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Unfortunately, the expert in debugging Arduino electrical errors, or in numpy, or in evaluating what the burn pattern on your spark plugs means, or in identifyi
by dotancohen 1y ago
Unfortunately, the expert in debugging Arduino electrical errors, or in numpy, or in evaluating what the burn pattern on your spark plugs means, or in identifying that strange object in your telescope, won't be on IRC. He'll be on Reddit, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate. Or on Facebook, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate. Or on whatever large, popular platform replaces them, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate.
But rest assured, so long as you want to discuss privacy and nostalgia of the pre-invasionary internet, you'll find a knowledgeable expert on IRC.
- johnisgood 1y agoThere are more free alternatives. We need to move to these platforms. We need the network effect here for sure.
- wkat4242 1y agoThere's lots of experts like that on Libera IRC. It's still a big hub for support of FOSS project. So is Matrix which doesn't have the capability for this kind of checks (and is federated so you can add your own server without it).
- dotancohen 1y agoMaybe there is an astronomy channel, maybe there isn't. The official page [1] requires longer to install the client to even know which channels exist. That's arguably worse than Reddit, which requires no software nor registration to know which communities exist. [1] https://libera.chat/guides/findingchannels https://libera.chat/guides/findingchannels
- MaPi_ 1y agoWhat do you mean? The webchat client is linked right there in the second paragraph, doesn't require you to install anything and let's you connect and list channels as a guest without registering. It took me like 30 seconds to find out that there is indeed an astronomy channel.
- dotancohen 1y agoIt was not clear to me that was a web browser interface, because it listed system requirements - none of which were an actual web browser.
- zmatt 1y agoUhh, I'm not seeing any system requirements, am I blind? It just warns against using the /list command if you have a very slow internet connection since it produces rather voluminous output. If you scroll down a bit further they also link to a third-party website that has a searchable index of all publicly visible channels.