freenode because this wasn't really a "start from scratch" as stated: > Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    Technically speaking, Libera Chat did start from scratch. It isn't their fault that another IRC network was in the process of imploding at the very same time and many projects and people felt the need to move to a less deranged foundation, therefore fueling the effective userbase of Libera.
    - Shish2k 4y ago
      The instance of the software was started from scratch; the communities (which are the hard part) were largely cut & pasted
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Do we have any reliable info on how freenode is even doing today? At least some accurate user counts? Who is using it? When the Exodus started, it seemed to turn into some right wing cesspool, but that was also more hearsay iirc.
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    It's had a bunch of guises as a website. For a while it was a blog filled with shouting about how removing the administrators will allow for real Free Speech and the future of everything will be freenode (and cryptocurrency, please buy our shitcoin maybe). https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode.... It was turned into a Free Speech reddit clone for a bit, which nobody used. https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode.... It's now a wiki which refers to the network as "assmode" and implores you to instead join "pissnet" run by the Impeerial Family. https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode.net/view/Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode.... Sort of the death knell of desperately trying to form a community.
    - 1propionyl 4y ago
      Someone was editing that wiki, but to be clear Pissnet is not affiliated with Freenode, though it was born from its collapse. It is a small but active community, and has a couple hundred servers. https://shitposting.space/network https://shitposting.space/network It's very hard to explain, but it is a real network that currently operates as an anarchic sandbox for doing weird things with IRC software/protocols and just generally goofing around. Pretty much every single active user is a netadmin. It's the network where you register a nick by linking your own server.
  - gerikson 4y ago
    It's back on netsplit's top 100 list at #7: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php I'm idling in the top 10 channels, it's semi-active in that people pop in and say stuff, but there's no interaction. Most connections are from old bots, or from community pages that haven't been updated.
- abstractbeliefs 4y ago
  Good, freenode is dead. Amen. I'm sure it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Irc in general is in a slow death.
    - fps_doug 4y ago
      As fast as people who grew up with it die ;-)
      - jolmg 4y ago
        Slower probably. I doubt there aren't new people getting into IRC. You could've made your comment back when I just got into it, and IRC doesn't really seem any more dead now.
        fps_doug 4y ago
        But maybe just as many as old folks leaving it for Matrix et al? Might just even it out in the grand scheme of things.
        fullstop 4y ago
        Most of the people that I find on IRC are 40+.
    - ollybee 4y ago
      We are all in a slow death. Right now it and we are alive with a vibrant IRC community to be thankful for.
    - denkmoon 4y ago
      IRC as in the 1988 chat protocol, sure. IRC as a concept has never been healthier. Lots of alternatives, most proprietary, some libre, and more users than ever.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I wonder if they're afraid Lee might sue them if they did or something Edit: Or maybe they don't want to drag the whole drama into this celebration again :) Libera moved on so quickly that even after 2 months it felt like everything was in the distant past and the community was just as it had always been. But then it would have been better to not elaborate on the history. I agree it's a bit weird like this.
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    > This time, instead of this awful cycle of disempowerment of the people, it's time that the people of the world, together, plant the flag of the power of the people on the Internet. The internet changed everything and leveled the playing field. This cannot be taken away. By his own manifesto he wouldn't do that, and he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite.
    - Doxin 4y ago
      > he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite I'm not sure that's actually true. Clearly he very much liked taking power away from a specific set of people. The guy really likes constructing this narrative where he's some sort of free speech savior, but when you look at his actions the opposite seems true. E.g. during the switch to libera if you had any mention of libera in the channel topic on freenode you'd end up with all the channel operators banned and replaced with friends of Lee. That's hardly a pro-free-speech thing to do.
      - RL_Quine 4y ago
        We need to standardize sarcasm punctuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
        Doxin 4y ago
        Oh whoops. The sarcasm seems obvious in hindsight. Apologies :P
- resonious 4y ago
  From the article, > Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half, a number which has been mostly steady since. Seems pretty impressive when they put it that way!
- saghul 4y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with that. I've been part of a community which forked in the past and it was so cringe (at least to me) for one of the sides to keep explaining the origins and such on each and every presentation even 10 years later. Anyone who knew Freenode knows the story already, and does any newcomer need to know, on that very blog post? I'd say no.
  - mgaunard 4y ago
    Because it's factually true and explains everything else.
- FoxbrushTailwag 4y ago
  Hi, one of the blog authors here, Fuchs. My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually. Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit. We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc. I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was. Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well. Hope that clears up that part a bit :) Edit: removed a typo / half cut off sentence
