Hey, Katie:
> Just want to mention here about the 'hostile takeover' of Freenode on > IRC, by Andrew Lee, in 2021. That situation really turned me off of > IRC for some time (now I use it again, but not Freenode or even > Libera). That whole situation really seemed to have a huge negative > impact on many open source projects and communities. This is more of an issue with centralisation than IRC being a bad protocol. It is true that IRC is a centralised protocol but the idea was to have many different networks for many different things. Unfortunately Freenode (and now Libera) have become a one stop shop for almost every single open source project which still uses IRC. This is concerning because the entire of the IRC open source community is dependant on a single network. I would have hoped that people would have learnt their lesson from freenode of not putting all your eggs in one basket, but it seems to have just repeated itself. As a disclaimer I have nothing against libera.chat, I think its a solid network and the staff are friendly enough. But I still think that people should put more emphasises on running their own IRC network for their projects. You can slap ngircd onto a raspberry pi running OpenBSD and would be able to handle thousands of people. That was, and still is, the amazing thing about IRC, just how light and simple it is. Greg: > Yeah, for me it's happening everywhere, not just in tech. For > instance my main social group has moved to Discord while keeping our > mailing list going, and there are now just 5 or 6 of us using the > list out of 60 users. It reminds me of the decline of Usenet when > folks started moving on to options with more features. I feel like this is a shift in the open source community. I feel a lot of it is trying to cater for younger people, and as one of the younger people, I hate it. Linux has adopted Rust not because they believe it benefits them, but Touvalds himself said it is because younger people write Rust, and thus supporting Rust draws in the younger developers. There is no denying that Discord is dominated by young people, the future developers, the future contributors. Be too rigid in your ways and you end up having no adoption within the younger generation, which is pretty much nailing the final nails in the coffin for your project, and I do believe all BSDs struggle with this. Looking around at EuroBSDCon you can count on one, maybe if you are lucky, two hands how many people are under 25 years old there are. But be too flexible, and too willing to abandon everything you stand for to draw in the younger developers makes it meaningless, and I feel many open source projects have done exactly that, abandoned their original goals, abandoned what they stood for, all simply for future survival. What is the point of having an open source project if the entire infrastructure it depends on to survive is all proprietary. What is the point of having a secure operating system such as OpenBSD if you are going to use Discord or another proprietary platform to communicate with your friends and family? And as for Discord, they have no end to end encryption, and messages are stored in plaintext on their databases. It takes one security flaw and every single message ever sent on the platform (as they dont delete messages) is leaked for everyone to see. I am not criticising you or your group for your choices, just want to make that clear. Many people are not as willing as me to cut off people and isolate themself for security and privacy. However, it is important that those who remain passionate about these problems continue to advocate for open protocols and self hosting. Take care, -- Polarian Jabber/XMPP: [email protected]
