Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

I absolutely love IRC.

It's blazing fast, uses very little bandwidth and is not polluted by images and stupid stickers, shaking windows or chat bubbles. Of these only the images can be handy sometimes but you can use a weblink for that.

Also, it's anonymous, you can just make up whatever nickname you want, no need to register (ok for some channels/servers they can require it). Just make sure to use a VPS to hide your IP. No "create an account with us first, what's your date of birth and other stuff we have no actual reason to ask for". No terms & conditions crap.

The whole thing with the rooms with hundreds of people joined but not talking is exactly what I like. There is a huge powerful community but very little noise. People don't blab on about what they had for dinner (except in the offtopic channels). IRC is really to the point, though this is a cultural thing, not technical. If you go to #obscureapp you will see talk about this obscure app, and don't have to wade through cat pictures and other BS. Because none of the regulars want to sift through this shit every day so such distractions are quickly moderated.

What you need is a bouncer. I use Quassel myself because it has a GUI client which makes it easy to control multiple connections to networks (with other bouncers this can be complicated). And it has a great Android client QuasselDroid. With Quassel you can just visit it once a day and scroll back to see what you've missed.

In IRC time is also very fluid, you can just reply to a question someone asked much later. If you saw an unanswered question, you probably didn't wait long enough. In fact it is super annoying when people plonk down a question on IRC and then leave 1 minute later. This is not how it works when people are on tens of channels at the same time!

If you're on there regularly and keep a bouncer running 24/7 you will get to know the 'usual suspects' in each channel and you will see a very strong sense of community.

I hate Discord, I like Matrix but matrix becomes difficult to manage if you join 50 public channels. The UI of its clients are focused on being a whatsapp/telegram replacement, not an IRC replacement.

As one actual specific example of what I like about IRC, I had an issue once with a FOSS package on FreeBSD. I mentioned this on the right channel, and it turned out the maintainer was there as well. He confirmed he saw the same issue, found a fix, gave me a workaround and published the final fix 10 minutes later. This is what makes IRC (and Libera in particular) so great. This kind of support is amazing. And this wasn't even a small package at all.

In comparison: I work for a multinational and we pay millions to the usual big tech suspects for "premium" support with agents that don't know more than it says in the kbase which I have already read, not to mention all the jumping through dark pattern hoops I have to go through just to get a ticket in the system. When it gets through I have to reiterate everything I have already said in the ticket, then they will tell me I'm doing it wrong because according to the docs it should work. Yeah, I read the docs, I'm contacting you because it doesn't. Then follows the "troubleshooting" which involves turning unrelated things on/off in the vague hope that it might work because they can't tell me they have no clue as to what the problem is. Fast forward a week or 2 or sometimes a month and if we bug our account manager enough they might grant us the extraordinary privilege of sending our request to someone who is actually slightly involved in development. Only at this point the issue is fixed though we usually have to wait for ages for it to make its way into production. And we pay really big bucks for this crap.

This is where IRC shines. And a lot of the things I mention are not even technical. You could do this thing on any platform, really. But it's part of the culture of IRC. I think what also helps is that the only people who are still sticking with IRC are quite technical so it bypasses the whole "expecting you're a moron that doesn't read the docs" stuff. Bonus points for those that have a registered + cloaked nick and haven't logged in 2 seconds ago :)

> I feel the same way about IRC (and Matrix). I think a part of the problem is that the technical Q&A discussion that happens in most of the dev channels would be better served taking place on a forum. Lots of those chats aren't happening in real-time anyways. And if you're not there to receive the messages, the information is lost.

This is where a good bouncer comes in. I can search all the way back to the beginning of when I joined a channel in Quassel. It's not lost at all, and a forum is much less direct.

This is one thing where Matrix shines by the way, as when you join a channel you can even go back to things that were said before you joined. Though this is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sometimes when you say something it's good to be aware of who's there to read it and who isn't.

Yeah the notifications and other tricks to try and 'engage' you, so annoying about discord and the other glossy chat apps. "Did you try this channel? People are waiting for you!" bullshit. IRC is clean, fast and efficient.

> We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.

This really helped. You focused on "getting life back to normal" from the get-go, looking to move forward instead of looking back at the anger and despair. This really helped to make Libera the home it always was within a matter of weeks. Really well done and thank you.

For me this mature and positive mindset only increased my trust in the team, there was never any need to rebuild it because none was lost :)

Normally you are going to want to go into the "offtopic" channels for general chatting. Normal support channels are often very focused and explicitly disallow non-support conversations, but it depends on the specific channel and the operators of the channel of course!