Libera has made itself our home very quickly, and I commend the Libera staff that have worked to approve our project group and set up cloaks.
When the issue blew up last week, we quickly reserved our slot on Libera just in case. Some of our staff were pushing harder for Libera, and I was concerned it was a bit fervent and sensational, but ultimately went along with it.
It's been sad to see over the last week how quickly they were proven right, and how it only took a few days for the new so-called freenode to deal a killing blow.
Had we been still uncommitted to the Libera move, Andrew's actions this morning would have hurt our community more.
The identical experience of libera chat makes me realize how useful open protocols are, and how much harder it would be to do something like this with some platform like discord
I don't use Discord but apparently there was some pretty drama a couple of weeks ago because they made a bunch of changes to the UI of the client that apparently the community didn't like.
If you want to have control of your platform then don't use closed source, proprietary solutions!
While I do hate that Discord is being used for all chat needs instead of just sticking to being a replacement for Ventrilo or Skype for gaming groups, I want to point out that the drama is a massive overreaction. Discord made very minor style changes and slightly modified their logo, wordmark, and brand color scheme (with the logo being the only one of those you really end up seeing inside the application).
There were a couple color changes made. I'm on the dark theme and this is what I saw:
They made the blue on some buttons more saturated. I don't really have a problem with this.
They made the highlight color of user and channel mentions more brighter. This hurt readability as the text is white. Making the background of the text brighter decreases contrast.
I thought they seemed like trivial changes as well, although not being a user myself I couldn't really form an opinion.
Still, it should serve as a wakeup call that the users really aren't in charge and that it can potentially suck. It's a taste of things to come whenever Discord decides to more aggressively monetize themselves for instance.
But apparently the conclusion was more that they should insult the devs on twitter and reddit instead.
I did not, and do not, give a single shit about the change. It's a god damn icon for like 99% of people
I guess some people just want to sit and gawk at their start menu for hours on end and Discords change has broken that zen-like meditation for them or something
I feel it's a classic example of bikeshedding. Except this is 2021, so the obvious solution is apparently harassment, anger, and vitriol.
Someone up-thread made mention of the stylistic changes being problematic for people with visual impairment or low vision, which would seem to me to be a much more serious issue than a stupid icon.
But, what do I know? When they announced the change, I had an incredibly difficult time feeling anything other than indifference. Why people would be upset is beyond me.
I use discord almost daily and didn't even notice any changes. The UI is still garbage and it still makes random notification sounds with no indication as to why.
The random notification sounds are because default server notification settings are set by the server owner. So when you join a server, its notification setting could be "all messages" or "mentions only" depending on what the server owner set. This setting only affects the notification sound (it doesn't badge the server or anything), so it's easy to misunderstand.
If it's easy to misunderstand then it's bad UX. Discord's chat could learn a lot from Slack and Mattermost (but then again, so could Signal, Skype and Teams). Their videoconf however is top notch.
You also forget to mention they changed the font of certain UI elements to the same as the wordmark, namely the server name. The legibility of the new font is objectively worse than the previous one, though as long as it remains exclusive to the server name I agree, it's not that big of a deal.
Thank you for the clear description of the change. It seemed like this was a teapot typhoon, but I was not quite interested enough to lift the lid myself.
When the IRC gateway stopped working, I found https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack worked pretty well. But I switched employers months ago and no longer have to use Slack, which is even better! (So, I don't know how well it works today.)
I think that's just because of the simplicity of IRC - migrating off of discord would entail a lot of friction because of the features it gives you, like super granular permissions and access to channels. IRC channels are just places to chat with minor access control, so moving is easy as long as the community/people move.
It's not the network, though - it's the experience. When some community decides to up and move to libera, I connect and register with the new server and it's literally the same thing.
Clients create the UX and the community creates the content.
Now I imagine trying to get a community off discord to a different platform with slightly different interactions, slightly different "channel" styles, different reactions or role-setting, would be a much harder sell.
