Meh, something smells _funny_ about all this. I still don’t know what in particular Freenode did wrong, looks like it was a group of admins/volunteers who just wanted to have control over the network that they have dedicated many hours to supporting. To some extent, that’s fair - if they contributed the most to the network.
I’m always a bit cynical when I hear too many posts/comments about the “community” etc, I’ve seen first hand how many community insiders in the FOSS movement pat each other on the back and put down the work of fresh starters who are trying new things.
And now looks like the migration to libera chat will definitely take place. Me personally I’m just going to quit IRC, too much drama over nothing.
Take everything with a grain of salt, I’ve learnt not to believe everything on the internet, especially it subtly involves peer pressure (which inevitably themes of “community” bring up).
I don’t care at all about Freenode, this is just an observers view of what’s happened.
I’m not immersed in IRC culture but I used to hang out on Freenode a bit, and I think it’s quite obvious that top-down dictatorial decisions like the recent “hijacking” of channels for mentioning Libera (or whatever actually happened there) are toxic to community building. To the people actually doing the community building, choosing Freenode now looks a bit like founding a city in the shadow of an active volcano, with a capricious force immune to accountability who can (and demonstrably will) nuke your decades-old community structures without any meaningful warning.
FOSS is rife with stupid drama and I don’t think either “side” here is an exception, but the recent “purge” goes above and beyond. I would absolutely never consider trying to start a community there now, for entirely pragmatic reasons.
While I agree that Libera is New Freenode and Old Freenode is rapidly dying a death, this whole episode has soured me mightily against Freenode as a whole. This should never have happened in the first place and the blame for it lies squarely at the OldFreenode/Libera admin's feet, not whichever outside actor took advantage of it. The admins are an "old boys network" - not chosen by the community, or elected, but simply in-group appointment - and while Rasengan is certainly a loose cannon, I have seen enough chatlogs to note that "the admins" are not innocent of power-tripping and favoritism either.
If I were starting an IRC channel for a free software project now, I would put it on OFTC, which has a real governance model with elections and - mysteriously - also manages to be drama-free.
That's not an accurate representation of the freenode situation: freenode was taken over, the old staff disagreed with the decisions of the new owner and left to create Libera.Chat, and then the new ownership started banning people and taking over channels for talking about Libera, changed the server software, effectively deleted the nickname database, and is producing really delusional messaging, such as https://freenode.com/news/introducing-irc .
Well. That's a good sign that whoever bought out freenode has no comprehension of group psychology or the fact that this behavior is more likely to lead to people leaving very rapidly. Barbara Streisand syndrome anyone?
It is so clear that they thing the community owes them something when in reality the people who use the irc are the only reason freenode has any value. It's not that hard to spin up another irc server, it is hard as heck to get lots of people to join and use it.
Andrew Lee formed a contract with the head staffer of freenode a few years ago, both of whom insisted that it was only a sponsorship, but did not release any further info, and that Andrew would have no operational/executive control over the network.
Now, it turns out that the contract was a sale of everything that could be had, and Andrew does want full operational and executive control.
Learning this, the volunteer staff resign as a bloc, and move to start an alternative. 250 projects (from Ubuntu, to PostgreSQL, SourceHut, the IRCv3 Working Group, etc) have all left freenode to head to Libera the volunteer network.
Losing all his projects, Andrew insists that "freenode is for FOSS" while at the same time shaming foss projects who want to exercise the freedom to choose their own chat platform and hiring a very dubious set of IRC "personalities" as staff.
The part I don't get is there was the same drama when freenode was founded...
The org structure (wasn't it a non-profit at one point?), the donation drives, etc. There was a lot of "much larger irc networks don't need all this", "its a cash grab", etc.
Now, it seems to have fallen victim to the very issues the organization was supposed to prevent ?
Agreed. I thought last week that all this was a tempest in a teapot and I wasn’t going to bother thinking about it. Today’s drama is a pretty convincing demonstration that Freenode is not a stable place to hold discussions any more. There’s plenty of other irc networks out there.
The 'staff' resigned, so it looks like a powergrab by them via starting their own network and disparaging freenode. I didn't see anything that was irreconcilable at the start of this, only that the 'staffs' demands of having DNS ownership were denied.
> The self-proclaimed "Owner and Guardian of Freenode" has not yet put in the effort to earn himself a seat at that discussion table for a single one of those communities, much less all of them.
That's just your opinion. I don't share it. I think Freenode is going fine, I'm fine with cutting bait with the outrage mob. If you want to go, go.
I think there were many many people on the fence, however freenode's new leadership repeatedly made it impossible to stay. To name a few.
Forcefully taking over control of channels that mentioned libera.
Completely banning irccloud users.
Network banning people mentioning libera.
And then dropping the entire nickserv chanserv databases whole setting everything back to square one.
---
I think if freenode did nothing at all, there would have been massive fragmentation. I would like to think the crazy and erratic behavior in the end was to facilitate a smooth transition.
Lets be serious. Libera is a direct competitor for the userbase of Freenode. If you went on to some message board and posted hey come to my message board we're over there. Even though the message board makes no profit, that is still someone's project and they will not take kindy to taking their userbase and will delete the message. Expecting otherwise is just acting entitled.
Honestly, the entire freenode nonsense is just a bunch of people acting super entitled over an IRC network they don't pay for and is basically their hobby. From what I can tell it basically all came down to the fact the staffers got pissed they couldn't control the domains which they didn't pay for. The fact they expect someone who bought the domains just to give the domains to them is nothing but entitlement.
> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99% of its use in just three easy steps: (see https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the dramatic abruptness of its fall)
1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to set up a new network (libera chat).
2. Most of the communities saw this drama and basically said "uh, we're still evaluating what the hell we're doing," with many opting in the interim to do something along the lines of have presence in both freenode and libera. Freenode responding by de-op'ing and kickbanning people from channels that mentioned libera in the topic. This resulted in pretty much every community still on the fence going "thank you for making the decision, we're now on libera, goodbye freenode."
3. A few months later, the network cleared its chanserv and nickserv lists and basically completely rebooted itself from scratch, to avoid the problems of legacy people.
I won’t speak for the spambots (which are dubious to be honest), or the banning/kicking which, while I know it happened in some places, was not really widespread.
Most communities I’m in were in a "wait and see" position, heck, one even only had something along the lines "We’re undecided over what to do, but you should register your nick at libera in any case". Guess what they decided to do after the channel got taken away…
> There is no lock-in. They're actually closing down channels that don't want to use their service. Think about it. These channels don't want to use freenode. Freenode closes them and everyone cries.
Because what a decent service provider does is provide a sunsetting period, in which most of the banned channels were already. Immediate termination because you decide to change your service provider and want to not fragment your community is not what a responsible provider does.
> Let's be serious that's because that was a single project and not a mass targeting of the freenode user base
FOSS projects owners are not "targeting the freenode user base", they are choosing another venue for discussion. You can think there is a secret cabal out to get Andrew Lee, but that’s really people considering their options, and getting proven right.
I was sad at the commotion in the community but at least he did it with so much passion that everyone left for Libera and the community wasn't split at all :) A few projects remained at first but when he wiped the database and they lost their op rights to random people (whoever happened to join back first) the last ones moved over.
So now Libera is what Freenode used to be, nothing more nothing less, only with more well-defined management that learned their lessons about vetting contracts. They're doing a great job at continuing the Freenode spirit and everything is settled back to normal.
Pretty much the best outcome possible from all this IMO.
Ps the sign up form is so un-irc. The great thing about IRC is that you don't need any identity.
I was quite relaxed about the whole thing and was willing to give Lee a chance, but mass purging channels and forwarding them to ## namespace, and deleting their topics...
#go-nuts had libera.chat mentioned in the topic... saying that they were on libera.chat as well "if freenode dies". Suddenly every user was forwarded to ##go-nuts, the topic empty, #go-nuts invite only ; that certainly is a classy way. This was the official golang support channel, no warning, nothing. Can you understand what kind of breach of trust that is? How can you host a support channel on Freenode for any kind of official project, if that's what they're doing?
I was k-lined on Freenode for repeatedly pointing out in one of the hijacked channels what had happened. This is _not_ something I ever considered doing, but it was so unfair. People being forwarded to an unofficial support channel not realizing what had happened.
Freenode staff are very aggressive about taking over channels in order to limit exposure to this whole fiasco. And they go way overboard. From the beginning my impression was "this is ops fighting, and who knows what's true, hopefully things will calm down", but the way Lee handles this? Like a privileged, rich, socially inapt teenager. Every new ounce of information released on freenode.net reads like what I would have written with 16. https://freenode.net/news/for-foss is this the person you would entrust your official support channel for an OSS project with?
I still don't know what's true and what's not. And I can see both sides of this. Libera will first have to prove itself, and so I hope channels will also consider switching to OFTC (which promises far less trouble, and more stability at this point), but Freenode definitely is not trustworthy anymore. It's pretty much as simple as that.
See also: the way freenode went under. Some asshole seized power, and then nothing happened for a bit. Then staffers got replaced as they got too uppity. Then a bit later anyone mentioning libera.chat in official freenode channels got kicked. Then the mods of any channel mentioning libera.chat in the topic got replaced. And then there was no one left as everyone had moved over to libera.
If they would have simply done nothing, nothing at all then hardly anyone would have left. I wasn't planning on leaving freenode, there hadn't been any hard evidence of malice and I have no attachment to any staff.
If there's enough users in an IRC channel to have a decent conversation, and there's someone actively banning spammers and trolls, then that's good enough.
Now they went actively being aggressive about it, motivating me and probqbly most other previously disaffected people to make a decision. That user count will go down, he's an idiot for waving that banner so proudly.
I'm a little confused by all this controversy. I'm no stranger to people trying to exert secret influence in open-source projects, and put themselves in positions of power to satisfy egos, etc. and I certainly don't like that kind of thing.
But what was actually done on Freenode? I've read several of the volunteer resignations and it seems to just be that they're obviously now in control and people don't like that. Is there something more concrete they've done that points to a particular ulterior motive or the negative impact of their ownership? Am I just missing some historical baggage?
I’m always a bit cynical when I hear too many posts/comments about the “community” etc, I’ve seen first hand how many community insiders in the FOSS movement pat each other on the back and put down the work of fresh starters who are trying new things.
And now looks like the migration to libera chat will definitely take place. Me personally I’m just going to quit IRC, too much drama over nothing.
Take everything with a grain of salt, I’ve learnt not to believe everything on the internet, especially it subtly involves peer pressure (which inevitably themes of “community” bring up).
I don’t care at all about Freenode, this is just an observers view of what’s happened.
reply