Free as in dead
June 28, 2021 7:12 AM Subscribe
Will the real IRC please stand up? Freenode’s forest fire leaves ashes – and fresh growth. There then followed gag orders, staff changes and overnight coups, culminating in mass resignations of the volunteers, a forced take-over of control of 700-odd channels by the new management, and the wholesale migration of the user base to a new system, Libera Chat, run by the old staff.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely used in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. freenode.net had been the centre of most FOSS IRC activity up until a couple months ago, and since then most major channels, from #linux, to #python, to #haskell, have migrated to libera.chat.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely used in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. freenode.net had been the centre of most FOSS IRC activity up until a couple months ago, and since then most major channels, from #linux, to #python, to #haskell, have migrated to libera.chat.
is freenode dead yet?
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:37 AM on June 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:37 AM on June 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
To answer #2, IRC as designed doesn't store any messages on the server. They are received by the servers, which send them out to users connected to the same channel, but not stored. Many public channels operate public logs on websites, and of course there's no way to prove that copies of the messages weren't being kept by server operators, but the basic assumption is that messages are sent and forgotten.
Answering #3 is hard. Because of #2, many people idle -- possibly for years -- and many of those clients have re-connected to the "new freenode". A community I participate in that has officially moved to Libera (and has 100+ people who have actively opted over to Libera) but I just checked and there there are still 41 people in the freenode channel of the same name. There doesn't seem to be much overlap, just 3 or 4 people.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:44 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Answering #3 is hard. Because of #2, many people idle -- possibly for years -- and many of those clients have re-connected to the "new freenode". A community I participate in that has officially moved to Libera (and has 100+ people who have actively opted over to Libera) but I just checked and there there are still 41 people in the freenode channel of the same name. There doesn't seem to be much overlap, just 3 or 4 people.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:44 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
It's remarkable to me how fast the active community moved to a new network. What's missing though is the long tail, the folks who only log in to IRC every nine months because they remember there's a great channel for the weird open source software they suddenly have to figure out some problem for. (Hello, it's me.) One of the things the new Freenode operators are doing is banning anyone who advertises "hello, we moved to this new network"; it's going to make it hard for the stragglers to find their way.
There's more history on how Andrew Lee performed his hostile takeover on Freenode here and here. Long story short, until 2017 Freenode was operating without much legal structure. Christel Dahlskjaer then incorporated Freenode and said it was just a formality, then sold the company to Lee. Nothing much changed until a few months ago when Lee got aggressive with Freenode management and used his legal and technical control to fuck everything up.
Andrew Lee is real weird btw, there've been a bunch of articles profiling him. Built and sold a VPN service (Private Internet Access), then started living the life of an eccentric rich dude. Among other things he now claims to be crown prince of Korea with a tenuous connection to one of the pretenders to the (no longer existing) throne.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 AM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
There's more history on how Andrew Lee performed his hostile takeover on Freenode here and here. Long story short, until 2017 Freenode was operating without much legal structure. Christel Dahlskjaer then incorporated Freenode and said it was just a formality, then sold the company to Lee. Nothing much changed until a few months ago when Lee got aggressive with Freenode management and used his legal and technical control to fuck everything up.
Andrew Lee is real weird btw, there've been a bunch of articles profiling him. Built and sold a VPN service (Private Internet Access), then started living the life of an eccentric rich dude. Among other things he now claims to be crown prince of Korea with a tenuous connection to one of the pretenders to the (no longer existing) throne.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 AM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
Hilarious how the exact people I remember from IRC drama 20 years ago are still central characters to the biggest IRC drama in 2021.
posted by automatronic at 8:20 AM on June 28, 2021 [15 favorites]
posted by automatronic at 8:20 AM on June 28, 2021 [15 favorites]
> 1. How did Lee come to own the company or IP that enabled him to impose his will over Freenode? Was it (presumably) already owned by someone, somewhere, and he just bought it? (That sounds like what happened.)
Freenode is a hosted service (a "distributed server system" is still a centralized, hosted service, it just has its servers in more than one place), which means that *somebody* has to own the domain name and pay for the servers and network fees and etc. After some transactions that somebody became Lee. The real story (and, presumably, some real shadiness) is in how those transactions happened, but there's nothing inherently weird in a hosted service changing ownership.
Also buying the "Crown Prince of Korea" title is fucking hilarious. I guess that's counterpart to North Americans who buy European titles.
posted by at by at 8:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Freenode is a hosted service (a "distributed server system" is still a centralized, hosted service, it just has its servers in more than one place), which means that *somebody* has to own the domain name and pay for the servers and network fees and etc. After some transactions that somebody became Lee. The real story (and, presumably, some real shadiness) is in how those transactions happened, but there's nothing inherently weird in a hosted service changing ownership.
Also buying the "Crown Prince of Korea" title is fucking hilarious. I guess that's counterpart to North Americans who buy European titles.
posted by at by at 8:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Also, it wasn't at all clear that the sale was legal in any sense, IIRC, but no one on the staff could afford the the money it would take to go to court, and it was easier to simply take all the expertise and sponsors and move.
posted by tavella at 8:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tavella at 8:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
1. How did Lee come to own the company or IP that enabled him to impose his will over Freenode? Was it (presumably) already owned by someone, somewhere, and he just bought it? (That sounds like what happened.)
To put it briefly, after the original founder died, and one of the staff set up a "Company" to hold the DNS records and setup a Freenode con. They worked for Lee, and a few months afterward sold it to him, and then things were quiet for a few years. Then, the rest of the staff voted that member off, and Lee started sueing and gag ordering people right and left. Whether he owns anything real is up for debate, but he's willing to throw down millions of bucks to say he does.
posted by pan at 8:33 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
To put it briefly, after the original founder died, and one of the staff set up a "Company" to hold the DNS records and setup a Freenode con. They worked for Lee, and a few months afterward sold it to him, and then things were quiet for a few years. Then, the rest of the staff voted that member off, and Lee started sueing and gag ordering people right and left. Whether he owns anything real is up for debate, but he's willing to throw down millions of bucks to say he does.
posted by pan at 8:33 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
Now that I think about it, buying a service known only as a nexus for the open-source community doesn't seem all that unlike to buying ones way into Korean royalty: It involves shedding a lot of money for the illusion of power but the only material consequence is amusing or offending the locals who had been doing just fucking swell before you came along and will continue to do so despite you.
posted by at by at 8:36 AM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by at by at 8:36 AM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
I have personally enjoyed watching the #freenode channel descend into chaos and irrelevance via ohnode's MS Comic Chat viewer. I keep taking screenshots and thinking "this could be a Jerkcity/Bonequest panel, no question".
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:01 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:01 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
After channels I used move to libera I figured I'd still check in from time to time on freenode in case anyone didn't know about the move. And then freenode banned irccloud. I use that. It's really convenient. I figured I would just connect directly from time to time. But then freenode dumped the database of nicks and channels! That was completely bonkers.
I haven't bothered to reregister my nick.
posted by bleary at 9:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I haven't bothered to reregister my nick.
posted by bleary at 9:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
> ... tenuous connection to one of the pretenders to the (no longer existing) throne.
No, it's more nuanced than that. Korea has legitimate living heirs to a crown. It does not have a crown with legitimate authority.
To recap history in 15 seconds: The imperial Korean nation, such as it existed until the waning days of the Joseon, was annexed by Japan over a century ago and then divided over seventy years ago and doesn't exist any more in any form.
So of course any heir to the crown last worn by Emperor Gojong has about as much legitimacy to actual rule of Korea as an heir to one of the preceding dynasties -- I wouldn't doubt there are groups in South Korea who endorse a restoration of the crown and I also wouldn't doubt that they're considered pretty fringy and amusing and/or weird by the public at large. (And, agreeing with your "tenuous connection" statement, I dunno how a Korean Imperial restorationist would feel about someone buying their way up the ranks.)