That being said, I have nothing against discord - I think they've made a really compelling product and have certainly set a bar for what a future open protocol should cover if it wants to be relevant
It's also a good use case for a good old .vcard, which already has semantics for plenty of contact fields, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some for IRC.
Modern phones have done their utmost to end these. If you even find the option to load a vcard they will (often sneakily) copy the contents to Google Contacts or similar, and you don't know if the phone is even keeping the vcard updated. It has made the approach feel unreliable.
I've switched to self-hosting my contacts with Radicale[0] (with "backups" to a git repo) synced via DavX5[1], with no problem of them mixing with Google Contacts. It's pretty annoying though that basically no current contacts app recognizes common fields like the nickname for a person.
I fully expected some blockchain nonsense opening your link, I'm pleasantly surprised.
It seems like an interesting project but I wonder if it has any chance of reaching critical mass. The incumbents have no incentives to interoperate with such a protocol as far as I can tell.
The same is true for any open protocol, at least at first. Any open protocol has to reach widespread usage first, and only then will incumbents have to adopt it. That's an extremely difficult task, but hopefully not impossible.
I wouldn't say it was a 1:1 identical experience; registering was a pain as there was no process to take over user registrations or channel registrations from freenode.
But, assuming you did those things smoothly then it was pretty identical and as simple as changing your client config to connect to libera instead of freenode.
The noteworthy (IMO, obviously) communities/projects that I have seen jump ship (either voluntarily or by force) are wikimedia & wikimedia, ubuntu, gentoo, centos, kde, postgres, sourcehut, wesnoth, mutt, vim, emacs, lisp, scheme, clojure, haskell. Any other ones that I haven't seen yet?
Alpine (to oftc), voidlinux, grafana, prometheus, fosdem, curl, bastillebsd, couchdb, musl, ircpuzzles, jellyfin, gamingonlinux, xen, devuan, irssi, weechat, …. The list is too big to get it exhaustively
Indeed but note that if you search for "libera chat" or "libera.chat" (I think they are equivalent, github's search doesn't recognize punctuation I think), it filters out the commits that don't mention both "libera" "chat" in the commit message, and only turns up those that do. In particular, github's commit search does not search diffs, only commit messages, so even if the diff contains libera.chat, it won't turn up until the commit message also mentions it.
While there is a #clojure on both Freenode and Libera, it's not official as far as I know. Also, https://clojure.org/community/resources still links to the Freenode channel. Most of the Clojure community hangs around on Zulip and Slack (Clojurians) more than IRC anyways.
IRC and mailing lists are still the most important communication channels for a lot of projects (see: kernel.org and similar projects). It haven't changed for 30+ years and I hope it won't change in the future.
Not sure I'd call it primary for all of them, but it's been a supremely useful, and speedy, support resource whenever I've needed it. Being able to just blindly /join #name_of_project and land somewhere useful (even if unofficial) is like magic.
The move to Matrix was not a community decision, which is why it's now fractured slightly between the different systems. Maybe someone will bridge them in the future.
There are no hard limit on matrix room member counts. e2e encrypted rooms with thousands of users se a lot of key negotiation traffic, but with such sizes maybe full encryption doesn't buy much as any user can share the log/history.
O(N) per user for the initial key exchange when you join a room, and then O(1) thereafter - although you should re-key when someone joins/leaves or every N messages or X days (where N is typically 100 and X is typically 7).
Looking at https://freenode.net/static/img/wikimedia-forced-move.png the forced part is by people on the projects. Honestly, that sort of stuff is the main reason I stopped using IRC. I can completely believe that someone decided to do that and it shows contempt for the community it says they want to have.
It's easy to say the community moved when you kick and ban everyone from a channel and create a new channel on a different network. But how many people actually moved? Did they just damage their own community over this?
While it perhaps seems a bit heavy-handed, it's an easy way to ensure people notice the channel has moved, even if they haven't been following the news, and thus minimize damage to your community. I don't see how this action is "contempt for the community".
