11–20 of 39 posts
The current drama around Freenode is completely disproportionate to what its importance in 2021 is. Sure, IRC was huge back in the day. Today it isn't.
I see a 4k user drop on the past 24h on https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ I wonder if that was the #python ban hammer OFTC numbers look stable for the whole ordeal OTOH Libera now has 2/3rds of the Freenode users, that number I think was 1/2 a couple of days ago. I wonder when will the penny drop.
The current drama around Freenode is completely disproportionate to what its importance in 2021 is. Sure, IRC was huge back in the day. Today it isn't.
You are pretty young, right? IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.
No.
> IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.
I don't understand why when I make a statement about the overall state of something, there's always this one guy who replies "oh yeah, you're wrong because I something, something".
I understand every person is a universe and to them their PoV is the only thing that matters, but we need to be a little less egocentric when analyzing overall trends.
I didn't claim there's not a single person using Freenode in this thread. In fact I've also used IRC from time to time recently. And I can compare how it was 30 years ago and how it is today. Today, it doesn't matter. The regulars who were there decades ago are still there and literally using IRC to their last day on Earth. And the rest have largely moved on. And thing is, the regulars don't make a self-sufficient community on their own.
You can be all like "them kids and their Slack, Discord, etc." all you like and these services DO have short half-life. What you fail to realize is that IRC is not an exception.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just like, your opinion, man. The tens of thousands of users that migrated to other networks feel differently about the matter.
Tens of thousands of users is not actually that large these days for a worldwide chat app though? I don't know exactly how many concurrent users apps like Slack or Discord have, but I'm willing to bet it's at least two orders of magnitude more than ten thousand. Let's not even compare it to the real giants like Whatsapp and WeChat.
I see a 4k user drop on the past 24h on https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ I wonder if that was the #python ban hammer OFTC numbers look stable for the whole ordeal OTOH Libera now has 2/3rds of the Freenode users, that number I think was 1/2 a couple of days ago. I wonder when will the penny drop.
Uh, sounds to me like the penny has dropped already...? Or do you mean, when Andrew "rasengan" Lee will understand he fucked up and kill Freenode? I think that will take at least a year or so, probably more, and he'll probably try to sell it on first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are pretty young, right? IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.
> You are pretty young, right? No. > IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care. I don't understand why when I make a statement about the overall state of something, there's always this one guy who replies "oh yeah, you're wrong because I something, something". I understand every p…
I see a 4k user drop on the past 24h on https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ I wonder if that was the #python ban hammer OFTC numbers look stable for the whole ordeal OTOH Libera now has 2/3rds of the Freenode users, that number I think was 1/2 a couple of days ago. I wonder when will the penny drop.
While self-hosting sounds fun, I think part of made for example freenode so fruitful is the concentration of projects. It's easy to pop over in a different channel when you're already on the network, and concentrating similar projects makes it likely that you find something interesting.
Most of the current irc clients make it possible to have multiple server connections simultaneously, so jumping between servers isn't a problem either.
For a long time the freenode debacle will complement my examples about why open protocols are important.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1459
The erstwhile Freenode volunteers would have a far harder time setting up Libera IRC as an alternative if it wasn't for IRC being an open protcol and how that enabled the emergence of existing open source ecosystem of servers/clients/libraries/bots/...
In the same vain, FOSS projects who lost their home have a choice: setup a shop at an alternate IRC network, or start their own IRC network (self hosted). Which is still preferable to being wholesale forced towards adopting a different protocol altogether. Everyone still gets to enjoy the same affordances provided by the IRC ecosystem such as it is, that doesn't change.
Of course, that doesn't exclude debating the merits and limitations of the IRC protocol in it's own right, or it's future roadmap and design. But I feel that's a separate discussion, removed from the Freenode diaspora: I would argue that the latter is a discussion located one level up.