At the same time being a legitimate heir to an obsolete title is significantly different than some random dude arbitrarily declaring themselves a ruler a'la Emperor Norton. Among other things, the legitimate heirs to the upper ranks of a nation tend to be the people who, after a major change in government in any country, have the means necessary to retain most of their wealth and privilege after the turnover, or at least the connections and wherewithal to begin reclaiming that wealth and privilege. Family connections will always count for something, moreso in smaller monocultural countries like Korea. Descendants of Korean nobility and the top ranks of the Joseon bureocracy are doing pretty well in government and the private sector in Seoul right now, but that is because they are the people who, by hook or crook, remained at the top through the multiple turmoils of the 20th century. There's a viable question in whether an outsider buying a title will also buy access to those upper ranks of power in modern South Korea (something that would actually have value to a businessperson), though I don't know if Andrew Lee will be our best test subject.
posted by at by at 9:37 AM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
No, it's more nuanced than that. Korea has legitimate living heirs to a crown. It does not have a crown with legitimate authority.
To recap history in 15 seconds: The imperial Korean nation, such as it existed until the waning days of the Joseon, was annexed by Japan over a century ago and then divided over seventy years ago and doesn't exist any more in any form.
So of course any heir to the crown last worn by Emperor Gojong has about as much legitimacy to actual rule of Korea as an heir to one of the preceding dynasties -- I wouldn't doubt there are groups in South Korea who endorse a restoration of the crown and I also wouldn't doubt that they're considered pretty fringy and amusing and/or weird by the public at large. (And, agreeing with your "tenuous connection" statement, I dunno how a Korean Imperial restorationist would feel about someone buying their way up the ranks.)
At the same time being a legitimate heir to an obsolete title is significantly different than some random dude arbitrarily declaring themselves a ruler a'la Emperor Norton. Among other things, the legitimate heirs to the upper ranks of a nation tend to be the people who, after a major change in government in any country, have the means necessary to retain most of their wealth and privilege after the turnover, or at least the connections and wherewithal to begin reclaiming that wealth and privilege. Family connections will always count for something, moreso in smaller monocultural countries like Korea. Descendants of Korean nobility and the top ranks of the Joseon bureocracy are doing pretty well in government and the private sector in Seoul right now, but that is because they are the people who, by hook or crook, remained at the top through the multiple turmoils of the 20th century. There's a viable question in whether an outsider buying a title will also buy access to those upper ranks of power in modern South Korea (something that would actually have value to a businessperson), though I don't know if Andrew Lee will be our best test subject.
posted by at by at 9:37 AM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
I think that a closer analogy in this instance might be the character of the "King of France" in Huckleberry Finn.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:42 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:42 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'd been watching this drama from afar, and what stood out to me was how the freenode admins spent months planning and preparing for this situation. By the time Lee started screwing things up for real, all the infrastructure for abandoning freenode was already in place: resignation posts had been written, libera chat was up and running, etc. I was impressed.
FOSS communities have a history of pulling up stakes and abandoning a platform the minute it gets stale or toxic. Anyone who saw how fast the Sourceforge -> Google Code and Google Code -> Github transitions happened should have known this.
posted by phooky at 9:44 AM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
FOSS communities have a history of pulling up stakes and abandoning a platform the minute it gets stale or toxic. Anyone who saw how fast the Sourceforge -> Google Code and Google Code -> Github transitions happened should have known this.
posted by phooky at 9:44 AM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
FOSS communities have a history of pulling up stakes and abandoning a platform the minute it gets stale or toxic. Anyone who saw how fast the Sourceforge -> Google Code and Google Code -> Github transitions happened should have known this.
While that’s true the last time I saw it happening this fast - days, arguably hours - was when XFree86 went from being the bedrock of the free software graphical interface world to being irrelevant in about a week.
Sadly, IRC as a whole thing itself is pretty much in the rear view mirror at this point. Open source has lots of better options right now, and by and large has voted with their collective feet. (Which I’m in some part culpable for, but if so, a badge I wear with pride.)
posted by mhoye at 10:05 AM on June 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
While that’s true the last time I saw it happening this fast - days, arguably hours - was when XFree86 went from being the bedrock of the free software graphical interface world to being irrelevant in about a week.
Sadly, IRC as a whole thing itself is pretty much in the rear view mirror at this point. Open source has lots of better options right now, and by and large has voted with their collective feet. (Which I’m in some part culpable for, but if so, a badge I wear with pride.)
posted by mhoye at 10:05 AM on June 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
Metafilter: declaring themselves a ruler a'la Emperor Norton.
posted by riverlife at 10:20 AM on June 28, 2021
posted by riverlife at 10:20 AM on June 28, 2021
Sadly, IRC as a whole thing itself is pretty much in the rear view mirror at this point.
(some context for mhoye's post there.) I was waiting for someone to say this. I'm also of the belief IRC is a technology of the past. I realize the community that's still there likes it the way it is but, honestly, there's lots better technology.
My question is which? Slack and Discord get immediately rejected by some folks by not being open or open source. There are a zillion open source Slack-like apps, are any of them a consensus? Do any of them support a loose federated community the way Libera IRC does, where one login gives me access to many different channels?
Mozilla is using Discourse for web forums and Matrix for real time chat. Is that working out OK?
posted by Nelson at 10:29 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
(some context for mhoye's post there.) I was waiting for someone to say this. I'm also of the belief IRC is a technology of the past. I realize the community that's still there likes it the way it is but, honestly, there's lots better technology.
My question is which? Slack and Discord get immediately rejected by some folks by not being open or open source. There are a zillion open source Slack-like apps, are any of them a consensus? Do any of them support a loose federated community the way Libera IRC does, where one login gives me access to many different channels?
Mozilla is using Discourse for web forums and Matrix for real time chat. Is that working out OK?
posted by Nelson at 10:29 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: declaring themselves a ruler a'la Emperor Norton.--riverlife
If we made an appropriate donation to the descendants of the House of Savoy, we could declare Metafilter as the new King of Italy.
posted by eye of newt at 11:24 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
If we made an appropriate donation to the descendants of the House of Savoy, we could declare Metafilter as the new King of Italy.
posted by eye of newt at 11:24 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
The mass exodus is reminding me of something that David Graeber said about how common it was for human groups to simply move away when there was conflict instead of battle it out... or at least it was that was when density was lower. I guess this is a case where domain names are plentiful, moving is doable, and the conflict isn't worth it?
posted by clawsoon at 11:27 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 11:27 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
is freenode dead yet?
Wow — looking at those graphs, it really cratered around June 15th, didn’t it?
Which makes me wonder why you pay good money to buy an online forum in which you don’t actually own the processes or content as IP, and then institute policies that run off all of the user base.
This sounds like it will end up as a case study in a textbook somewhere.
posted by darkstar at 11:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Wow — looking at those graphs, it really cratered around June 15th, didn’t it?
Which makes me wonder why you pay good money to buy an online forum in which you don’t actually own the processes or content as IP, and then institute policies that run off all of the user base.
This sounds like it will end up as a case study in a textbook somewhere.
posted by darkstar at 11:28 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
It is working out spectacularly well. I consider getting Mozilla off IRC and onto Matrix one of the great personal successes of my career, possibly the most important work I've ever done.
I've believed for a long time that community involvement in open source projects should be seen through a product lens; that is to say, that the accessibility, ergonomics, ease-of-involvement and ease-of-use matter, that they can and should be understood, tested and refined and not left to chance, and our transition off IRC to Matrix has borne that thinking out better than I could have hoped.
Culturally as well as technically, IRC is a huge barrier to participation in software, just a sheer cliff face that basically everyone using IRC day to day does not even realize exists. For somebody hoping to make their first steps towards getting involved in open source, IRC amounts to "learn a whole new operating system full of strange incantations typed into antiquated-looking software and perhaps then, after admonishing you about netiquette, perhaps we will deign to answer your questions at all".
