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Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

libera.chat

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Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#81

Post by kodah »

INTPenis wrote: post #56
denkmoon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC as in the 1988 chat protocol, sure. IRC as a concept has never been healthier. Lots of alternatives, most proprietary, some libre, and more users than ever.

What are you basing this on? I'm not trying to be difficult, I have used IRC since the 90s and still use it. It's just the best format for chat imo. But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.

IRC has inspired most major chat protocols, even as much as they've deviated. The fact that there are major networks with tens of thousands and hundreds of users that are running with minimal funding is a testimony to the protocol and the communities around them.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#82

Post by Doxin »

aaronmdjones wrote: post #54
Doxin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't accuse him of having technical prowess. Pretty much as soon as the takeover happened freenode started suffering technical issues. Libera on the other hand dealt with the insane influx of users really well. There was some connection troubles for the first hour if I recall correctly, but has been pretty much spotless ever since.

The most difficult thing to deal with in the first couple of days were the occasional server crashes. We would have liked some more time on our testnet to iron out the bugs in the IRC server software we were planning to migrate to (and started out with on the new network), but that didn't end up happening. In essence, we deployed a beta straight to production with >10k users on day 1 and had everything ironed out by…

Well from a users perspective, for all intents and purposes it looked like you got everything sorted by the end of day 1. I vaguely recall some netsplits happening after that, but that's just part of the IRC experience on most networks.

Props on the smooth switchover. It could have hardly gone any better as far as I can see.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#83

Post by cpach »

Gigachad wrote: post #31
abstractbeliefs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, freenode is dead. Amen. I'm sure it doesn't help that the current owner of freenode is notoriously litigious.

Irc in general is in a slow death.

I mostly agree with you. But I still find IRC very useful. My main gripe is that there are few IRC clients that suite my tastes.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#84

Post by doctor_eval »

glandium wrote: post #69
doctor_eval wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"promises only bind those who believe them" - JL Gassee

FWIW, it's a very common saying in French. I wouldn't attribute it to Gassée. Edit: googling it in French attributes it to Henri Queuille.

Thanks. JLG attributed it to politicians, I think, but I was (a) too lazy to find the source, but also (b) don’t speak French. I just didn’t want to appear to be taking credit for such a sharp observation.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#85

Post by glandium »

doctor_eval wrote: post #84
glandium wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, it's a very common saying in French. I wouldn't attribute it to Gassée. Edit: googling it in French attributes it to Henri Queuille.

Thanks. JLG attributed it to politicians, I think, but I was (a) too lazy to find the source, but also (b) don’t speak French. I just didn’t want to appear to be taking credit for such a sharp observation.

Jacques Chirac famously used a variant of it.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#88

Post by Aissen »

FoxbrushTailwag wrote: post #40
LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

The 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…

> 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.

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#89

Post by kashyapc »

radarsat1 wrote: post #41

Can 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…

A quick few thoughts based on using IRC for 13-ish years:

• I like IRC because it is clean and a light-weight text-only interface (well, you could use emojis, if you wish). I prefer text-based conversations when possible. I'm equally fine with video, but text is far more effective for technical conversations.

• It is also less stressful for me, as I can respond in a more asynchronous manner, without any implicit pressure to immediately respond (e.g. the "$person is typing ..." notification).

• IRC 'stuck' with me, because I largely use it for upstream projects that I participate in.

• To avoid "boring questions" it is useful to put an etiquette "hint" in the channel topic, and gently point new users to it. E.g. I've written this some 8 years ago for a channel I used to moderate: https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/

• Lastly, I recognize IRC's pros and cons, so I'm not religiously attached to it, and I'm fine to use other chat tools. I just don't want to become that guy in the last pane of this XKCD comic ;-) — https://xkcd.com/1782/

Re: Happy Birthday, Libera Chat

#90

Post by junon »

Woah, been a year already. I remember sitting on mIRC for hours and hours watching the users flood into libera and out of freenode.

I will never forget how absolutely gobstricken I was with how perfectly the Libera team executed everything, and they were so incredibly polite through what has to be some of the densest chaos one could witness on the internet.

Really historic day. Happy birthday, Libera!

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