  - stavros 4y ago
    I agree that history is in your favor (and so does everyone else who moved to Libera), which is why it was a bit odd to not see Freenode mentioned at all. It's nothing bad, it was just a bit "hmm, I wonder why they did that".
    - FoxbrushTailwag 4y ago
      It seems to have confused some people, we also got some remarks in that direction on IRC and on Mastodon. I hope my answer cleared it up a bit.
- kossTKR 4y ago
  Mentioning it somewhere is good for history, but it's confusing and meaningless info for most people. People don't care, don't know and would rather have something "fresh", also from an internal perspective in the org.
- hda111 4y ago
  A fork would imply it had copied all user accounts and channels. But this didn’t happen.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hericium 4y ago
And fuck you, past 19 May 2021 Freenode.
- jolmg 4y ago
  s/past/post-/;s/2022/2021/
  - hericium 4y ago
    Thank you.
yardstick 4y ago
What is the state of Freenode now? Looking at Wikipedia it apparently still had low-thousands of users at the end of 2021? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_top_10_networks_2021.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t...
jolmg 4y ago
I see Bitcoin still has their official channel on Freenode[1]. I wonder if there are more projects still doing that. [1] https://bitcoin.org/en/community https://bitcoin.org/en/community
- nullc 4y ago
  That's just an unmaintained webpage.
- gerikson 4y ago
  I let Libreoffice know yesterday that their non-English pages were still pointing to Freenode, this was fixed.
- usrn 4y ago
  It was kind of nuts to see so many pages that weren't updated in years change their links.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  bitcoin.org is not owned by bitcoin project. There is some tug-of-war going on about that domain that's too stupid to even talk about. (As are all the stupid "what is true bitcoin???" debates of 2017-ish.) The actual Bitcoin domain is https://bitcoincore.org https://bitcoincore.org and they link Libera there.
czernobog 4y ago
Dear lord, it's been a year already? It feels like it was only yesterday when Freenode was trying to take over every other channel on their network. Glad to see Libera doing alright
someotherperson 4y ago
I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things: 1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities 2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system 3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing 4. Reputation is everything It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and further fragmentation of IRC, and hopefully the recovery continues. It was great to see everyone united for a brief moment though, regardless of your views against Freenode or any particular channel it was widely accepted that it was a horrible move and everyone resisted the hostile takeover.
- fps_doug 4y ago
  Is there any hints at this being the case? I could just as much see him somehow doubling down on everything, twisting it as purging the network from bad actors and that the current state of freenode is actually what he wanted in the first place, or god-knows-what...
- Doxin 4y ago
  I wouldn't accuse him of having technical prowess. Pretty much as soon as the takeover happened freenode started suffering technical issues. Libera on the other hand dealt with the insane influx of users really well. There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly, but has been pretty much spotless ever since.
  - aaronmdjones 4y ago
    The most difficult thing to deal with in the first couple of days were the occasional server crashes. We would have liked some more time on our testnet to iron out the bugs in the IRC server software we were planning to migrate to (and started out with on the new network), but that didn't end up happening. In essence, we deployed a beta straight to production with >10k users on day 1 and had everything ironed out by day 4 if I recall correctly.
    - Doxin 4y ago
oynqr 4y ago
Not hard to remember, since it's also my birthday. Thank you, Libera, for being one of the players keeping IRC alive.
- anned20 4y ago
  Happy birthday!
saghul 4y ago
While I'm no longer using IRC, I'm happy to see Libera.Chat succeed. Godspeed!
radarsat1 4y ago
Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which is either answered quickly, or devolves into seeing that no one can help them, eg. because what they are asking doesn't make sense or is too mbitious or whatnot. Then silence again. In other words I've never gotten a clear sense of "community", but rather a forum for random and often uninteresting questions, and therefore just naturally stop visiting. All in all it just kind of gets boring very fast, I find, so I am curious how people manage to get something out of it and what motivates them to stay joined in a channel. I haven't tried newer systems like Matrix or Discord so I have no idea if these do any better, or if so, why, although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so..) My point is not to dis on IRC/chat rooms here, just explaining why I've never particularly found it engaging, and so I'm curious what others see in it, as I feel it's something I could learn to appreciate if I tried a bit harder.
- discardedrefuse 4y ago
  > although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so.. I feel the same way about IRC (and Matrix). I think a part of the problem is that the technical Q&A discussion that happens in most of the dev channels would be better served taking place on a forum. Lots of those chats aren't happening in real-time anyways. And if you're not there to receive the messages, the information is lost. OTOH, certain activities do lend themselves better to real-time messaging. For example, the subreddit of your favorite sportsball team might have a Discord chat that is lots of fun during a live game. Another example; many video game subreddits will have all their LFG (looking for group) activity in a Discord server. Both of these scenarios are very "in the moment" interactions that don't really need to be preserved for the future.
tentacleuno 4y ago