"How many people actually moved?" .. I'd presume everyone who wants to be in that channel and who has noticed that it has moved. Why would they not?
Also note that this example seems to be the exception, many channels that got hijacked merely mentioned the move in topic or even just mentioned libera in topic without any decision to move being finalized (though the hijackings did a great job at finalizing those decisions ;)
Libera.Chat is growing quite fast [0], let's see how it ranks in another week [1].
Todays channel hijacking on freenode [2] will probably trigger a bigger move.
This controversy has got me back on IRC. It feels good to be sitting in chatrooms and occasionally able to pitch in and help people. And the interface is better than Slack. :-)
Is there a way to get similar feel that slack has for irc? You know, half a gigabyte of client data, at least 1GB of ram usage, multiple processes, high cpu load?
I do realize you're being sarcastic, but to answer honestly anyway: best way is to use Matrix and bridge to IRC. This allows you to use almost all Matrix functionality without anyone you talk to on IRC being affected by that really at all.
Matrix isn't anything like as resource heavy as Slack is I don't think (and to me more importantly it's an open, federated protocol), but to many IRCers it'll seem similar in both the good and the bad ways, depending on what they find comfortable.
I dont know how you use matrix but its android and pc client are heavy as hell and buggy, and isnt the desktop apps just electron based? I dont even want to get started with the resource hog of the matrix server instance.
Yes, the desktop version is an Electron app. It's a bit of a pig, but an understandable choice for a small team delivering a truly open e2ee protocol and cross-platform software suite as quickly as they have. I'm willing to tolerate the Electron bloat for now.
The good news is that lighter Matrix clients like Nheko exist, and are steadily improving. I expect to switch within a year.
I just run it in browser. It runs "fine" for me. It doesn't bother me in terms of speed or resources. I wouldn't give it any kind of glowing recommendation on that front, I just think it's better than Slack.
Slack crawls for me more than Matrix does, though to be fair I only use them each on totally separate machines, so it's not a fair test.
Raw IRC beats both in resources and responsiveness, but the tradeoffs are well worth it for me to use Matrix personally (to name just one, I consider scrollback to be a required feature, and to get that with IRC requires too much effort/cost).
Not aware of how to do any of those things, but if you want some of the _better_ aspects: Lives in a browser tab, connect from anywhere, etc, look into TheLounge or Convos as your client. I'm a major version behind on TheLounge and it's still fantastic.
The last post related to this whole situation [1] had 245 points in 3 hours, was then manually down-weighted off the front page, and died as a result. I think that was a bit too much of a correction. Hopefully the same doesn't happen to this post.
This whole freenoda issue is a problem primarily because of the control of the domain name.
Who controls libera.chat domain? It says it is a swedish nonprofit (although I cant see any specifics on their website), but the unredacted portions of the whois show it is owned by an Icelandic entity.
Libera.Chat is likely owned by the Swedish Non profit. The Icelandic entity you see in the whois is the privacy protection of "with held for privacy"[0], a privacy DNS entity.
The Swedish non-profit is still in bureaucracy approval from what I've heard from their staff, but you can already look at their bylaws[1].
Adding some info on the freenode situation -- it did not really came from the DNS issue. DNS was always more or less owned by freenode limited, just that rasengan got locked out by a previous mistake and then took this as an offense while it was just a mistake. Surely tomaw did some retention on giving the access back after, but for other reasons (mainly signs of interference from rasengan).
That is simply an assumption. It is not clear who the owner is exactly because of this "privacy protection".
Why does a nonprofit organisation need this privacy protection? The org is the identity that should control it, and the information of the org is a matter of public knowledge (if it REALLY exists, which isnt clear either.)
These issues are critical for the trust that the libera.chat domain isn't suddenly going to be pointing elsewhere due to it not being control by the "trusted" org.
> Why does a nonprofit organisation need this privacy protection?
