Gregory's Server@miah counter: Freenode.
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49 comments
@ripienaar @miah that depends on the network really… I was server administrator on Rizon for a while, and any such shenanigans would quickly get your server delinked haha   @ripienaar counter: libera.chat. Just because efnet turned into a shitshow, and freenode sold out doesn't mean you can't run your own server. You _DON'T_ have to chat on a "big" network. You can run your own for friends and family. "The stuff irc opers get up to" sure. Everything can be abused. Just throw your PC into the ocean already. @miah @ripienaar “Just throw your PC into the ocean already.” This sentiment I whole heartedly agree with. @miah Point is, you have valid points about IRC and I agree a lot - but the big missing “*" is if you are able to pick a good and well run and well intentioned server or network. Much the same concerns as here etc.  @miah @ripienaar That's probably better. IRCv3 is pretty good, but the "big" networks never update their software and no one says anything in the channels. Better to run a private server for a few friends who actually use it. @miah And largely also why many of the federated services fail or dont succeed in the wider sense - its impossible to know who to trust. Even a enormous comunity of some of the most paranoid crazies on the planet (us) didnt see the Freenode thing coming @ripienaar I wonder what would have happened had Lilo not passed away. Maybe Freenode would have been different? Maybe worse? Who knows. I don't know why the past leadership sold it off. I'm totally baffled by that whole situation. @miah And indeed, I can also run my own Mastadon server - but even I dont do that I pay someone to do it. It's just not a viable answer for someone who uses Slack day to day. Until we find ways to deal with these super hard to solve problems, these suggestions are largely not useful. Many of us have tried corporate IRC servers and lol, how bad does that go. @ripienaar We ran our own IRC & ZNC servers at Bank Simple for years. We of course switched to Slack after we got bought because... probably because management wanted to read the private messages of an employee. @miah Did all your business users in the company, CEO and all other executives and sales etc, use IRC? @ripienaar Yes, everybody was on irc. We all chatted regularly. The shift happened more than a year after we got bought out. Similarly everybody was on our github enterprise. I could tag _anybody_ in the company, and we all had access to repos. It wasn't uncommon for somebody from a different department to send in a PR to fix something that was bothering them. I patched some text on our web app while I worked in ops (weird gendering of things that didnt need it). @ripienaar For a time Bank Simple was amazing, one of the best jobs of my career... up until our buyout =) We tried to keep things great then, and in many ways we got better, but in so many others we got much much worse.  @miah @ripienaar My heart goes out to y’all, I was a customer for years up until the bitter end. It was always clear the love and care that went into the product. @miah @ripienaar I *really* wanted to have our whole 50-60 head company on our Gitlab enterprice license since we were trying to get more people engaged in the PO meetings. Unfortunately pricing just wouldn't work out. Enterprise productivity tools like that need a "guest pass" seat tier or something so we can at least get our whole directory taggable from the discussion tools or something. @ripienaar I don’t see why they couldn’t? There are significantly more arcane systems (e.g. SAP) in common use. @ripienaar @Serenus I think most people in "tech" ran a simple command line irc client, while everybody else ran the Mac Colloquy. We had a standard of "no Windows" on the server network, and after buyout our new "compliance" broke that rule, ripped out our slapd and replaced it with Active Directory.  @miah @ripienaar mattermost you can also host as a slack alternative or matrix, if you want to do the activity pub thing.. and federate, and have e2e both have pretty slick free mobile clients  @ripienaar @miah ircd is just one apt install away. That is MUCH easier and lighter than mastodon. Zulip is so much better than Slack (topics not threads! so much better— and i am someone who cannot choose an e-mail subject to save my life), also better than IRC. Zulip is what we moved to. Free software that you *can* self-host but also available as a service. I think for many it will hit that sweet spot between convenience and freedom/control. Though i don't want to derail the main thread too much, which is that IRC is alive and well. `irc.indymedia.org` is where @mayfirst and some other groups we are part of are on, everything else is on `libera.chat` i think.   @thaodan @mlncn People don't know how to triage email. They try to read absolutely everything, get overwhelmed and then stop reading anything at all. If I get a hundred emails in a day, 80 of them came from a noisy automation reporting status changes and 15 came from some form of corporate chatter. I only *need* to read those last 5. Those 80 automated emails aren't too much because a) I ignore them and b) I don't immediately delete them so I can still go back for it later as needed. Yeah there's definitely a lot of benefit to IRC/Slack/whathaveyou that has nothing to do with features compared to e-mail and more to do with "this bucket of things i care about is HERE". But also: - Zulip lets you move messages between topics, not so possible in e-mail @mlncn @gooba42 Mixing chats with long-form isn't a good idea IMHO. I don't think the medium email has anything to do with keeping etiquette or posting styles. You can always quote more than needed. @ripienaar  This is what happened with the London Hackspace IRC channels. One of the moderators set up another parallel service, and the transition took place easily. :D Open Protocols for the Win! :D @miah @ripienaar yea if anything Freenode is actually a vote of confidence in IRC I think? Yes it sucked a lot that some predator freakshow tried to pull a coup, but the organizational/financial cost of just routing around him was low enough that this could just happen. A kind of fault tolerance that is exceedingly rare in communication media   @ripienaar @miah Freenode isn't the counter. Because of all the reasons above, people could upsticks and leave it, which they cannot do in other walled chat networks. @Baggypants @miah they absolutely can leave any walled garden for another or an open alternative. There wasn’t some magical migration, no history was kept, nicks had to be reclaimed. It’s essentially start from scratch somewhere else. The fact that it happened to use the same protocol as the previous network was coincidental and convenient but not an enabling factor. @ripienaar @miah I think being able to keep the client you were using before, with all it's customizations, and then to move to an environment that is functionally how it was before is much better than "We were using Discord, and we moved to Teams" @Baggypants @miah Convenient yes. Many migrated elsewhere to walled gardens and it was fine also. @ripienaar @miah "fine" is a low bar. What we don't have is any figures for how many people just left the community they were in because of the change. I would hope that retention would be higher for people migrating irc to irc verses irc to some other client. @Baggypants @miah I just left IRC completely, the channels I ran mostly died and communities are vibrant on slack instead. (I was a PROLIFIC user for decades since mid 90s, highest contributor in some of the largest Freenode channels for years running etc, just as an aside its not like it was nothing for me) @ripienaar @miah Sure, but if a community I was in moved to slack, I wouldn't have followed it. |
@miah Also, oh my, if you knew the shit irc operators got up to :)