[HN Gopher] Welcome to Libera Chat ___________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Libera Chat Author : smitop Score : 1001 points Date : 2021-05-19 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (libera.chat) (TXT) w3m dump (libera.chat) | jokoon wrote: | Not enough users | travisgriggs wrote: | Honest/weird question. | | This is (at least) time number two, that OSS projects have used | the "Libre/Libera" term in community reboot/rebrand efforts. | Nothing against speakers of French which have given us so many | beautiful words, but there is something off putting about | libre/libera for me in "brand names". I like what they stand for | even! They just don't roll off the tongue for me. Is this just a | "me thing"? Maybe there's something inherit about the actual | phonetics that makes it off putting for me? | yosito wrote: | It's just a you thing. Much of the world is not English | speaking, and many languages (including English, by the way) | use the libre root. It has a well established meaning as a | specific meaning of "free". I'd even go so far as to say that | "libre" itself is virtually an English word now. Sorry you | don't like it. Maybe learning a second language will help. | CydeWeys wrote: | Interesting, when I hear libre, I think Spanish. It comes from | a common root word across all the Latin languages, and that has | also given us "liberty" in English. | | Anyway, it doesn't bother me. It's better than "Free", which is | mostly misunderstood, RMS's rebranding attempts | notwithstanding. | cout wrote: | I agree that "libre" does not roll off the tongue well. It's a | rare pattern in English, shared with words like cadre, timbre, | and macabre. Those are nouns, so they're not followed by | another word in the same way as e.g. "libre software". We have | other words like theatre or acre or lustre that we pronounce as | if the e and the r are switched. That could work for libre, | pronouncing it like "mediocre" (the only other adjective I know | of that is spelled that way). | | Libreoffice rubs me in a particularly wrong way, because until | someone explained it, I did not know whether it was "libre | office" or "lib re-office". Either one is strange (the former | especially awkward because of the two vowel sounds back-to- | back). | hnjst wrote: | French speaking people pronounce it "libroffice". Lots of | final "e" are silent in french. | t-writescode wrote: | For what it's worth, I believe that it's usually typed either | "libre office" or LibreOffice, and so the confusion there | should be minimized. | | And a lot of English speakers at high-school or above level | would probably be able to associate Libre with Free / Open. | | I will agree that OpenOffice was a better name. | queuebert wrote: | All things being equal, I would prefer fewer syllables to | pronounce when possible. But I'm a lazy English speaker. | jeltz wrote: | Where are you from? I am Swedish and I feel these names work | just fine both in Swedish and in English. | travisgriggs wrote: | Amurhica. :) However, I do speak Norwegian (and can limp med | Svenska). Even if I tenk pa det pa Norsk, det fremdeles er | samme :D. GratisNet would have been kult I guess. Or ApneNet. | mrweasel wrote: | GratisDNS in Denmark is weird enough, let's not go that | route. ApneNet, now that is something I want. | galgalesh wrote: | Works fine in Dutch too, imo. | toxik wrote: | I've already misspelled it is libra a couple of times. | harikb wrote: | Don't forget Libra coin/currency that was going to solve | all the worlds problems :P | EamonnMR wrote: | It means 'free' without people instantly associating it with | 'zero cost'. Or at least that was the argument back in the day. | prionassembly wrote: | Wow. Anglocentric much? | | Just wow. | [deleted] | duxup wrote: | Yeah so Freenode went wrong and they created this. | | Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? How | do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode? | | I know addressing a messy past on a new site is no fun / I saw | the other articles on HN, but ... they should still address who | is running the show and some level of assurances (as much as you | can in text on the internet) that this is a good place. | ilaksh wrote: | They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit. The people | running the show are associated with many of the greatest open | source projects. Projects where literal geniuses have donated | thousands of hours to make software and services available to | you and I free of charge. | | You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new | service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that, | except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example, | actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the | guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in | #nim. | | The people running the show are those people and friends of | those people. | | The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got | control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't | interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started | advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the | networking etc. | | So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are | problem solvers. | void_mint wrote: | Is this satire? | ilaksh wrote: | What on earth makes you think that? | SamBam wrote: | Because it's hyperbolic, most if it is just fawning about | how great Freenode was which had nothing to do with the | question, and it did not answer the question at all. | | Original question: "there is not a single name of a real | person anywhere on the site that I can find. there is | only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit | association in Sweden." Is it normal for the staff of | such a project to be secret?" | | Your answer: "They did address the ownership. It's a non- | profit." Not named. And then you had a bunch of stuff | about unnamed people who chose not to put their names or | nicks anywhere on the site, when the question is "why | wouldn't they associated their names/nicks with this?" | ilaksh wrote: | It's not hyperbolic, it was the literal truth, and all of | it is relevant because the question implies they do not | know what Freenode was. | | The staff are not secret. They have names on the network. | Those nicks are published (at least on the old site, not | sure if that has been transferred to new yet) and well- | known. | | The one guy who's name everyone knows is undisputably | trying to profit from a non-profit organization, which he | previously lied and said he would not, and in so doing | has caused the worst disruption possible. So that proves | that names don't actually help us. | void_mint wrote: | It's definitely hyperbolic. You responded to "Who owns | this" with "Look how smart/iconic these unverified people | are". | | It reads like (good) satire. The perceived esteem of some | of the users are unrelated to the validity/integrity of a | company. | ilaksh wrote: | It's not a company. | void_mint wrote: | > Our legal home is a non-profit association in Sweden, | with all our staff holding equal stakes, and we will | never accept corporate control. | | Go on. | Lammy wrote: | We have the best geniuses -- the best! My father -- great | man; very smart; raised me well -- my father told me | computers are the most important. We do the software, and | we do the best software, and we're WINNING! | void_mint wrote: | > Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? | How do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode? | | It will almost certainly go the same way as its gone in the | past. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | The _network policies_ , and _Guidelines, recommendations and | best practices_ are already fraught with subjectivity and the | unsolvable dichotomy of carrier v publisher (at least in the | USA). | Lammy wrote: | "While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and | freedom of expression, Libera.Chat does not operate on the | basis of absolute freedom of speech". Ah I see: | https://libera.chat/policies | | I would feel way more confident if they defined all the terms | used in this document e.g. "various forms of antisocial | behaviour are forbidden", "discrimination", "any other | behaviour meant to deliberately put upon a person harassment, | alarm or distress". | | The vagueness is rather alarming and distressing to me. | nednar wrote: | What is the purpose of this? | p1mrx wrote: | The logo reminds me of a DOS game called Aldo's Adventure: | https://youtu.be/Ik2N4opZynQ?t=200 | | I guess it's mainly due to the EGA-like magenta/blue/white color | scheme. | Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur) | | "In 2021, Lee took control of freenode, making some staff resign | and move to Libera.chat." | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera.chat | | Freenode's wikipedia entry also has been updated | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode | | Not sure how I feel about those lightning fast Wikipedia changes. | mst wrote: | Mr. Lee annoyed some wikipedia editors in the process of | screwing up freenode. | | This has consequences. | Lammy wrote: | "making" lol | dom96 wrote: | I'm curious why Freenode staffers aren't instead moving to OFTC | (https://www.oftc.net/). Seems like a well structured network | with a lot of history. | rockdoe wrote: | For one the policies are quite different: non-open source | channels need to be secret. This isn't a requirement on | freenode. | donatj wrote: | Trying to register with NickServ with my gmail, which is by far | my primary email address. | | > Sorry, we do not accept registrations with email addresses from | that domain. Use another address. | | That's going to limit adoption. | donatj wrote: | FWIW I got in shortly after I posted this by capitalizing the G | in Gmail.com | sapphire_tomb wrote: | Weird. It let me use my Gmail address. | tych0 wrote: | You might try it again later; my coworkers and I have been | having problems registering all morning. | progval wrote: | They are overloaded with registrations; they might have blocked | gmail temporarily because gmail's spam filter. | varispeed wrote: | Do we know why there has been no update to IRC protocol to ensure | end to end encryption? I understand that doing e2e for public | chats is extremely complex - so these could remain public, but | private messages could easily be encrypted. | andrewzah wrote: | It's a huge pain in Matrix with even a small amount of users in | a chat. At least for me, I've never used IRC where I cared | about e2e. There are other services for that, including just | encrypting with the other party's public pgp key. | kdragon wrote: | I think group e2ee is overblown and self-defeating in | principle. Good luck auditing a ratcheting e2ee algo. Plus it | breaks often, and group encryption is defeated by any user in | the chat. | | Direct e2ee is far simpler and can be expanded to small groups | without the need for complex ratcheting trees. Anything larger | and you may as well fall-back to client-server with e2e | communications. | joecool1029 wrote: | I think this actually happened before with Freenode staff | breaking off into another network. Around 2006 staff got pissed | at lilo (I forget the exact reasons) and started the Atheme | network. Later that year lilo was run over and killed. After this | staff returned and Atheme became the testing grounds for