The worst is that if you don't know a lot of pretty deep magic, you always start out without scrollback. If you somehow manage to climb IRC mountain, get yourself connected and join the right room, your reward for that is a blank page. No names, no conversation, nothing. If they can gin up the courage to ask their question, or say they want to get involved... what happens? Maybe nothing. Maybe they close that window and decide to come back later to see if anyone answered their question? But there's nobody there, when they get back. It's the same empty window, even their question is gone.
Setting dealing with that as the standard you accept for your community? No. No modern system inflicts that on you anymore. It's inhumane, it's a huge barrier to anyone getting involved in your conversations and the unequivocal message it sends to prospective participants in your project is you don't care enough about newcomers to make being a newcomer easy.
IRC is terrible, and I say that as somebody who's used it for 25 years.
Matrix though:
Now that we can actually provide a safe working and community participation environment, where participants can see that they're joining an existing community and conversation, that they can expect - as they have every right to expect - that they will not arbitrarily subject to the drive-by malfeasance and systemic, structural harassment problems that plague the Internet's pre-modern tech stacks, now that we have the tools to hand that aren't just good enough to uphold our community standards for safe participation but good enough that we can and should be held accountable for their upholding? Participation is up across the board, everywhere. In some parts of the project by a factor of ten. Our little corner of the much larger Matrix ecosystem is now several times the size of all of Freenode at its' peak, and growing steadily.
It's wonderful.
posted by mhoye at 11:43 AM on June 28, 2021 [55 favorites]
I've believed for a long time that community involvement in open source projects should be seen through a product lens; that is to say, that the accessibility, ergonomics, ease-of-involvement and ease-of-use matter, that they can and should be understood, tested and refined and not left to chance, and our transition off IRC to Matrix has borne that thinking out better than I could have hoped.
Culturally as well as technically, IRC is a huge barrier to participation in software, just a sheer cliff face that basically everyone using IRC day to day does not even realize exists. For somebody hoping to make their first steps towards getting involved in open source, IRC amounts to "learn a whole new operating system full of strange incantations typed into antiquated-looking software and perhaps then, after admonishing you about netiquette, perhaps we will deign to answer your questions at all".
The worst is that if you don't know a lot of pretty deep magic, you always start out without scrollback. If you somehow manage to climb IRC mountain, get yourself connected and join the right room, your reward for that is a blank page. No names, no conversation, nothing. If they can gin up the courage to ask their question, or say they want to get involved... what happens? Maybe nothing. Maybe they close that window and decide to come back later to see if anyone answered their question? But there's nobody there, when they get back. It's the same empty window, even their question is gone.
Setting dealing with that as the standard you accept for your community? No. No modern system inflicts that on you anymore. It's inhumane, it's a huge barrier to anyone getting involved in your conversations and the unequivocal message it sends to prospective participants in your project is you don't care enough about newcomers to make being a newcomer easy.
IRC is terrible, and I say that as somebody who's used it for 25 years.
Matrix though:
Now that we can actually provide a safe working and community participation environment, where participants can see that they're joining an existing community and conversation, that they can expect - as they have every right to expect - that they will not arbitrarily subject to the drive-by malfeasance and systemic, structural harassment problems that plague the Internet's pre-modern tech stacks, now that we have the tools to hand that aren't just good enough to uphold our community standards for safe participation but good enough that we can and should be held accountable for their upholding? Participation is up across the board, everywhere. In some parts of the project by a factor of ten. Our little corner of the much larger Matrix ecosystem is now several times the size of all of Freenode at its' peak, and growing steadily.
It's wonderful.
posted by mhoye at 11:43 AM on June 28, 2021 [55 favorites]
Metafilter: declaring themselves a ruler a'la Emperor Norton.--riverlife
If we made an appropriate donation to the descendants of the House of Savoy, we could declare Metafilter as the new King of Italy.
Link to their GoFundMe? "There is no cabal, and even if there is, it's not the King of Italy."
posted by otherchaz at 12:08 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
If we made an appropriate donation to the descendants of the House of Savoy, we could declare Metafilter as the new King of Italy.
Link to their GoFundMe? "There is no cabal, and even if there is, it's not the King of Italy."
posted by otherchaz at 12:08 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the info, mhoye! That'd make a great blog post.
posted by Nelson at 12:20 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 12:20 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
"Voice, choice, and exit", clawsoon?
posted by clew at 12:28 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 12:28 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
About 20 years ago I spent a bunch of time expanding the core irc daemon software for an in-house chat product. Unlimited size messages, new commands, chat history, integration with corporate user auth, that sort of thing. Smooth sailing until I managed to put in a crashing bug that still is in the top 3 of my "hardest bugs to find ever", considering it took me a good week to figure it out even after I could make it happen daily. I only partially blame myself though, considering that what caused it was just adding a field to the struct representing a client - at the end, and as one does - and only later realizing that about halfway down the three screen long list of client fields there was a comment noting that 'fields below this point are only available on local (this server) clients'. Turns out that it only allocated enough memory for half the struct on remote clients. All the clients looked the same, but for clients on different servers reading or writing half of the defined fields was effectively a buffer overflow. Good times, but anyway that's still all I can think of when people mention IRC.
posted by true at 12:54 PM on June 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by true at 12:54 PM on June 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
Oh true, that is one of the funniest comments I've read in ages!
I've used IRC occasionally when I needed to interact or just a bit curious about some software, I think I knew several slash commands (was it slash or tilde, hmm) and yeah kinda the antithesis of user friendly. I do kinda wish someone had come up with a really nice UI but actually sounds like the back end protocol is way funky. Have not clicked with matrix, just clicked in now to check and mostly crypto one the front page, ugh.
posted by sammyo at 1:27 PM on June 28, 2021
I've used IRC occasionally when I needed to interact or just a bit curious about some software, I think I knew several slash commands (was it slash or tilde, hmm) and yeah kinda the antithesis of user friendly. I do kinda wish someone had come up with a really nice UI but actually sounds like the back end protocol is way funky. Have not clicked with matrix, just clicked in now to check and mostly crypto one the front page, ugh.
posted by sammyo at 1:27 PM on June 28, 2021
Thanks for the info, mhoye! That'd make a great blog post.
It's made for several, I documented the whole process.
posted by mhoye at 1:27 PM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
It's made for several, I documented the whole process.
posted by mhoye at 1:27 PM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Discourse is lovely.
posted by signal
Antiponysterical!
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:59 PM on June 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by signal
Antiponysterical!
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:59 PM on June 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
I set up a lightly used private* Discord instance for keeping up with friends when the Rona hit. It has maybe a dozen channels, and consists of discussion about things (TV/music/games, tech, work) and the odd link or cat photo. I'm now wondering whether there'd be a better alternative to this. (It would have to have mobile clients for iOS and Android.)
* I assume it's not really private, and that statistically-mined lists of ad-targeting interests are sent upwards to adtech networks along with the hashes of posters' phone numbers, as in everything that requires a phone number for authentication.
posted by acb at 3:33 PM on June 28, 2021
* I assume it's not really private, and that statistically-mined lists of ad-targeting interests are sent upwards to adtech networks along with the hashes of posters' phone numbers, as in everything that requires a phone number for authentication.
posted by acb at 3:33 PM on June 28, 2021
→
mhoye's description of IRC - no-one around, user hostile client, hostile users if you deign to ask something - is exactly my experience. Over the years I've had several people say "there's this great IRC channel, you'd love it" then when I join there's no-one on and no obvious activity.
Do you have to be nocturnal for IRC to seem cool? 'cos it's always seemed deadsville during the day whenever I look
posted by scruss at 4:05 PM on June 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
IRC is terrible
mhoye's description of IRC - no-one around, user hostile client, hostile users if you deign to ask something - is exactly my experience. Over the years I've had several people say "there's this great IRC channel, you'd love it" then when I join there's no-one on and no obvious activity.
Do you have to be nocturnal for IRC to seem cool? 'cos it's always seemed deadsville during the day whenever I look
posted by scruss at 4:05 PM on June 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
I'm curious to know whether they used IRC to plot their exodus, or some other communication platform...
posted by clawsoon at 5:26 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 5:26 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Oh my, this is bringing back some long-repressed memories.
