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> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd s

by tetha 3y ago

> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python. Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in. I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.
- tetha 3y ago
  > At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    I think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .
- sshine 3y ago
  > something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? It was a netsplit. Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor. The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.
bovermyer 3y ago
There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun mechanics on the side. That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.
- gregjw 3y ago
  I think the fact that server-based matchmaking is seperated in the way it is lends itself to those types of close-knit communities forming. MMOs with things like instancing implemented cause clusters like that to not form. You get that a little bit in capital cities in games like FFXIV and low-population WoW servers, but it's an unfortunate drawback for features to help with scaling.

by tetha 3y ago

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in. I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.

tetha 3y ago
> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
- dizhn 3y ago
  I think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .
sshine 3y ago
> something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? It was a netsplit. Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor. The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.

bovermyer 3y ago

There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun mechanics on the side. That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.

gregjw 3y ago
I think the fact that server-based matchmaking is seperated in the way it is lends itself to those types of close-knit communities forming. MMOs with things like instancing implemented cause clusters like that to not form. You get that a little bit in capital cities in games like FFXIV and low-population WoW servers, but it's an unfortunate drawback for features to help with scaling.