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.
Libera is an IRC network too! It's run by the same people who used to run Freenode! I agree it shouldn't have happened, but everything is intact except for the name "Freenode." It's not like they moved to Discord or something (well, there is also a very large Python Discord, but the IRC channel is around too).
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.
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.
It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently.
The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything important.
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.
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.
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.
my first thought on that post actually was, how about moving all the channels onto freenode? there is no need for every community to maintain their own servers. and most FOSS IRC users will be on freenode anyways.
The reason they're going to Libera.chat is because the former Freenode staff set it up—moving to another existing IRC network would mean, essentially, abandoning your own house and coming to someone else's and asking to be allowed to set up in there, while what they're doing is trying to build their own new house.
Especially considering that probably most of the current freenode users are idling or even orphaned bouncers. IRC is such that connection counts do not mean an actual person is behind the connection. But obviously everyone who moved to Libera did so actively. 18K active users vs 69K total connections is huge.
If this leads to a mass exodus from Freenode, it'll probably significantly reduce overall IRC usage.
Communities will fracture, people will set up random splinter networks that will die off in a few months, and lots of open-source projects that already want to be using something Javascripty like Slack or Discord are going to use this as the motivating thing to make the switch.
Personally I'm staying put on Freenode because I don't see a lot of user-facing impact potential here, and IRC was already essentially untrusted/public (yes, even your private messages - you don't really know who is relaying them and how trustworthy they are).
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 .
If Libera.chat gets 60% of the users, freenode would still be the second largest IRC network. I think there will be a enough inertia among people/projects who don't follow hacker news or internet trends for the remainder of freenode to retain an audience.
The bigger question is if they retain enough server sponsors, who may be paying more attention. They might defect to libera.chat or OFTC, or just decide the whole business is not worth their while.
Irc servers are not that hard to start up and libéra is already in place. It's a matter of time now before they lose most of the users.
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