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 is either answered quickly, or devolves into seeing that no one can help them, eg. because what they are asking doesn't make sense or is too mbitious or whatnot. Then silence again. In other words I've never gotten a clear sense of "community", but rather a forum for random and often uninteresting questions, and therefore just naturally stop visiting. All in all it just kind of gets boring very fast, I find, so I am curious how people manage to get something out of it and what motivates them to stay joined in a channel.<p>I haven't tried newer systems like Matrix or Discord so I have no idea if these do any better, or if so, why, although I am consistently surprised by the number of requests posted to reddit to 'join our discord community'. (My reaction is always kind of, well, we're here in this reddit where there is already a community, so..)<p>My point is not to dis on IRC/chat rooms here, just explaining why I've never particularly found it engaging, and so I'm curious what others see in it, as I feel it's something I could learn to appreciate if I tried a bit harder.
Woah, been a year already. I remember sitting on mIRC for hours and hours watching the users flood into libera and out of freenode.<p>I will never forget how absolutely gobstricken I was with how <i>perfectly</i> 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.<p>Really historic day. Happy birthday, Libera!
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.
Dear lord, it's been a year already? It feels like it was only yesterday when Freenode was trying to take over every other channel on their network.
Glad to see Libera doing alright
I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that (for me at least) the best IRC client is Matrix. They offer a bridge to Libera.chat, and that then sets up a Matrix "room" for each IRC channel you join.<p>You then get a consistent session, that all history automatically, with clients for every platform. Plus you're on Matrix which is a good thing :)
What is the state of Freenode now? Looking at Wikipedia it apparently still had low-thousands of users at the end of 2021?<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_top_10_networks_2021.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t...</a>
I see Bitcoin still has their official channel on Freenode[1]. I wonder if there are more projects still doing that.<p>[1] <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/community" rel="nofollow">https://bitcoin.org/en/community</a>
I think Freenode helped serve as a lesson to rasengan on a few things:<p>1. Technical prowess doesn't supersede the value of interpersonal/social abilities<p>2. Money doesn't let you control the narrative in a free system<p>3. Elon Musk isn't Elon Musk because he's rich, he's Elon Musk because he's good at marketing<p>4. Reputation is everything<p>It's a shame that the cost of these lessons was the destruction of Freenode and further fragmentation of IRC, and hopefully the recovery continues. It was great to see everyone united for a brief moment though, regardless of your views against Freenode or any particular channel it was widely accepted that it was a horrible move and everyone resisted the hostile takeover.
I was on freenode off and on for many years...the ex staff that now runs libera are some of the most sad toxic ego maniacs on the internet. These people were never professional or kind, they've always been immature and obsessed with power and control to the point that the old freenode owner had to sell quietly to try and avoid riling up these neck beards...her efforts were in vain of course because per mo one of the lead freenode admins threw a tantrum and locked out the new owner by changing passwords...liberal can celebrate all it wants, it's leaders are terrible people who love to abuse the little power that they have. Irc in general is inherently awful and I'm glad it's almost completely dead. Keep faking dem connection stats and spamming "off topic" whaaa