Free Software Projects Defenestrate The Freenode IRC Network

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Free Software Projects Defenestrate The Freenode IRC Network

Seemingly by the minute today there are more free software projects leaving the Freenode IRC network and moving to alternative IRC networks or other chat platforms...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Free-Software-Exits-Freenode

[idcmp_]

> defenestrate

I feel like someone has been looking for a reason to use that word for a while. :-)

[Jabberwocky]

This is sad news. Freenode was the thing that got me into open source around 2001.

[microcode]

Still seems to be working fine, hope they don't shut down. I guess I'll have to do more reading on what exactly is going on, but it doesn't exactly seem reasonable?

[rhavenn]

So, read some of this. How is it that Christel was able to create a Ltd. and then sell it to begin with? If it was all volunteers, etc... what was there to sell? or were they duped into it? It seems not a lot of people are pissed at them, but at Andrew Lee for being a capitalist and taking advantage of a contract?

I mean, yeah, I liked Freenode too and knowing it's no longer "open" I won't use it anymore, but I don't hold any issue with Lee. It seems while a little slimy he did nothing illegal???

[anarki2]

Folks, we're witnessing the death of IRC. freenode was the last bastion. What a sad day.

[usta]

Folks, we're witnessing the death of IRC. freenode was the last bastion. What a sad day.

if you think freenode == irc then you are completely out of knowledge. It is a protocol and used current most of games/systems and will be used in future.
Just a small example twitch is using irc for its message parts. IRC will never die.
Just for a small reminder :

[CommunityMember]

Folks, we're witnessing the death of IRC.

"The news of my death was greatly exaggerated" - IRC

However, this event is pushing some communities to consider moving to something like matrix (likely with a libera.chat bridge for those that prefer IRC) more rapidly then they had otherwise been planning.

[david-nk]

Sad, Freenode was the last remaining large IRC server and the best for developers and open-source enthusiasts alike.
With IRC gone, pretty much all communication worldwide is now in the hand of megacorps.

[anarki2]

if you think freenode == irc then you are completely out of knowledge. It is a protocol and used current most of games/systems and will be used in future.
Just a small example twitch is using irc for its message parts. IRC will never die.
Just for a small reminder :

You're rather quick to dismiss my knowledge, though I wrote my thesis on IRC and the release and deployment hurdles of an IRC client. I've been the founder and project leader of said client for a couple of years as well, although I admit it was more of a build / deployment challenge.

In any case, I didn't say the IRC protocol, the open standard will be prohibited from being used in random stuff, that's not technically possible. I said Internet Relay Chat, where you fire up your IRC client and join to random IRC networks and channels, and talk to other people, is dead.

freenode has been the one and only IRC network that didn't shrink consistently over time. It was *the* IRC network, period. And now the users will scatter all over the internet to various alternate services and protocols.

IRC is dead and has long been dying. The main issue is that IRC was designed in 1988 and it shows. It was designed to replace BBS systems' chat interfaces, many of which were limited to just one concurrent user at the time. That tells a lot about the state of affairs back in the day.

So the thing is, IRC just won't scale at all, the protocol is fundamentally, inherently incapable of scaling. There's no standardized way of authentication or authorization either (in other words, it's a friggin' mess), no link previews, no file sending (no, DCC does not count, it just never works in practice), no reactions, no nothing, it's a true 20th century, extremely limited, plain text patchwork.

Twitch providing a write-only gateway for chatbots to spam random cr@p won't change that fact. It's not for chatting, it's for automation. Same goes for botnets and miners being controlled via IRC. If you don't understand the difference, I don't know what to say to you.

Regarding the comic, Slack shut down its IRC gateway more than 3 years ago. But it was awful anyway. Why? Because IRC is an extremely limited piece of cr@p, so it's not possible to seamlessly connect it with a 21st century client and protocol. It can be a patchwork at best.

freenode was the place where you could just connect and look around in the channel browser to find your favorite OSS projects' channels and talk to people about your issues and ideas. Or just idle around. And now it's gone. And so is the spirit of IRC.

Have fun with your Twitch chatbots.