Hi all, (TL;DR: Due to major and disruptive changes in freenode governance and operations, I propose that HCoop should move its IRC channel to libera.chat, the new IRC network created by now-former freenode staff who recently collectively resigned; see the proposal at the bottom of this message for details.)
As some of you are aware, the freenode volunteer staff resigned en masse a week or so ago as a result of Andrew Lee (AKA rasengan, owner of the freenode.net domain via freenode ltd) breaking his promise not to interfere in freenode's operations. This led to the creation of a new IRC network, Libera Chat (<https://libera.chat/>), run by the former freenode staff. freenode is now under the operational control of Lee and a new group of staff selected by him, following a set of poorly-documented and rapidly-changing 'policies'. Among a variety of questionably-ethical decisions, I'll only mention one of the more egregious examples: there was an unannounced mass takeover of hundreds of channels which mentioned libera.chat in their topics, resulting in the loss of privileges for operators of those channels and the deletion of the old topics as they were deemed to be 'spam'. That action likely accelerated a mass departure that was already underway; many projects have left freenode entirely (including Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Wikimedia, GNU Emacs, GNU Guix, GNU Guile, etc.). For more information, see these articles: - https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/857140/9d69e4bef039e574/ (permalink: <https://lwn.net/857140/>) - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-the-crown-prince-of-korea/ - https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-source-korea-crown-prince-takeover The first week on Libera has gone well despite the influx of new users (it's now the #3 network according to netsplit.de). Beyond setting up Solanum (a new IRC daemon developed in collaboration with OFTC) and the usual Atheme services (NickServ, etc.), they've set up a Tor hidden service and webchat, and are in the process of setting up an official Matrix bridge similar to freenode's. Libera is also a Swedish nonprofit, rather than a group of volunteers relying on the goodwill of a for-profit company as freenode was, making a distruptive split like this less likely in the future. I personally consider relying on the new incarnation of freenode unacceptable and believe that we should either move to another free-software-oriented IRC network (e.g., Libera or OFTC) or to another free software chat service (e.g., XMPP or Matrix). Between the two, I'd prefer to maintain an IRC presence as it remains a de facto standard for free software communities, and we can use bridging to allow access via other protocols. Given the above, and that over half of our IRC users are already using #hcoop on libera.chat (while no one has expressed a preference for OFTC so far AFAIK), I propose the following change: HCoop will move its official IRC presence to #hcoop on irc.libera.chat on 2021-06-05. ...i.e., next Saturday, allowing a week for discussion. If there is general consensus for moving to Libera, we can update our wiki, etc., to direct members to the Libera channel, and the decision could be ratified at the next board meeting. (We could also register as an official project on Libera, which has some benefits beyond being an ordinary channel.) If you have other ideas as to what our reaction to the changes at freenode should be, or questions about the overall situation, please don't hesitate to share them here. If there are alternative proposals, we can discuss them here and possibly take other steps, such as holding a vote or scheduling a board meeting to resolve the question. In Cooperation, Robin Templeton _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