Although my interactions on IRC were generally positive, there is a whole subset of interactions that I mentally filed under "unhelpful and derisive asshole old-timer". And then I locked that mental file, crated it up, and stored it deep, deep in the back of my brain warehouse, behind the Ark, so as never to think of it again.
These, along with arguments with trolls, were my earliest interactions with absolute jerks on the internet and formed some of my first impressions of this new mode of communication 32+ years ago.
posted by darkstar at 5:53 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
Although my interactions on IRC were generally positive, there is a whole subset of interactions that I mentally filed under "unhelpful and derisive asshole old-timer". And then I locked that mental file, crated it up, and stored it deep, deep in the back of my brain warehouse, behind the Ark, so as never to think of it again.
These, along with arguments with trolls, were my earliest interactions with absolute jerks on the internet and formed some of my first impressions of this new mode of communication 32+ years ago.
posted by darkstar at 5:53 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
My irc days go back to when there was one worldwide server (I think before freenode, actually), and I was hanging out on #gblf and #bearcave a lot. I've only ever used irc for socializing, so I don't know much about the people who might hang out there for other reasons.
I haven't been on a public irc server in years. I am always on a server in a channel with some friends I've had for decades, because it's a low friction low overhead chat that works on any system with any number of clients available.
mhoye's experience is something entirely alien to me, really. irc isn't difficult to use, it's mostly typing and hitting return. We're a long way from the days when I was using an AT&T dumb terminal over a 300 baud modem doing a public channel and several private chats all on one green screen using keyboard commands to hop back and forth.
Some software friends of mine were lamenting the freenode situation just a few days ago. I guess the whole thing sort of really did get burned down.
posted by hippybear at 6:04 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I haven't been on a public irc server in years. I am always on a server in a channel with some friends I've had for decades, because it's a low friction low overhead chat that works on any system with any number of clients available.
mhoye's experience is something entirely alien to me, really. irc isn't difficult to use, it's mostly typing and hitting return. We're a long way from the days when I was using an AT&T dumb terminal over a 300 baud modem doing a public channel and several private chats all on one green screen using keyboard commands to hop back and forth.
Some software friends of mine were lamenting the freenode situation just a few days ago. I guess the whole thing sort of really did get burned down.
posted by hippybear at 6:04 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Do you have to be nocturnal for IRC to seem cool? 'cos it's always seemed deadsville during the day whenever I look
There’s nothing to it, you just need to set up Irssi behind screen on an always-on box or VPS somewhere - though you’d be better off with screen -> dtach -> irssi, there’s still a few bugs in screen, I guess you could use tmux if you’re fancy - then get irssi connected to the right server, pick a nickname and register it with NickServ so you don’t lose it and don’t get assigned “IrcMonkey23456” next time you log in, then you’re all set. Maybe you could use a bouncer somewhere if a VPS isn’t your style, but you usually have to pay for them, the free ones are pretty spammy and maybe dangerous, but one way or the other.
What could be simpler?
posted by mhoye at 6:55 PM on June 28, 2021 [11 favorites]
There’s nothing to it, you just need to set up Irssi behind screen on an always-on box or VPS somewhere - though you’d be better off with screen -> dtach -> irssi, there’s still a few bugs in screen, I guess you could use tmux if you’re fancy - then get irssi connected to the right server, pick a nickname and register it with NickServ so you don’t lose it and don’t get assigned “IrcMonkey23456” next time you log in, then you’re all set. Maybe you could use a bouncer somewhere if a VPS isn’t your style, but you usually have to pay for them, the free ones are pretty spammy and maybe dangerous, but one way or the other.
What could be simpler?
posted by mhoye at 6:55 PM on June 28, 2021 [11 favorites]
Do you have to be nocturnal for IRC to seem cool? 'cos it's always seemed deadsville during the day whenever I look
You just leave it up all the time. People have all kinds of locations/schedules, so it's not uncommon to have seriously delayed conversations.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:09 PM on June 28, 2021
You just leave it up all the time. People have all kinds of locations/schedules, so it's not uncommon to have seriously delayed conversations.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:09 PM on June 28, 2021
For bad and good, IRC was a formative part of my Internet experiences and even my life considering that I think I first used it when I was about thirteen years old.
The bad was a Windows 95 machine with mIRC and a "war" script (seriously?) and a wide open WinGate care of a key generator obtained from some dude who freely offered it after hearing me complain about having to reset the computer's clock to start a new 30-day trial. It was also actually believing that 'ping -f' on a dialup modem could knock someone off the Internet (ping of death notwithstanding) and begging for "ops" in channels immediately after joining them.
The good was ircii (later irssi) on a machine running Redhat Linux 4.0, using GNU screen to persist it (all the cool people idled on channels 24/7/365) and learning how to ssh into that machine from my Windows 95 desktop. I think the first thing I ever built using ./configure; make; make install was eggdrop (this might take a while....have a coke!) and most of my early knowledge of linux came from just asking people how to do things in the channels I was in.
I haven't used IRC in about fifteen years, and it's been twenty years since I was particularly active. At some point I kind of outgrew even the best parts of it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:17 PM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
The bad was a Windows 95 machine with mIRC and a "war" script (seriously?) and a wide open WinGate care of a key generator obtained from some dude who freely offered it after hearing me complain about having to reset the computer's clock to start a new 30-day trial. It was also actually believing that 'ping -f' on a dialup modem could knock someone off the Internet (ping of death notwithstanding) and begging for "ops" in channels immediately after joining them.
The good was ircii (later irssi) on a machine running Redhat Linux 4.0, using GNU screen to persist it (all the cool people idled on channels 24/7/365) and learning how to ssh into that machine from my Windows 95 desktop. I think the first thing I ever built using ./configure; make; make install was eggdrop (this might take a while....have a coke!) and most of my early knowledge of linux came from just asking people how to do things in the channels I was in.
I haven't used IRC in about fifteen years, and it's been twenty years since I was particularly active. At some point I kind of outgrew even the best parts of it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:17 PM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Culturally as well as technically, IRC is a huge barrier to participation in software, just a sheer cliff face that basically everyone using IRC day to day does not even realize exists. For somebody hoping to make their first steps towards getting involved in open source, IRC amounts to "learn a whole new operating system full of strange incantations typed into antiquated-looking software and perhaps then, after admonishing you about netiquette, perhaps we will deign to answer your questions at all".
Seeing as how I was once one of those annoying kids who downloaded mIRC and proceeded to ruin things forever, I'm a bit confused by this perspective. IRC may be difficult and intimidating if you're using a vanilla ircii client on a shell account, but there have always been much easier ways to get connected.
Also, remember Microsoft Comic Chat?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:26 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Seeing as how I was once one of those annoying kids who downloaded mIRC and proceeded to ruin things forever, I'm a bit confused by this perspective. IRC may be difficult and intimidating if you're using a vanilla ircii client on a shell account, but there have always been much easier ways to get connected.