This isn't about keeping public information entirely secret. It's about controlling where and how public information is shared. As an individual, you might agree to have your telephone number and your address published in a paper telephone directory, but you might not be so keen to have that information published in an easily scraped online service leaving you with obnoxious sales calls, and junk mail.
The same applies to a non-profit as well.
> the information of the org is a matter of public knowledge
Yes. But the what and the how is typically explicitly outlined by local laws.
Typically, you could direct yourself to a local tax office or public registry where you could search and look into basic information about a legal entity as defined / outlined in a legal statute.
You might find that domain names aren't required to be divulged publicly by law, and doing so is entirely at the discretion of the organization. (Example in the same vain: a public office isn't going to outright hand you a list of employees at a company if it's not legally mandated)
Whether there's a moral responsibility is a different question.
> These issues are critical for the trust that the libera.chat domain isn't suddenly going to be pointing elsewhere due to it not being control by the "trusted" org.
The freenode.net domain name isn't pointing to anywhere differently over the past period. It's also still very much registered to Freenode Ltd. That hasn't changed. What really changed is the control over the Ltd as the a majority stake in voting rights changed hands some time ago, and how that majority stake is now suddenly behaving very differently.
In that regard, DNS records aren't a definitive indicator for trust.
You have to amend that by (a) looking at who's represented in the board governing the non-profit, (b) look at documents such as yearly account balances and year reports which are typically legally mandated to be made publicly each year to see how the organisation is governed and (c) gauging day-to-day operations.
Last week, I made a remark that the libera.chat website was precariously terse in contact information or mentions about it's legal status or whoever was behind this initiative. It's assuring to see that the website has been amended over the past week with the "bylaws" section and the "about Libera" section with mentioning full composition of the board as well as whoever actively contributes to the organiation.
> Typically, you could direct yourself to a local tax office or public registry where you could search and look into basic information about a legal entity as defined / outlined in a legal statute.
Sweden doesn't require non-profit associations to be registered.
I appreciate your response, and would argue that the website is still lacking transparency.
As is theres no evidence that the org owns the domain, or that the org even exists.
Thats worrying, and if awareness was higher, its possible people wouldnt be migrating there - especially given the reason for the move in the first place.
I personally dont care for all this drama - I have a few small rooms on freenode, and am also looking to migrate - but I dont want to follow the drama...
This organisation is a "ideell förening" under Swedish law.
> In Sweden there are two kinds of associations: the voluntary association (ideell förening) and the economic association (ekonomisk förening). The second one is a cooperative company and must be registered with the authorities to become a legal entity. The first one is a member-based nonprofit organization and is formed without formal registration. The main steps in creating a voluntary association are explained here.
> Once properly created, the voluntary association of course has to follow the tax law and other laws and rules established by the government. But it also has to follow the unwritten rules and traditions of Swedish voluntary organizations (god föreningssed) which guide how the organization should be run, how it makes decisions and so on.
> ...
> The association is a legal entity, but needs to apply to the tax authorities for a registration number, which is needed for tax reasons but also when opening a bank account or hiring an office and so on.
In essence, the organisation proper isn't formally registered or incorporated (e.g. via a notary public) but it will be registered under Swedish tax law. The latter part is probably still being processed by the administrative paper mills.
The non-profit isn't really live yet, this may be why. I'm sure the libera.chat staff wants do to things correctly this time-- they have learned the mistakes.
As said, the entity isn't formally created yet because bureaucracy seems to be slow. This will happen, I'm 99% sure of this.
Sweden seems to have really lightweight legislation for non-profits: Write by-laws, convene a meeting of at least 3 people, accept the by-laws, and bang: you're a legal entity. So it may be live, who knows.
You only need to register with the Swedish Tax Office and get an organization number, if you want to conduct business transactions, such as opening bank account, pay taxes etc.
That should be made clear to all those migrating. As it is it says it IS a NPO: "Libera Chat is a Swedish nonprofit organisation" - but doesnt provide any evidence to that effect.
