I wish that Libera Chat would obfuscate user hostnames in the WHOIS...
Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
101–110 of 153 posts
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#102Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which i…
When I was in high school I was in different Linux related channels on IRC as I was getting into Linux. I ended up on Quakenet, not sure why, because I'm not a big gamer. Looking back it was mostly the community and meeting like-minded people. Instead of watching TV I'd fire up irrsi and hang out in the chats, talk a bit, answer some basic Linux questions and learn a bit myself. It was also a great place to get help as the expertise was bundled there and there weren't many online sources like these days. I was also in some C/C++ channels and the same goes for that. Some of them were basically a live version of Stackoverflow these days (I'm trying to do X, here's my pastebin of code...any suggestions).
I slowly faded away once I got more busy and forums/search engines provided quick answers for most questions.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#103I wish that Libera Chat would obfuscate user hostnames in the WHOIS...
You can just set -r on yourself as you join, that should do the trick (from memory, I'm on mobile)
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#104I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things: 1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities 2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system 3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing 4. Reputation is everything It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and…
0. Do not threaten and steal from the guy who runs the show, or you're going to have a bad time.
Sincerely,
Gaurav Giri
Ex-CIO Private Internet Access Inc. (5.5 years)
PS: War is expensive, his costs are mounting.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#105The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.
Hi, one of the blog authors here, Fuchs. My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually. Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wa…
I sincerely applaud focusing on positivity instead of negativity. You all are not putting in your current efforts because of FreeNode. That's long in the past and completely irrelevant to current efforts. You're all doing it to enable the wonderful communities that are out there and thrive on this fertile ground.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#106The fact that this doesn't even mention Freenode is hilarious, and so awkward. Whoever wrote this had to really go out of their way to construct a history that isn't technically wrong, but, if you didn't know that Libera got its start as a fork of Freenode that almost everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible, you'd never figure it out.
A fork would imply it had copied all user accounts and channels. But this didn’t happen.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#107Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which i…
I share your observations, which apply to a lot of topic-focused channels.
I think they don't apply to the freewheeling chat channels.
In those, a totally different set of social norms apply, and one that may be counterintuitive is that, to get a conversation going, you shouldn't try to be _too_ provocative to get attention. Reason being that you may be dismissed as a troll not worthy of feeding. There's a balance to be struck, but it does exist.
Chat is also not for everyone. And IRC isn't even for every chatter. So it's entirely plausible and not really damning if IRC just isn't your vibe. But if the idea (of a 33-year-old protocol, of a mostly-decentralized infrastructure, of f/oss server and client software) intrigues you, then I'd encourage you to give it another try but with different goals.
Explore more channels. Pop into some of the social ones with 100 < n < 1000 users. Set up a persistent client like TheLounge or Convos on a pi in the closet, so you can catch what happens after you close your browser or sleep your laptop.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#108I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things: 1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities 2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system 3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing 4. Reputation is everything It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and…
I was there and rasengan handled it extremely poorly. He could've taken over the network and most people wouldn't have moved out if he didn't screw so many things up.
Yeah. When the first reports of problems a-brewing were coming out, I mostly ignored them as dumb Internet drama that would blow over. Then the channel take-overs started happening...
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#109Can people explain what they like about IRC? I've often found the idea of having a community chat around some topic quite intriguing, but in practice when I've tried briefly joining such communities, I simply don't last long, as it doesn't grab my attention. Rooms tend to have tens or a hundred people joined, but saying nothing, until someone has a problem they want to talk about or question they want to ask, which i…
It's not engaging, because it's made for developers. It's a serious tool, and it's not corporate. Professionals want something that works, not something attractive. For example there are two big c++ discord servers. You can't even search for discord servers, you can't favorite single channels. You quickly get overwhelmed with notifications. Not to mention the things you have to click when you join a server. And it ru…
This is an overly reductive summary that isn't backed by any of the stats--the number of IRC users has declined well below the number of professional developers. Dozens to hundreds of open source projects were already on Slack/Discord before the explosion of Freenode, dozens more switched when that happened. It's not as simple as "professionals use IRC, gamers use discord".
You could definitely argue that IRC appeals more to the kind of developer who spends their entire day in the terminal and Vim--but that's not the only kind of developer out there! Just like many developers prefer IntelliJ to Vim, many prefer Discord to IRC. Discord and Slack both offer real improvements for some workflows, and some people value those improvements.
As an example, persistent chat is hugely valuable in a help community--I often find I don't need to ask a question at all because I can just search in the history to find what I'm looking for. Even something as seemingly frivolous as reactions is quite useful--one person can answer a question and get a chorus of 'amens' without actually having a bunch of "what he said"s in the chat.
Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, one of the blog authors here, Fuchs. My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually. Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wa…
> We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. This is a half-truth. Some people (in a community I'm in) had implicit trust in the team that did such a great job running freenode, though not everyone. I'd say you already had some trust (just like some IRC software, I guess); and we're glad we chose to follow to libera.chat in the end.
Well, they're still the ones that built it. :-)