Also, remember Microsoft Comic Chat?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:26 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Screw ircii, ScrollZ is where it's at. The talk of building eggdrop is bringing back nightmares, though. Nightmares of the days of building basically everything on a 25MHz 386 with maybe 4MB of RAM and the slowest hard disk ever. My life was made substantially worse when the cops broke my Pentium after keeping it for over a year. At least they gave it back so I could get all my IRC logs off the hard drives. I still have them kicking around, if I could ever remember the passphrase to my PGP key.
mIRC didn't make you an annoying twit, but it was the choice of annoying twits in the same way ircii eventually became the choice of assholes like me. It has to be true because my SO was a user of mIRC and we've been a thing for over 20 years now. If she was an annoying twit I'd have had to notice at some point. She claims I'm not an asshole, but I know that to be false. I still maintain that nickserv is stupid and takes the fun out of everything.
posted by wierdo at 8:43 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
mIRC didn't make you an annoying twit, but it was the choice of annoying twits in the same way ircii eventually became the choice of assholes like me. It has to be true because my SO was a user of mIRC and we've been a thing for over 20 years now. If she was an annoying twit I'd have had to notice at some point. She claims I'm not an asshole, but I know that to be false. I still maintain that nickserv is stupid and takes the fun out of everything.
posted by wierdo at 8:43 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
My favorite thing about irc is that back when mr hippybear and I were first a thing and we were living 150 miles apart, we'd both get home from work in the mid-afternoon, just in time to log into irc and find each other to hang out and watch Animaniacs, Pinky & The Brain, and Freakazoid together every afternoon, first run. It was great they were all on the air at the same time for both of us. It was an amazing way to build a relationship long-distance way back when.
posted by hippybear at 8:49 PM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:49 PM on June 28, 2021 [10 favorites]
My favorite memories of IRC are my SO and the bot named i. In the days when long distance phone calls cost money, IRC was a damn miracle. i was always good for a barrel of laughs when SO was afk, though.
posted by wierdo at 9:58 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by wierdo at 9:58 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I will look at this in the morning. RFC 1459 is something .
posted by baegucb at 10:03 PM on June 28, 2021
posted by baegucb at 10:03 PM on June 28, 2021
we'd both get home from work in the mid-afternoon, just in time to log into irc and find each other to hang out and watch Animaniacs, Pinky & The Brain, and Freakazoid together every afternoon, first run.
At the time nothing could beat how real-time IRC was. When the first Babylon 5 movie aired on TNT, I dragged a clunky old 386 desktop with an NE2000 ethernet card, windows 3.1, and a CRT next to the couch so I could sit there with a keyboard in my lap (attached via a coiled AT-era cable) and watch while taking part in the "livestream" on IRC. I also remember how much fun it was during east coast blizzards in the mid-to-late 90s to be on IRC talking about current weather conditions. At it's best, being on IRC was what I always imagined being a ham radio operator must be like.
I still maintain that nickserv is stupid and takes the fun out of everything.
Within me there still dwells the remnants of the teenage asshole who would agree with you, but honestly looking back IRC's design flaws created so. much. petty. drama. Losing control of channels because someone gained operator status during a netsplit and kickbanned everyone else the moment the split ended. Or in the days before it was fixed, using a netsplit to collide with someone else's nickname to boot them off when they weren't looking. IRC was a breeding ground for assholes and script kiddies. My experience was that you either grew into an aloof lurker who only occasionally emerged to scold newbies for daring to do an a/s/l check because it wasn't "proper" (and totally a class signifier of being an AOL user) or you became a l33t-speaking hax0r proto-*chan troll who delighted in anonymously harassing others.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:51 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
At the time nothing could beat how real-time IRC was. When the first Babylon 5 movie aired on TNT, I dragged a clunky old 386 desktop with an NE2000 ethernet card, windows 3.1, and a CRT next to the couch so I could sit there with a keyboard in my lap (attached via a coiled AT-era cable) and watch while taking part in the "livestream" on IRC. I also remember how much fun it was during east coast blizzards in the mid-to-late 90s to be on IRC talking about current weather conditions. At it's best, being on IRC was what I always imagined being a ham radio operator must be like.
I still maintain that nickserv is stupid and takes the fun out of everything.
Within me there still dwells the remnants of the teenage asshole who would agree with you, but honestly looking back IRC's design flaws created so. much. petty. drama. Losing control of channels because someone gained operator status during a netsplit and kickbanned everyone else the moment the split ended. Or in the days before it was fixed, using a netsplit to collide with someone else's nickname to boot them off when they weren't looking. IRC was a breeding ground for assholes and script kiddies. My experience was that you either grew into an aloof lurker who only occasionally emerged to scold newbies for daring to do an a/s/l check because it wasn't "proper" (and totally a class signifier of being an AOL user) or you became a l33t-speaking hax0r proto-*chan troll who delighted in anonymously harassing others.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:51 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
For work I've had to jump into discords to ask the developers questions about some very esoteric software packages, and maybe it's a holdover from my IRC days, but I do feel like there's something impolite about entering a community, asking for help from that community, and then just leaving.
I know that's the reason the developers have a discord, but I still kind of feel like I'm obligated to stick around for a little while and contribute by helping others, and I don't know if I'd have the same guilt if I was just submitting questions to a web-based forum or some stack-exchange like Q&A thing.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:47 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I know that's the reason the developers have a discord, but I still kind of feel like I'm obligated to stick around for a little while and contribute by helping others, and I don't know if I'd have the same guilt if I was just submitting questions to a web-based forum or some stack-exchange like Q&A thing.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:47 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is an interesting discussion because I was one of the people in the weeds of moving over some FOSS-related channels from freenode to libera right before nickserv/chanserv were wiped on freenode, we just about did it in time. I do think it's right that IRC is in decline, has been for a while; much of our chatting community has moved to discord including developers, and usually participate in irc only via an irc<->discord bridge bot. However, it is still the platform where all of this community's infobots run (including ones that are bridged to various discords), and these are kind of central to this community.
In terms of where internet chat is going, I guess Matrix seems to be one FOSS trend as illustrated by this thread. But, I gotta say, it currently presents as every bit as incomprehensible as IRC, perhaps even more so (because it has a "better" web presence than most IRC networks, i.e. vast reams of overwhelming developer-oriented material). It also appears to be most useful for fairly resourced organizations, which is to say, not most FOSS projects. But perhaps I'm wrong about this.
Within me there still dwells the remnants of the teenage asshole who would agree with you, but honestly looking back IRC's design flaws created so. much. petty. drama. [...] IRC was a breeding ground for assholes and script kiddies.
It's still creating it. In the wake of the Freenode drama, IRC bot spam operators (who are pretty vicious, can't say I understand what their deal is) have been running massive joe job attacks at every network they can find ("advertising" libera with hate speech etc). Lack of nickserv or even just lots of regulars who don't use it turn out to make an open IRC network extremely vulnerable to spam, with very few good options for the admins. I'm on a small IRC network (that is somewhat mefi-adjacent actually) that runs nickserv but I guess also has a lot of people who still have never bothered with it, and the spam attacks over the last month have just been brutal for the admins there to try to deal with. If everyone had some kind of verified email/identity, even with throwaways the situation just becomes a lot more manageable. In addition, there's the set of people, minority but unfortunately not nonexistent, who are apparently managing to run an irc server or channel is but don't know what a joe job is and just readily believe that the libera admins would genuinely advertise their server with hate speech bots (??), and then show up on libera ready to fight.
posted by advil at 6:30 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
In terms of where internet chat is going, I guess Matrix seems to be one FOSS trend as illustrated by this thread. But, I gotta say, it currently presents as every bit as incomprehensible as IRC, perhaps even more so (because it has a "better" web presence than most IRC networks, i.e. vast reams of overwhelming developer-oriented material). It also appears to be most useful for fairly resourced organizations, which is to say, not most FOSS projects. But perhaps I'm wrong about this.
Within me there still dwells the remnants of the teenage asshole who would agree with you, but honestly looking back IRC's design flaws created so. much. petty. drama. [...] IRC was a breeding ground for assholes and script kiddies.
It's still creating it. In the wake of the Freenode drama, IRC bot spam operators (who are pretty vicious, can't say I understand what their deal is) have been running massive joe job attacks at every network they can find ("advertising" libera with hate speech etc). Lack of nickserv or even just lots of regulars who don't use it turn out to make an open IRC network extremely vulnerable to spam, with very few good options for the admins. I'm on a small IRC network (that is somewhat mefi-adjacent actually) that runs nickserv but I guess also has a lot of people who still have never bothered with it, and the spam attacks over the last month have just been brutal for the admins there to try to deal with. If everyone had some kind of verified email/identity, even with throwaways the situation just becomes a lot more manageable. In addition, there's the set of people, minority but unfortunately not nonexistent, who are apparently managing to run an irc server or channel is but don't know what a joe job is and just readily believe that the libera admins would genuinely advertise their server with hate speech bots (??), and then show up on libera ready to fight.
posted by advil at 6:30 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
I also remember a definite libertarian streak that ran through IRC and as I think about it (how many servers had "access to this server is a privilege and not a right" explicitly spelled out in the MOTD?) that's absolutely the reason for the hatred towards nickserv (and chanserv).