I guess this is why some of the larger (and more knowledgeable?) projects have moved to OFTC instead.
Can you prove that this Ideell Förening exists? Can you prove that libera.chat domain name is registered on behalf of that org? These are things that should be provable!
Anyone can say: "I am the chairperson of an Ideell Förening called Libera Chat, and it holds every privacy protected domain on the planet (apart from the ones you know of that belong to others).". Prove me wrong.
Show the official registration information for that organization. Show the official registrant of the domain. Thats all Im asking for.
Honestly...
As I mentioned, if they hold a bank account (which clearly they should, to pay for the domain if nothing else, to reinforce "ownership" of the domain), then they need - BY LAW - a company registration number.
EDIT: So many downvotes for asking for proof that this non-profit exists and "owns" the domain. What a silly thing to ask... I'll be putting off migrating until its clear its not another bait and switch.
As has already been explained by others in this thread (e.g. [1]); we are still waiting for the Swedish tax authority to get back to us. We will be happy to publish a registration number when we are assigned one.
But that explanation was given an hour after the question was asked. I think a lot of the downvotes vor supermatt are caused by HN's sorting by freshness, so many people read his slightly aggressive question after the answers, which makes it sound much more obnoxious than it actually has been in context. [Edit:] And of course as a reaction to asking the same question over and over again.
If people want to blindly migrate where that same thing can happen, then thats up to them - but downvoting for pointing out the concerns only serves to silence the issue, and that kinda sucks, IMHO.
> Why is the domain owned by an icelandic entity instead of the nonprofit?
According to the WHOIS information, the registration of libera.chat was made 2021-04-23. This registration was made ~1 month before the organisation Libera Chat was announced. As far as I can tell, the organisation could not have made the registration as a legal entity before existing.
Seeing the registrar is Namecheap, I guess someone made the registration and made use of the zero-cost Whoisguard service available. Perhaps the registrant's contact details point to Iceland. Some of my domains point to Panama, what gives.
> Where is the company registration number of the nonprofit (required to open a bank account - where will donations be held, etc).
As the OP title suggests, Libera Chat was assembled a week ago. There is no Swedish law requiring that an organisation registers, but as you suggest, it will be necessary to register a legal entity for financial purposes. Fulfilling the paperwork of registering a non-profit organisation with Skatteverket and thus receiving an ORG number generally comes after the fact of the foundation of said organisation.
Non-profit organisations in Sweden are real and protected entities, registration or not.
> As far as I can tell, the organisation could not have made the registration as a legal entity before existing.
Domain name ownership can be transferred. It's trivial for a founding member to register the domain name first, then transfer ownership to the organisation once it has been founded.
Of course, but many services would require a registered VAT number to be able to fulfill a purchase or transfer to an organisation. Or rather, to set up such an account in the first place.
Frankly, WHOIS records is to crude a metric to really pass judgement on anything nowadays. The masked entries in the lookup for libera.chat i.e. "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY", are typical of registrars not overstepping GDPR compliance when making them public.
I think you are getting downvoted because you're making points that I've already responded to you. Libera is a week old. It may have been started to get in shape before the launch and mass resign of a week ago, but give them time to create the org properly (which, again, is in progress, and was already a week ago).
Im happy to give them time - im just pointing out the current state of things, and what sets off my alarm bells. These are all things that can be addressed, no doubt.
Ha! Sorry, didn't noticed this one when I replied before to you, so I thought it was new.
All the bells you are ringing has been pointed already (and since Libera got opened), it's in progress. I trust them to do the correct things, and will be addressed soon. Maybe as you said in another comment that it should have been made more clear on their website, tho.
The domain matters less than control of the servers. While the freenode servers were controlled by ohters, Andrew was obviously able (via legal threaths from what it seems) to get the previous staff to relinquish control of them. If it would have just been the domain, getting people to change their client settings to connect somewhere else but keep all channel and user registrations would have been easier.
It's incredible how fast the whole transition is happening. I'm really grateful to the Libera Chat team for creating a space for the communities to move to. Amazing job!