Happy birthday libera.chat! Thank you very much to the founders for providing this free and open platform :-)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nickdothutton 4y ago
One of the biggest selling points of IRC is that large numbers of people are not on it, and will never be on it.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I stopped actively using IRC about 15 years ago precisely because regular (for the time) people gradually disappeared. I've stuck with too many dying communities.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 4y ago
I wonder if discord might threaten IRC, it seems that is not the case. There are two servers dedicated to the c++ language.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
  While I use discord (because thats what my online gaming buddies use) my main issue is discord is that they disallow alt clients https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248 https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248 My main gripe if the offical client is the lack of multi account support, Yeah I know it has an account switcher but a) its only desktop atm b) you only get notifactions from the account you are currently using. The "workaround" is to multi-client. The thing is with IRC, its a protocol, so any client supporting the protocol works, If one client doesn't support the features you want you can swap to another, if no client supports the feature you want you can hack it onto an existing one / create your own.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
  I am part of a few programming/language communities that are both on discord and IRC. I noticed that discord lends itself to...low quality discourse, so to speak. It might sound a bit cliché but despite a big overlap of members which hang out and participate in both at the same time IRC has way less noise and better discussions and answers. I also feel like the language creators, while hanging out in both, do the "important" communication on IRC. On discord there is more emote, picture and link spam and more "joking around with memes", and that is despite the fact that the discord servers already have dedicated channels for certain topics. Now this is a very subjective observation on my part, but I believe that there will always be a place for plaintext communication, since it automatically filters a lot of noise and demands a lot less mental overhead to keep running in the background. Please note that I am not really nostalgic for IRC, since I am a pretty recent user. I'm at an age where I barely missed the "golden IRC years" and when I got into programming it was already declared dead by many, whatever that even means given that some people have been claiming the death of IRC for a long time now.
- Macha 4y ago
  Discord has absolutely hurt IRC, and supplanted it in many cases. Once upon a time, e.g. subreddits had their chats on Snoonet IRC, now it's all discord. Tech is still IRC-heavy, but Discord, Slack and Matrix all have sizeable presences now too.
akselmo 4y ago
Happy birthday libera chat! I use matrix to connect there because im a heretic, but im glad i can do that.
JulianMorrison 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.chat/news/happy-birthday-libera-chat https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.ch...
junon 4y ago
Woah, been a year already. I remember sitting on mIRC for hours and hours watching the users flood into libera and out of freenode. I will never forget how absolutely gobstricken I was with how perfectly the Libera team executed everything, and they were so incredibly polite through what has to be some of the densest chaos one could witness on the internet. Really historic day. Happy birthday, Libera!
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I agree. I really thought the whole thing would split and kill the community but within weeks after Libera started everything was as if we never left freenode. With some improvements even. Really well done. Also kudos to the Libera team to not continue trying to fight the battle, after the first few weeks I don't remember freenode ever even being mentioned. They just focused on getting back to life as usual which worked great.
  - junon 4y ago
    That's my experience as well. Ample opportunities to attach a bunch of extra fluff to the whole thing and it wasn't even a temptation for them to do so. Very professional and expertly executed. I can't think of many comparable examples.
rkangel 4y ago
I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that (for me at least) the best IRC client is Matrix. They offer a bridge to Libera.chat, and that then sets up a Matrix "room" for each IRC channel you join. You then get a consistent session, that all history automatically, with clients for every platform. Plus you're on Matrix which is a good thing :)
- justaj 4y ago
  Except when it sporadically disconnects and forgets your login credentials.
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    it should never forget your login creds if you saved them. type !help in the admin room and it’ll tell you how to save them.
    - justaj 4y ago
      That's odd, it happened to me quite a few times on the Libera network despite having saved my credentials with Liberachat IRC Bridge status using `!storepass <password>`, but on OFTC bridge it happens all the time because IIRC it's currently not possible to save credentials for the OFTC network.
Vladimof 4y ago
I wish that Libera Chat would obfuscate user hostnames in the WHOIS...
- tribaal 4y ago
  You can just set -r on yourself as you join, that should do the trick (from memory, I'm on mobile)
- ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
  There is, in fact, excellent documentation on their site for this https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks. Of course, it's not as much of a free-for-all as some other networks (I recall Rizon lets you set whatever cloak you want), but it should hide hostnames.
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    by default, Rizon replaces the identifying part of your hostname with "Rizon-xxxxxxxx"... I wish that liberachat would do the same without needing to register and then take some other action.... I don't need a custom hostname, just one that doesn't broadcast my IP.