It was a flex to have the resources to guard a channel or sit on a nickname, and if you couldn't run an a network of eggdrop bots or have a ton of screen'd ircii instances, that was considered your problem. Choosing to run an IRC network without nickserv and chanserv enshrined the rights of a group of assholes with shell accounts with the means to easily bully the less privileged (EFNet, I'm looking at you).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:27 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
It was a flex to have the resources to guard a channel or sit on a nickname, and if you couldn't run an a network of eggdrop bots or have a ton of screen'd ircii instances, that was considered your problem. Choosing to run an IRC network without nickserv and chanserv enshrined the rights of a group of assholes with shell accounts with the means to easily bully the less privileged (EFNet, I'm looking at you).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:27 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I used irc in 1989, which always baffles people who think The Internet started in 1997 or whenever their town got dialup.
I was on a BBS that became an ISP that became an IRC node and then when people started using the trust-everyone server named "Eris" to wreak havoc, it joined the freshly-formed "Eris-Free Network" (EFNet for short).
I was confused about the notion of "channels" for ages. I joined # at someone's advice, and people used to float through there. But I'd try other channels like #1 or #500 but no one was around. I found some people in #69 but they were weird and so I left.
Eventually someone asked me to join a named channel, and I did, and it was full of people talking about what was going on in Kuwait. I later heard stories that this was actual reports from people in Desert S(torm|hield), but I don't remember details.
IRC was always a "leave it running forever" kind of thing, which required either GNU screen on your ISP's shell account (pretty new in the 90s, and not always compatible with the right terminals) or some kind of fancy T1 connection like a university had. I met a friend in high school who wrote his own ircii scripts to help protect and raid other channels. He asked me to help him test, so I ran this weird scriptpuppy client for years, until I got banned from #perl for my "glowing colon" (it added bold stylings when addressing people, so if I wanted to ask Merlin a question it would look like "merlin: how do I..." with the colon's intensity cranked up so that it looked much brighter than the rest of the text.).
I remember switching a few clients before settling on irssi, and then I woke up on 11 September and NPR was talking about the events and I hopped on IRC. A friend told me to join a channel on the small network we'd made home, and I did to find that a legally blind server operator had hooked up the output from his closed captioning device straight into the channel, with another for us to discuss it. The memorial service for the fallen was largely transcribed as just repeating couplets of "(MUSIC) (MUSIC)" so we used to type that in occasionally when feeling anxious.
And then I went to work for a company that did everything on IRC, and Freenode was a sort of satellite of that just due to software development in the free software world. Not only did I need to reach out and ask technical questions, but I needed to answer some for things I was responsible for, and keeping friendly relationships going is a bit nicer in a friendlier chat environment. Internally we've moved to mattermost for team comms now, but Libera is still an important place for conducting technical business.
I keep admiring that IRC is nothing more than a client protocol, and a wealth of extant clients that speak it. There are so many IRC servers out there that repeat the silly architectural problems of the old ones. Slack used to support IRC clients, until corporate decided it wasn't worth the effort. If you want to make something to supplant IRC, just make sure that you test the ability for anyone with irssi, mirc, weechat, quassel, or MS Comic Chat to hook up to it and join a conversation. Don't force us to set up noisy matterbridge bots that paste usernames as plain text that our clients don't style or let us tab-complete.
I'm happy to leave IRC behind, personally, but only if what replaces it is something we can run and maintain and moderate as a community, without relying on big companies to claim territory. That's the nice thing about Libera: it was just a community of users and some RFCs. They could start over from scratch when the Ownership Class got toxic. We need to keep that alive.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:46 AM on June 29, 2021 [12 favorites]
I was on a BBS that became an ISP that became an IRC node and then when people started using the trust-everyone server named "Eris" to wreak havoc, it joined the freshly-formed "Eris-Free Network" (EFNet for short).
I was confused about the notion of "channels" for ages. I joined # at someone's advice, and people used to float through there. But I'd try other channels like #1 or #500 but no one was around. I found some people in #69 but they were weird and so I left.
Eventually someone asked me to join a named channel, and I did, and it was full of people talking about what was going on in Kuwait. I later heard stories that this was actual reports from people in Desert S(torm|hield), but I don't remember details.
IRC was always a "leave it running forever" kind of thing, which required either GNU screen on your ISP's shell account (pretty new in the 90s, and not always compatible with the right terminals) or some kind of fancy T1 connection like a university had. I met a friend in high school who wrote his own ircii scripts to help protect and raid other channels. He asked me to help him test, so I ran this weird scriptpuppy client for years, until I got banned from #perl for my "glowing colon" (it added bold stylings when addressing people, so if I wanted to ask Merlin a question it would look like "merlin: how do I..." with the colon's intensity cranked up so that it looked much brighter than the rest of the text.).
I remember switching a few clients before settling on irssi, and then I woke up on 11 September and NPR was talking about the events and I hopped on IRC. A friend told me to join a channel on the small network we'd made home, and I did to find that a legally blind server operator had hooked up the output from his closed captioning device straight into the channel, with another for us to discuss it. The memorial service for the fallen was largely transcribed as just repeating couplets of "(MUSIC) (MUSIC)" so we used to type that in occasionally when feeling anxious.
And then I went to work for a company that did everything on IRC, and Freenode was a sort of satellite of that just due to software development in the free software world. Not only did I need to reach out and ask technical questions, but I needed to answer some for things I was responsible for, and keeping friendly relationships going is a bit nicer in a friendlier chat environment. Internally we've moved to mattermost for team comms now, but Libera is still an important place for conducting technical business.
I keep admiring that IRC is nothing more than a client protocol, and a wealth of extant clients that speak it. There are so many IRC servers out there that repeat the silly architectural problems of the old ones. Slack used to support IRC clients, until corporate decided it wasn't worth the effort. If you want to make something to supplant IRC, just make sure that you test the ability for anyone with irssi, mirc, weechat, quassel, or MS Comic Chat to hook up to it and join a conversation. Don't force us to set up noisy matterbridge bots that paste usernames as plain text that our clients don't style or let us tab-complete.
I'm happy to leave IRC behind, personally, but only if what replaces it is something we can run and maintain and moderate as a community, without relying on big companies to claim territory. That's the nice thing about Libera: it was just a community of users and some RFCs. They could start over from scratch when the Ownership Class got toxic. We need to keep that alive.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:46 AM on June 29, 2021 [12 favorites]
I was confused about the notion of "channels" for ages. I joined # at someone's advice, and people used to float through there. But I'd try other channels like #1 or #500 but no one was around. I found some people in #69 but they were weird and so I left.
Oh man that sounds so much like the first time I tried IRC using my father's dialup shell account. I think I was following instructions in O'Reilly's "The Whole Internet" or a similar book and I actually /join'ed #mychannel as per the guide and hung out there alone for a bit wondering where everyone else was.
I still remember how magical it was to leave my computer at home dialed up and connected to IRC, then connect with a client at school and transfer files between the two. And then I installed some crap windows 95 based webserver on my home computer and by looking up my home client's ip address by finding it in IRC, I could browse to it from school!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:31 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oh man that sounds so much like the first time I tried IRC using my father's dialup shell account. I think I was following instructions in O'Reilly's "The Whole Internet" or a similar book and I actually /join'ed #mychannel as per the guide and hung out there alone for a bit wondering where everyone else was.