I want to say just that I appreciate the positive and largely non-confrontational tone of this post. Considering the circumstances it could have as easily become muddled with bitterness and/or cheap snipes.
The ease at which one connects to Libera with an IRC client, it was like nothing had happened, at this point (especially after recent events) you'd get a very close experience of what Freenode was like, with the same people, topics and all.
How is Libera meant to be pronounced? L-eye-beer-ah, or maybe "liberal" without the trailing ell? Freenode was such a great name, this one is hard to warm up to in the same way.
Wiktionary, which I usually find to be more comprehensive and accurate than the commercial dictionaries, lists 'libera' as a word in Esperanto, Galician, Ido, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. But not English.
Regardless, it doesn't seem like a challenging word to me, somebody who has only ever spoken English. I just pronounce it like it's written, "lib-eh-ra", it never occurred to me that this world might be challenging.
My personal opinion is that if you can find it in an English dictionary, it's an English word. It's pretty common, in English as it is in all languages, that the pronunciation differs from that of the original language from which the name originated.
> Libera Chat is a Swedish nonprofit organisation, feel free to read our bylaws[1]. The organisation is run entirely by volunteer staff who are the members of, and have equal voting power in, the organisation. Libera Chat’s purpose is to provide services such as a community platform for free open-source software and peer directed projects on a volunteer basis.
> Most decisions are taken by the membership as a whole. The board primarily deals with organisational tasks like managing our bookkeeping and keeping the member list in sync...
> The board of the organisation comprises a chair, a treasurer and a representative from each of our specialised teams. Board seats are elected by the membership...
> In addition to this the organisation has two auditors elected by the membership. Their role is to audit the board’s actions on behalf of the membership. Their yearly audit report, along with the annual report and bookkeeping of the organisation, will be published in a yearly transparency report
Can someone who is more in the know help me: is the move away from the Freenode name (or rebranding) a way to leave the project as it is (keeping existing functionality and thereby ensuring backwards compatibility)? Or is it because of a disagreement between maintainers, or something else?
Freenode's management changed. Libera.Chat is a new organization with new servers not associated with Freenode -- but many organizations that had previously maintained IRC channels on Freenode are moving to Libera.Chat.
Libera is effectively the spiritual continuation of freenode, managed by the former freenode operators. Freenode on the other hand is now under control of new management, which has in very short time already managed to prove itself inept and abusive.
It seems the matrix bridge is not up yet, so I guess I'm not joining quite yet :/
Though the one channel I really frequent these days is totally not caring about the whole issue, and seems there is no motivation to move. (It is not a project channel, just some hangout channel around a topic)
If the Freenode #foo owners have a legitimate claim (ie they represent a project or community named foo) then they can register that project/community [0] and claim #foo. In case of multiple claims it is up to the Libera operators to find a solution.
While there are no technical restrictions to registering unclaimed channels, on Libera (and also on Freenode before) channels with a single # are not really free for all and on-topic projects and communities have priority.
Nah, it's a set of idiot trolls we've been dealing with for years - they've also been trying to spam libera in "support" of freenode but libera have people who know how to deal with IRC spam so it's not gone nearly as well.
One of the things that Freenode (and other networks) allowed that I haven't seen from Libera.chat (yet) is the ability for others to host servers as well. I wonder if that will show up in time, or if the plan is for only Libera.chat servers to be part of the network.
I'm sure if you're a reputable hosting provider able to sponsor a server then libera will be interested, even if there's no official procedure documented yet for offering hosting.
When the issue blew up last week, we quickly reserved our slot on Libera just in case. Some of our staff were pushing harder for Libera, and I was concerned it was a bit fervent and sensational, but ultimately went along with it.
It's been sad to see over the last week how quickly they were proven right, and how it only took a few days for the new so-called freenode to deal a killing blow.
Had we been still uncommitted to the Libera move, Andrew's actions this morning would have hurt our community more.