302 points by mcwhy 4y ago

I was on freenode off and on for many years...the ex staff that now runs libera are some of the most sad toxic ego maniacs on the internet. These people were never professional or kind, they've always been immature and obsessed with power and control to the point that the old freenode owner had to sell quietly to try and avoid riling up these neck beards...her efforts were in vain of course because per mo one of the lead freenode admins threw a tantrum and locked out the new owner by changing passwords...liberal can celebrate all it wants, it's leaders are terrible people who love to abuse the little power that they have. Irc in general is inherently awful and I'm glad it's almost completely dead. Keep faking dem connection stats and spamming "off topic" whaaa

LeoPanthera 4y ago

The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.

hericium 4y ago
The text could actually mention Freenode because this wasn't really a "start from scratch" as stated: > Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  Technically speaking, Libera Chat did start from scratch. It isn't their fault that another IRC network was in the process of imploding at the very same time and many projects and people felt the need to move to a less deranged foundation, therefore fueling the effective userbase of Libera.
  - Shish2k 4y ago
    The instance of the software was started from scratch; the communities (which are the hard part) were largely cut & pasted
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
iforgotpassword 4y ago
Do we have any reliable info on how freenode is even doing today? At least some accurate user counts? Who is using it? When the Exodus started, it seemed to turn into some right wing cesspool, but that was also more hearsay iirc.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  It's had a bunch of guises as a website. For a while it was a blog filled with shouting about how removing the administrators will allow for real Free Speech and the future of everything will be freenode (and cryptocurrency, please buy our shitcoin maybe). https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode.... It was turned into a Free Speech reddit clone for a bit, which nobody used. https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode.... It's now a wiki which refers to the network as "assmode" and implores you to instead join "pissnet" run by the Impeerial Family. https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode.net/view/Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode.... Sort of the death knell of desperately trying to form a community.
  - 1propionyl 4y ago
    Someone was editing that wiki, but to be clear Pissnet is not affiliated with Freenode, though it was born from its collapse. It is a small but active community, and has a couple hundred servers. https://shitposting.space/network https://shitposting.space/network It's very hard to explain, but it is a real network that currently operates as an anarchic sandbox for doing weird things with IRC software/protocols and just generally goofing around. Pretty much every single active user is a netadmin. It's the network where you register a nick by linking your own server.
- gerikson 4y ago
  It's back on netsplit's top 100 list at #7: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php I'm idling in the top 10 channels, it's semi-active in that people pop in and say stuff, but there's no interaction. Most connections are from old bots, or from community pages that haven't been updated.
abstractbeliefs 4y ago
Good, freenode is dead. Amen. I'm sure it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Irc in general is in a slow death.
  - fps_doug 4y ago
    As fast as people who grew up with it die ;-)
    - jolmg 4y ago
      Slower probably. I doubt there aren't new people getting into IRC. You could've made your comment back when I just got into it, and IRC doesn't really seem any more dead now.
      - fps_doug 4y ago
        But maybe just as many as old folks leaving it for Matrix et al? Might just even it out in the grand scheme of things.
      - fullstop 4y ago
        Most of the people that I find on IRC are 40+.
  - ollybee 4y ago