I still remember how magical it was to leave my computer at home dialed up and connected to IRC, then connect with a client at school and transfer files between the two. And then I installed some crap windows 95 based webserver on my home computer and by looking up my home client's ip address by finding it in IRC, I could browse to it from school!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:31 AM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
I used irc in 1989, which always baffles people who think The Internet started in 1997 or whenever their town got dialup.
I was on a BBS that became an ISP that became an IRC node…
Speaking of BBSs and early Internet, although IRC was part of my Internet diet in the 1980s, by FAR the lion’s share of my engagement with other people online was through Usenet and the USC BBS.
I generally preferred the asynchronous communication style to synchronous chatting. Not surprising that I’d later land at MeFi.
posted by darkstar at 3:43 PM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]
I was on a BBS that became an ISP that became an IRC node…
Speaking of BBSs and early Internet, although IRC was part of my Internet diet in the 1980s, by FAR the lion’s share of my engagement with other people online was through Usenet and the USC BBS.
I generally preferred the asynchronous communication style to synchronous chatting. Not surprising that I’d later land at MeFi.
posted by darkstar at 3:43 PM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]
If you're looking for a so-unpopular-it's-useless option, XMPP these days supports pretty much all the things that people wish IRC had built-in, and it's fully open source!
Best I can tell the only open source projects using it for their official chat are XMPP-related ones.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:46 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
Best I can tell the only open source projects using it for their official chat are XMPP-related ones.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:46 AM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
It was also actually believing that 'ping -f' on a dialup modem could knock someone off the Internet (ping of death notwithstanding)
It turns out my brain can still recite the string "2b2b2b41544830".
I won't explain, just in case anyone here is still on dialup...
posted by automatronic at 4:30 AM on June 30, 2021
It turns out my brain can still recite the string "2b2b2b41544830".
I won't explain, just in case anyone here is still on dialup...
posted by automatronic at 4:30 AM on June 30, 2021
Oh I will. +++ATH0, the Basilisk for modem users. It's hilarious that ever worked.
posted by Nelson at 7:59 AM on June 30, 2021
posted by Nelson at 7:59 AM on June 30, 2021
Indeed, I used to occasionally /ctcp #channelname PING +++ATH0 to get them to respond. Then a friend pointed out that Hayes held a patent on requiring a human-input-level delay on the characters to disengage, as a way of punishing competing modem manufacturers. I decided that was pretty nasty behaviour on their part and stopped doing it.
My boss at my university work-study job used to have a signature that was just "+++ath", and he had a framed printout email from a security researcher who told a security discussion list that he'd proven that his modem hung up whenever he got an e-mail from my boss.
I used to set WebTV stationery headers in my mails to make them black-on-black for WebTV users, and had a bunch of Outlook-specific headers that showed up as administrator alerts telling the user to switch to Linux, because yes I was that guy in the 90s.
But enough about e-mail!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:25 AM on June 30, 2021
My boss at my university work-study job used to have a signature that was just "+++ath", and he had a framed printout email from a security researcher who told a security discussion list that he'd proven that his modem hung up whenever he got an e-mail from my boss.
I used to set WebTV stationery headers in my mails to make them black-on-black for WebTV users, and had a bunch of Outlook-specific headers that showed up as administrator alerts telling the user to switch to Linux, because yes I was that guy in the 90s.
But enough about e-mail!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:25 AM on June 30, 2021
Oh I will. +++ATH0, the Basilisk for modem users. It's hilarious that ever worked.
Do you know the story of why it did work?
When Hayes developed the original 300-baud Smartmodem in 1981 - the one that introduced the AT command set - they needed an escape sequence to bring the modem back to command mode. What they chose was (1 second pause) +++ (1 second pause). They figured that although you might have +++ in the normal flow of data, you were unlikely to accidentally send +++ with a pause before and after.
And they patented that!
Every modem for the last 40 years has copied their AT command scheme - right up to the 4G modules we use today. But for the whole of the 80s and 90s, if you got too close, Hayes would sue you for infringing their patent.
But every bit of software back then expected to be able to pause, send +++, pause, and then send AT commands. Any viable modem had to be compatible or nobody would want to use it.
So the other modem manufacturers decided to make their modems accept +++ followed by any valid AT command as an escape sequence. That was less likely to come up by accident than +++ alone, so it seemed safe enough.
But of course people figured that you could deliberately trick a user's machine into sending +++ATH0 to such a modem, it would drop the call. Which you could do by just putting that string in an ICMP echo request and making them send it back. You just ran ping -p 2b2b2b41544830 <your target IP> and off they dropped.
This trick was perfectly poised to maintain the social hierarchy of IRC in those days.
If you were on a "real" network connection you were immune. If you had a shell account you IRCed from, people couldn't see your dialup IP and you were safe. If you knew how to configure PPP to escape that sequence, you were immune. Hell, if you had a Hayes or licensed modem which required the pause, you were immune.
But if you were a user connecting directly over a dialup link with a cheap modem and default settings, anyone could see your IP and kick you off the internet.
All because Hayes patented a simple solution to an obvious problem 40 years ago.
posted by automatronic at 8:29 AM on June 30, 2021 [10 favorites]
Do you know the story of why it did work?
When Hayes developed the original 300-baud Smartmodem in 1981 - the one that introduced the AT command set - they needed an escape sequence to bring the modem back to command mode. What they chose was (1 second pause) +++ (1 second pause). They figured that although you might have +++ in the normal flow of data, you were unlikely to accidentally send +++ with a pause before and after.
And they patented that!
Every modem for the last 40 years has copied their AT command scheme - right up to the 4G modules we use today. But for the whole of the 80s and 90s, if you got too close, Hayes would sue you for infringing their patent.
But every bit of software back then expected to be able to pause, send +++, pause, and then send AT commands. Any viable modem had to be compatible or nobody would want to use it.
So the other modem manufacturers decided to make their modems accept +++ followed by any valid AT command as an escape sequence. That was less likely to come up by accident than +++ alone, so it seemed safe enough.
But of course people figured that you could deliberately trick a user's machine into sending +++ATH0 to such a modem, it would drop the call. Which you could do by just putting that string in an ICMP echo request and making them send it back. You just ran ping -p 2b2b2b41544830 <your target IP> and off they dropped.
This trick was perfectly poised to maintain the social hierarchy of IRC in those days.
If you were on a "real" network connection you were immune. If you had a shell account you IRCed from, people couldn't see your dialup IP and you were safe. If you knew how to configure PPP to escape that sequence, you were immune. Hell, if you had a Hayes or licensed modem which required the pause, you were immune.
But if you were a user connecting directly over a dialup link with a cheap modem and default settings, anyone could see your IP and kick you off the internet.
All because Hayes patented a simple solution to an obvious problem 40 years ago.
posted by automatronic at 8:29 AM on June 30, 2021 [10 favorites]
(And yes, I did this enough to know that string by heart. In my defense, it was often the closest thing we had to moderation back then)
posted by automatronic at 9:07 AM on June 30, 2021
posted by automatronic at 9:07 AM on June 30, 2021
If you're looking for a so-unpopular-it's-useless option, XMPP these days supports pretty much all the things that people wish IRC had built-in, and it's fully open source!
Smartphone/Media Center integration via XMPP over GoogleTalk - Aug 03, 2009
posted by mikelieman at 9:20 PM on June 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
Smartphone/Media Center integration via XMPP over GoogleTalk - Aug 03, 2009
posted by mikelieman at 9:20 PM on June 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
To add a bit more about Matrix, our experience with it, and why I believe it remains the best choice we could have made:
If you've been hanging in certain Matrix channels for the last few days, you might have noticed an exciting number of channel ACL updates - Access Control Lists, permissions basically - all over the place, and wondering what that is all about. And I am here to tell you, what you're seeing here is the most important new idea in social software in the last twenty years in action, far and away my favourite Matrix feature that nobody knows about: Federated, auto-updating blocklist sharing.
If you decide you trust somebody else’s decisions, in some other room, at some other organization – if you trust their judgment calls about who is and is not welcome there – those decisions can be immediately and automatically reflected in your own rooms. When a site you trust drop the banhammer on some bad actor - or some whole collection of bad actors - that ban can be adopted near-immediately by your site and your community as well.
