The thing is, most people will just stay, and the freak behind Freenode will have numbers to back up his claims, that his "community" is strong. Who knows how many of those users just keep running irssi in screen or have it configured on bouncer, checking it once a year when they need to ask question. Maybe over long time, the numbers will shift. But most people just don't care about the platform they chat through.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't know about "most users". The numbers are already getting pretty close to half of what they were before, so even if they're still big the graph seems to counter any claims they might make about a strong community: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
I'm glad someone else in the comments posted this link: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php which clearly indicates freenode is tanking and libera is matching it but upwards. In a month it'll be overtaken; I think there may be a lot of inertia from people who have a load of irc channels open but don't actively interact with it, as well as old webpages pointing to the freenode servers. But it's a matter of time, nobody will promote freenode anymore, all IRC communities will or have migrated, etc.
Yeah. I had one or two channels that took some time moving, but this morning my last one moved, so I've finally logged off Freenode for the first time in about 15 years. In a few more weeks/months, pretty much the only "users" left will be IRC proxies that someone forgot about.
Luckily the threshold for switching to libera for non-channel-owners is pretty damn low. Just update your config to point towards libera instead of freenode. Even if you only lurk that's probably not too much to ask.
The evidence suggests that is not the case. Freenode has already lost almost half of its users in the last month and the projections suggest that Libera Chat will overtake freenode in user count in just over a week and that freenode will drop to the third largest network by user count in about a month. These projections have been pretty optimistic for freenode over the last few weeks too, the reality of the situation has shown freenode lose users faster than the projections forecast.
> But most people just don't care about the platform they chat through.
People love to throw this sentiment around literally every time any kind of platform does something shitty, and it's certainly very effective at demotivating people from even trying to do anything about it. It would be great if people stopped claiming this, because it's really not helping anybody and makes the job of resolving governance issues so much harder.
This specific case is actually a good example of how the sentiment is completely wrong, too; with the right strategy (which was what happened here) it's clearly possible to get people to move en masse. As evidenced by Freenode bleeding users to Libera at breakneck pace, and effectively all projects having moved over.
Bottom line: you might not want to put in the effort to solve governance issues like this, and that's fine. But please stop actively telling other people that they won't succeed.
I think there's a spectrum of caring. Facebook users barely comprehend what their platform is doing to them, IRC users would get ham radio callsigns if they needed to.
reply