    We are all in a slow death. Right now it and we are alive with a vibrant IRC community to be thankful for.
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    IRC as in the 1988 chat protocol, sure. IRC as a concept has never been healthier. Lots of alternatives, most proprietary, some libre, and more users than ever.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I wonder if they're afraid Lee might sue them if they did or something Edit: Or maybe they don't want to drag the whole drama into this celebration again :) Libera moved on so quickly that even after 2 months it felt like everything was in the distant past and the community was just as it had always been. But then it would have been better to not elaborate on the history. I agree it's a bit weird like this.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  > This time, instead of this awful cycle of disempowerment of the people, it's time that the people of the world, together, plant the flag of the power of the people on the Internet. The internet changed everything and leveled the playing field. This cannot be taken away. By his own manifesto he wouldn't do that, and he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite.
  - Doxin 4y ago
    > he wouldn't want to be a hypocrite I'm not sure that's actually true. Clearly he very much liked taking power away from a specific set of people. The guy really likes constructing this narrative where he's some sort of free speech savior, but when you look at his actions the opposite seems true. E.g. during the switch to libera if you had any mention of libera in the channel topic on freenode you'd end up with all the channel operators banned and replaced with friends of Lee. That's hardly a pro-free-speech thing to do.
    - RL_Quine 4y ago
      We need to standardize sarcasm punctuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
      - Doxin 4y ago
        Oh whoops. The sarcasm seems obvious in hindsight. Apologies :P
resonious 4y ago
From the article, > Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half, a number which has been mostly steady since. Seems pretty impressive when they put it that way!
saghul 4y ago
I don't see anything wrong with that. I've been part of a community which forked in the past and it was so cringe (at least to me) for one of the sides to keep explaining the origins and such on each and every presentation even 10 years later. Anyone who knew Freenode knows the story already, and does any newcomer need to know, on that very blog post? I'd say no.
- mgaunard 4y ago
  Because it's factually true and explains everything else.
FoxbrushTailwag 4y ago
Hi, one of the blog authors here, Fuchs. My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually. Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit. We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc. I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was. Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well. Hope that clears up that part a bit :) Edit: removed a typo / half cut off sentence
- stavros 4y ago
  I agree that history is in your favor (and so does everyone else who moved to Libera), which is why it was a bit odd to not see Freenode mentioned at all. It's nothing bad, it was just a bit "hmm, I wonder why they did that".
  - FoxbrushTailwag 4y ago
    It seems to have confused some people, we also got some remarks in that direction on IRC and on Mastodon. I hope my answer cleared it up a bit.
kossTKR 4y ago
Mentioning it somewhere is good for history, but it's confusing and meaningless info for most people. People don't care, don't know and would rather have something "fresh", also from an internal perspective in the org.
hda111 4y ago
A fork would imply it had copied all user accounts and channels. But this didn’t happen.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hericium 4y ago

And fuck you, past 19 May 2021 Freenode.

jolmg 4y ago
s/past/post-/;s/2022/2021/
- hericium 4y ago
  Thank you.

yardstick 4y ago

What is the state of Freenode now? Looking at Wikipedia it apparently still had low-thousands of users at the end of 2021? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_top_10_networks_2021.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t...