You don’t have to have ever seen that person, you don't need whatever got them banned hit you in the eyes. You don’t even need to know they exist. All you need to do is decide you trust that other site's judgment and magically someone persona non grata on their site is precisely that grata on yours.
Another way to say that is: among people or communities who trust each other in these decisions, an act of self-defence becomes, seamlessly and invisibly, an act of collective defence.
No more everyone needing to fight their own fights alone forever, no more getting isolated and picked off one at a time, weakest first; shields-up means shields-up for everyone in a single action. In other words: effective, practical defensive solidarity by default. I'm not exaggerating when I say it’s the most important new idea I’ve seen in social software in twenty years. It might be the idea that makes social software possible at all twenty years from now.
The Matrix team has a significantly more permissive idea of what constitutes acceptable use than we do; that's fine, it's a big internet and they can make that choice, but operating on the theory that, if somebody has done something that will catch them a ban from the Matrix team we definitely want nothing to do with them, we subscribe to their ACL updates on our instance.
Right now - or at least, over the last few days - the main Matrix instance is under attack. And what you're actually seeing in those frequently-updated ACL messages isn't just the Matrix ops team actively repelling an aggressive spam attack; it's our corner of the Matrix ecosystem enjoying the benefits of all their work, without me needing to do so much as click a button.
It's been clear to me for a while now, but this is the table stakes of a better possible future and every federated or distributed system out should build out their own version, because once you've had this you are absolutely not going back to not having it.
posted by mhoye at 1:47 PM on July 1, 2021 [8 favorites]
If you've been hanging in certain Matrix channels for the last few days, you might have noticed an exciting number of channel ACL updates - Access Control Lists, permissions basically - all over the place, and wondering what that is all about. And I am here to tell you, what you're seeing here is the most important new idea in social software in the last twenty years in action, far and away my favourite Matrix feature that nobody knows about: Federated, auto-updating blocklist sharing.
If you decide you trust somebody else’s decisions, in some other room, at some other organization – if you trust their judgment calls about who is and is not welcome there – those decisions can be immediately and automatically reflected in your own rooms. When a site you trust drop the banhammer on some bad actor - or some whole collection of bad actors - that ban can be adopted near-immediately by your site and your community as well.
You don’t have to have ever seen that person, you don't need whatever got them banned hit you in the eyes. You don’t even need to know they exist. All you need to do is decide you trust that other site's judgment and magically someone persona non grata on their site is precisely that grata on yours.
Another way to say that is: among people or communities who trust each other in these decisions, an act of self-defence becomes, seamlessly and invisibly, an act of collective defence.
No more everyone needing to fight their own fights alone forever, no more getting isolated and picked off one at a time, weakest first; shields-up means shields-up for everyone in a single action. In other words: effective, practical defensive solidarity by default. I'm not exaggerating when I say it’s the most important new idea I’ve seen in social software in twenty years. It might be the idea that makes social software possible at all twenty years from now.
The Matrix team has a significantly more permissive idea of what constitutes acceptable use than we do; that's fine, it's a big internet and they can make that choice, but operating on the theory that, if somebody has done something that will catch them a ban from the Matrix team we definitely want nothing to do with them, we subscribe to their ACL updates on our instance.
Right now - or at least, over the last few days - the main Matrix instance is under attack. And what you're actually seeing in those frequently-updated ACL messages isn't just the Matrix ops team actively repelling an aggressive spam attack; it's our corner of the Matrix ecosystem enjoying the benefits of all their work, without me needing to do so much as click a button.
It's been clear to me for a while now, but this is the table stakes of a better possible future and every federated or distributed system out should build out their own version, because once you've had this you are absolutely not going back to not having it.
posted by mhoye at 1:47 PM on July 1, 2021 [8 favorites]
Oh man, I hadn't thought about +++ATH0 in decades! I seem to recall using it disconnect myself sometimes?
posted by tavella at 9:07 PM on July 1, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by tavella at 9:07 PM on July 1, 2021 [1 favorite]
Speaking of modem related things that hadn't come to mind in decades, I was yelling at my screen the other day when I was watching a YouTube video talking about old modems and how people had to manually dial them if they didn't have touch tone service. ATDP has been a thing since the first Hayes Smartmodem!
What they didn't have was an EEPROM to store all your settings, hence the super long initializaton string buried in the settings of every terminal emulator. Life was so much easier once ATZ became a thing.
It delights me that we all carry around Hayes-compatible modems to this day and most of us don't even realize it. Until quite recently, most cell carriers still supported circuit switched data calls, so you could use your cell phone to dial up whatever random modem you liked. Even now your phone uses AT commands internally to talk to the baseband chip and establish the data connection. Externally, too, if you plug in the USB and select tethering mode. Some present as a network interface instead, but many are still emulating a dialup modem.
posted by wierdo at 1:33 AM on July 2, 2021 [6 favorites]
What they didn't have was an EEPROM to store all your settings, hence the super long initializaton string buried in the settings of every terminal emulator. Life was so much easier once ATZ became a thing.
It delights me that we all carry around Hayes-compatible modems to this day and most of us don't even realize it. Until quite recently, most cell carriers still supported circuit switched data calls, so you could use your cell phone to dial up whatever random modem you liked. Even now your phone uses AT commands internally to talk to the baseband chip and establish the data connection. Externally, too, if you plug in the USB and select tethering mode. Some present as a network interface instead, but many are still emulating a dialup modem.
posted by wierdo at 1:33 AM on July 2, 2021 [6 favorites]
It delights me that we all carry around Hayes-compatible modems to this day and most of us don't even realize it.
That would make a great article if it hasn't already been written.
posted by clawsoon at 7:27 AM on July 2, 2021
That would make a great article if it hasn't already been written.
posted by clawsoon at 7:27 AM on July 2, 2021
I've been out of the IRC world for a few years. The last time I joined an IRC channel was for an Apache Software Foundation member's meeting, and that was brief.
I'm part of a few Slack channels and we moved primarily to Google Chat for my day job (sadly) which is the worst of all worlds: proprietary, clunky, and ever-changing at the whims of Google.
I'm not familiar with Matrix yet. Does it have centralized servers like Freenode I can join and access channels for various projects or does it entail joining a Matrix server for each project? One thing I really dislike about Slack (aside from being proprietary, etc.) is having to join one Slack for this and one for that... the client doesn't really optimize participating in multiple projects / chats.
I'd really love something popular + simple enough that has enough user gravity to pull in friends + family so I don't have to do all my communication via proprietary networks. That's probably like wishing for a pony, though. Actually, there's a better chance I'll get the pony.
posted by jzb at 7:39 AM on July 3, 2021
I'm part of a few Slack channels and we moved primarily to Google Chat for my day job (sadly) which is the worst of all worlds: proprietary, clunky, and ever-changing at the whims of Google.
I'm not familiar with Matrix yet. Does it have centralized servers like Freenode I can join and access channels for various projects or does it entail joining a Matrix server for each project? One thing I really dislike about Slack (aside from being proprietary, etc.) is having to join one Slack for this and one for that... the client doesn't really optimize participating in multiple projects / chats.
I'd really love something popular + simple enough that has enough user gravity to pull in friends + family so I don't have to do all my communication via proprietary networks. That's probably like wishing for a pony, though. Actually, there's a better chance I'll get the pony.
posted by jzb at 7:39 AM on July 3, 2021
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This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Questions:
1. How did Lee come to own the company or IP that enabled him to impose his will over Freenode? Was it (presumably) already owned by someone, somewhere, and he just bought it? (That sounds like what happened.)
2. Do the old conversations and info persist as archived on Lee’s system? Or were they all scrubbed when users shifted to Libera? Are the old conversations considered IP owned by Lee?
3. Did anyone stay on Freenode or was the exodus pretty much 100%?
posted by darkstar at 7:29 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]