jolmg 4y ago

I see Bitcoin still has their official channel on Freenode[1]. I wonder if there are more projects still doing that. [1] https://bitcoin.org/en/community https://bitcoin.org/en/community

nullc 4y ago
That's just an unmaintained webpage.
gerikson 4y ago
I let Libreoffice know yesterday that their non-English pages were still pointing to Freenode, this was fixed.
usrn 4y ago
It was kind of nuts to see so many pages that weren't updated in years change their links.
shp0ngle 4y ago
bitcoin.org is not owned by bitcoin project. There is some tug-of-war going on about that domain that's too stupid to even talk about. (As are all the stupid "what is true bitcoin???" debates of 2017-ish.) The actual Bitcoin domain is https://bitcoincore.org https://bitcoincore.org and they link Libera there.

czernobog 4y ago

Dear lord, it's been a year already? It feels like it was only yesterday when Freenode was trying to take over every other channel on their network. Glad to see Libera doing alright

someotherperson 4y ago

I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things: 1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities 2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system 3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing 4. Reputation is everything It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and further fragmentation of IRC, and hopefully the recovery continues. It was great to see everyone united for a brief moment though, regardless of your views against Freenode or any particular channel it was widely accepted that it was a horrible move and everyone resisted the hostile takeover.

fps_doug 4y ago
Is there any hints at this being the case? I could just as much see him somehow doubling down on everything, twisting it as purging the network from bad actors and that the current state of freenode is actually what he wanted in the first place, or god-knows-what...
Doxin 4y ago
I wouldn't accuse him of having technical prowess. Pretty much as soon as the takeover happened freenode started suffering technical issues. Libera on the other hand dealt with the insane influx of users really well. There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly, but has been pretty much spotless ever since.
- aaronmdjones 4y ago
  The most difficult thing to deal with in the first couple of days were the occasional server crashes. We would have liked some more time on our testnet to iron out the bugs in the IRC server software we were planning to migrate to (and started out with on the new network), but that didn't end up happening. In essence, we deployed a beta straight to production with >10k users on day 1 and had everything ironed out by day 4 if I recall correctly.
  - Doxin 4y ago

oynqr 4y ago

Not hard to remember, since it's also my birthday. Thank you, Libera, for being one of the players keeping IRC alive.

anned20 4y ago
Happy birthday!

saghul 4y ago

While I'm no longer using IRC, I'm happy to see Libera.Chat succeed. Godspeed!

radarsat1 4y ago

Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which is either answered quickly, or devolves into seeing that no one can help them, eg. because what they are asking doesn't make sense or is too mbitious or whatnot. Then silence again. In other words I've never gotten a clear sense of "community", but rather a forum for random and often uninteresting questions, and therefore just naturally stop visiting. All in all it just kind of gets boring very fast, I find, so I am curious how people manage to get something out of it and what motivates them to stay joined in a channel. I haven't tried newer systems like Matrix or Discord so I have no idea if these do any better, or if so, why, although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so..) My point is not to dis on IRC/chat rooms here, just explaining why I've never particularly found it engaging, and so I'm curious what others see in it, as I feel it's something I could learn to appreciate if I tried a bit harder.

discardedrefuse 4y ago
> although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so.. I feel the same way about IRC (and Matrix). I think a part of the problem is that the technical Q&A discussion that happens in most of the dev channels would be better served taking place on a forum. Lots of those chats aren't happening in real-time anyways. And if you're not there to receive the messages, the information is lost. OTOH, certain activities do lend themselves better to real-time messaging. For example, the subreddit of your favorite sportsball team might have a Discord chat that is lots of fun during a live game. Another example; many video game subreddits will have all their LFG (looking for group) activity in a Discord server. Both of these scenarios are very "in the moment" interactions that don't really need to be preserved for the future.

tentacleuno 4y ago

Happy birthday libera.chat! Thank you very much to the founders for providing this free and open platform :-)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nickdothutton 4y ago

One of the biggest selling points of IRC is that large numbers of people are not on it, and will never be on it.

beebeepka 4y ago
I stopped actively using IRC about 15 years ago precisely because regular (for the time) people gradually disappeared. I've stuck with too many dying communities.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jokoon 4y ago

I wonder if discord might threaten IRC, it seems that is not the case. There are two servers dedicated to the c++ language.

Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
While I use discord (because thats what my online gaming buddies use) my main issue is discord is that they disallow alt clients https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248 https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248 My main gripe if the offical client is the lack of multi account support, Yeah I know it has an account switcher but a) its only desktop atm b) you only get notifactions from the account you are currently using. The "workaround" is to multi-client. The thing is with IRC, its a protocol, so any client supporting the protocol works, If one client doesn't support the features you want you can swap to another, if no client supports the feature you want you can hack it onto an existing one / create your own.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
I am part of a few programming/language communities that are both on discord and IRC. I noticed that discord lends itself to...low quality discourse, so to speak. It might sound a bit cliché but despite a big overlap of members which hang out and participate in both at the same time IRC has way less noise and better discussions and answers. I also feel like the language creators, while hanging out in both, do the "important" communication on IRC. On discord there is more emote, picture and link spam and more "joking around with memes", and that is despite the fact that the discord servers already have dedicated channels for certain topics. Now this is a very subjective observation on my part, but I believe that there will always be a place for plaintext communication, since it automatically filters a lot of noise and demands a lot less mental overhead to keep running in the background. Please note that I am not really nostalgic for IRC, since I am a pretty recent user. I'm at an age where I barely missed the "golden IRC years" and when I got into programming it was already declared dead by many, whatever that even means given that some people have been claiming the death of IRC for a long time now.
Macha 4y ago
Discord has absolutely hurt IRC, and supplanted it in many cases. Once upon a time, e.g. subreddits had their chats on Snoonet IRC, now it's all discord. Tech is still IRC-heavy, but Discord, Slack and Matrix all have sizeable presences now too.

akselmo 4y ago

Happy birthday libera chat! I use matrix to connect there because im a heretic, but im glad i can do that.

JulianMorrison 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.chat/news/happy-birthday-libera-chat https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.ch...

junon 4y ago

Woah, been a year already. I remember sitting on mIRC for hours and hours watching the users flood into libera and out of freenode. I will never forget how absolutely gobstricken I was with how perfectly the Libera team executed everything, and they were so incredibly polite through what has to be some of the densest chaos one could witness on the internet. Really historic day. Happy birthday, Libera!

GekkePrutser 4y ago
I agree. I really thought the whole thing would split and kill the community but within weeks after Libera started everything was as if we never left freenode. With some improvements even. Really well done. Also kudos to the Libera team to not continue trying to fight the battle, after the first few weeks I don't remember freenode ever even being mentioned. They just focused on getting back to life as usual which worked great.
- junon 4y ago
  That's my experience as well. Ample opportunities to attach a bunch of extra fluff to the whole thing and it wasn't even a temptation for them to do so. Very professional and expertly executed. I can't think of many comparable examples.

rkangel 4y ago

I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that (for me at least) the best IRC client is Matrix. They offer a bridge to Libera.chat, and that then sets up a Matrix "room" for each IRC channel you join. You then get a consistent session, that all history automatically, with clients for every platform. Plus you're on Matrix which is a good thing :)

justaj 4y ago
Except when it sporadically disconnects and forgets your login credentials.
- Arathorn 4y ago
  it should never forget your login creds if you saved them. type !help in the admin room and it’ll tell you how to save them.
  - justaj 4y ago
    That's odd, it happened to me quite a few times on the Libera network despite having saved my credentials with Liberachat IRC Bridge status using `!storepass <password>`, but on OFTC bridge it happens all the time because IIRC it's currently not possible to save credentials for the OFTC network.

Vladimof 4y ago

I wish that Libera Chat would obfuscate user hostnames in the WHOIS...

tribaal 4y ago
You can just set -r on yourself as you join, that should do the trick (from memory, I'm on mobile)
ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
There is, in fact, excellent documentation on their site for this https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks. Of course, it's not as much of a free-for-all as some other networks (I recall Rizon lets you set whatever cloak you want), but it should hide hostnames.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  by default, Rizon replaces the identifying part of your hostname with "Rizon-xxxxxxxx"... I wish that liberachat would do the same without needing to register and then take some other action.... I don't need a custom hostname, just one that doesn't broadcast my IP.