their | new services and is today what Freenode runs as their services | suite. | kragen wrote: | This is different; this is a hostile takeover. | ryanlol wrote: | Is it though? It seems that this was all initiated by | freenode staff trying to walk back on the deal Christel made | with rasengan, forcing his hand. | kragen wrote: | Christel was selling something she didn't own. | ryanlol wrote: | Who owns it then? | wrycoder wrote: | The side with the resources to pay the lawyers, | apparently. | joecool1029 wrote: | That's a matter of perspective. Lilo's dead so it's not like | we'll hear his side of the story. For other examples of forks | which may or may not be considered hostile by some, see the | ffmpeg/libav split from some years back (that just like | Freenode, eventually reconverged). | Arnavion wrote: | ffmpeg and libav didn't "eventually reconverge." ffmpeg was | always copying anything new that libav added when it made | sense, and libav was eventually abandoned. | iratewizard wrote: | There is an entire interesting rabbit hole dedicated to how | much people hate Rob Levin (lilo). They talk about how he was a | scammer, collected disability with his wife for ADHD, regularly | misused his position in freenode to grift for money... | pen2l wrote: | I've heard this before, but I've gotta add: about a decade | ago, when I was a newbie in the FOSS world, I remember a pm | interaction with lilo. He was kind, unassuming, and helped me | with some basic nickserv commands. I only came to know who he | was much much later. That stands in stark contrast to most | ircops there who seem pretty unapproachable. | | And the quibble about a couple of K's really grates on me. | The guy founded freenode and kept it going. Let the donations | fund his groceries. | joecool1029 wrote: | FWIW, I was an annoying teenager and lilo didn't K-Line me | when I went through that phase (flooding channels with | nonsense and generally causing some trouble). He was | patient and I grew out of it. | | I never knew of the hate until I befriended a few of the | atheme people and they told me some of their side. I do | think he misappropriated funds to survive which is | unethical but I'm not mad at the spirit of it. I used to | troll the staff a bit that netsplits were caused by the | /shakedown command lilo put in to collect donations. | | Unrelated, but freenode is weird among IRC networks. Other | networks I went on would sometimes just ban people because | they felt like it, not for any particular reason. The | server donors were not allowed to give themselves O-Lines | (IRC staff privs), this was an important distinction as | well as it kept servers neutral, and later on was the | reason they did not require a foundation with overhead. | There was an incident that I believe they deleted off their | blog where I think the Newark, NJ server was punted from | the network for giving themselves an O-line without | permission. So yes, the sale is weird because the assets | should have only been the domain name and website. My guess | on PIA wanting more was recommendations from their lawyers | over GDPR crap but I don't really know or care. | kelp wrote: | I have similar memories of lilo. Kind, unassuming, and | helpful. Me and some college friends had a small channel | back in the early 2000s, and lilo would occasionally pop in | and say hello. He was always nice. At the time I wasn't | sure how he was able to spend so much time on IRC. | [deleted] | Lammy wrote: | It's worrisome to me that one of the stated objections I've seen | to Freenode's new owner is related to his personal politics: | https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461 | | My own personal politics are probably very very similar to the | above author who was complaining about the new owner being | "Trumpian", but what will happen if/when we disagreed about | something? Would I get the boot from Libera? I totally don't care | about Orange Man's fans enough to leave a network over it. | | e: You gotta appreciate the irony of which group is censoring me | right here with downvote-as-disagree :) | FeepingCreature wrote: | I don't think they mean "Trumpian" in the sense of "a Trump | supporter". But I understand your worry. | esjeon wrote: | I agree. The author likely meant that Lee is acting like | Trump in the sense that the method being used is mean and | destructive. | notRobot wrote: | IDK man, it's not just politics. Trump supporters also often | seem to be misogynistic/bigoted/racist. Are those the kinds of | people you want being in charge of online communities? | | That person is completely within their rights to not want to | work for someone like that. | Lammy wrote: | > Are those the kinds of people you want being in charge of | online communities? | | As long as they do a good job running the servers and don't | censor me, sure. Life's too short for me to add more hate to | the world in anticipation of receiving hate even though I am | several flavors of minority in the tech world. | coldpie wrote: | I agree with you, although it would be nice if there were | some real sources instead of just a pile of invective. | notRobot wrote: | I'm not sure what you want sources for? | | Trump being racist? Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/F | ragileWhiteRedditor/comments/ecajm... | | So people who support him are also probably racist, or at | least okay with him being racist. | Lammy wrote: | Personally I don't think racism is a binary. Trying to | bucket people into racist and not-racist seems like an | overly-simplistic way to look at humans. | circularfoyers wrote: | I don't see how being even a little racist is good in any | way. I honestly feel like a lot of people don't realise | what being subjected to racism is like in our present | day. | coldpie wrote: | No. The Freenode guy. | api wrote: | To be fair (and I'm not a Trump fan), there's more than one | reason someone might support Trump. | | I know a fair number of people who supported Trump because he | was a departure from the Bush/Clinton oligopoly and promised | no more "wars like Iraq." He also promised to push back on | grossly unfair trade policies with China. | | Had Trump not run in 2016 it's entirely likely that we would | have had, starting in 1992: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama (more | or less Clinton), and then a race between (drum roll...) Bush | and Clinton! | | Though I gotta say... many of them didn't vote for Trump the | second time because even if he did have a few good points his | personality is too repellent and humiliating to tolerate. | notRobot wrote: | Voting for trump and being a trump supporter is not the | same thing though. If someone is publicly saying that | they're a supporter, that means that they support trump's | policies and practices. Which includes bigotry. | api wrote: | I voted for Joe Biden, but do not support all his | policies and positions. | | Racism is awful, but American racism has not killed | anywhere from 500k to 1m people (depending on who is | counting) recently. The Iraq war did that along with | setting fire to over a trillion dollars. | | Sometimes I think Trump was worth it to make sure nobody | named Bush or Clinton ever inhabits the White House | again. | EamonnMR wrote: | While we're all switching to Libera chat, anyone have good | recommendations for general channels they follow besides project | channels? (the Lubuntu and Ubuntu channels where very helpful | when I needed them!) | capableweb wrote: | Examples: /msg alis LIST *linux* | /msg alis LIST *clojure* /msg alis LIST *art* | | Up to you really, tooling is there for you to explore :) | [deleted] | dt3ft wrote: | He acquired a site I built which I used to operate on user | donations. Today the site no longer exists. | z3t4 wrote: | I don't know if this is legit or not, but a Swedish non profit is | pretty awesome, it means that _anyone_ can be a member as long as | they pay a yearly symbolic member fee. Everything is owned by the | members and is fully democratic, where each member has equal | voting power, where members usually select a board, and the board | makes the daily decisions. When it comes to taxes, etc, non- | profits pretty much don 't pay any taxes, yet can make millions | in profit - as long as you spend that money in ways that benefits | the members. | natural219 wrote: | If you're going to switch a bunch of servers anyway, why not | start over by partnering with someone like Matrix.org? Dead | simple to create an IRC<->matrix bridge for people who just love | the old protocol, and decentralization efforts always have | strength in numbers. | tristan957 wrote: | The Matrix-IRC bridge is absolutely horrible and leads to | terrible experiences for Matrix users and IRC users. | natural219 wrote: | Ahh, I haven't used it before. Appreciate the feedback, | probably makes Matrix a less attractive option for this case | then. | nullc wrote: | For example, if your lines on the matrix side are long it | converts them into urls. So people on IRC end up seeing you | talking with 1/4 of your messages just being urls to some | random server's pastebin. | | When the matrix gateways go up and down you'll have 1000 | random users thunderously join and part the channel at | once. | | Matrix comment edits flood the channels. | | Matrix is unhelpful with abuse reports, in my experience. | | I generally ban matrix from IRC channels for these and | other such nuisances. | Arathorn wrote: | fwiw we've just added stuff to the IRC bridge to let the | pastebin, edit & reply behaviour be configurable on a | per-room basis so that if folks have strong opinions they | can enforce them. | | In terms of abuse reports; Element hires a fulltime team | of folks to man abuse@matrix.org on behalf of the | Matrix.org Foundation and chase down the tickets as they | come in. Please ping abuse@matrix.org if we've dropped | stuff. | metroholografix wrote: | A lot of people find Matrix completely unpalatable. Why would | they support it in this way? | | IRC works and has worked for decades. Its minimal, text-only, | no bs, no distractions nature is its greatest asset. Client | support, programmability, and ease of integration too. | | The folks that like Matrix are already using it. The folks that | have stuck with IRC for decades will not abandon it for a | protocol they deem to be inferior. | natural219 wrote: | Trust me, I get that; the main argument is that, in protocol | wars, there's strength in numbers; IRC is a waning protocol, | Matrix is a waxing protocol. I'm not saying people must | change what's working for them already; my only case is that | _if_ what _was_ working for you is now broken (the freenode | network), you have a new opportunity to re-evaluate your | position. That's all. | | You don't even have to go "all in" on all the fancy new | Matrix stuff; just write a wrapper to comply with being a | "homeserver", and continue using the IRC API with no changes. | If not, that's also fine, I'm not that invested in this | personally. | ecmascript wrote: | Seems like the chat just died, I cannot reconnect anymore. | | HN hug of love? | staz wrote: | https://twitter.com/liberachat/status/1395009986921652233 | | > Hi all. The IRC network is currently experiencing technical | difficulties, likely a result of a massive influx of people. | We're working on fixing it. | | all the people migrating from Freenode it seems | [deleted] | snalty wrote: | I think it's all the people jumping ship from freenode rather | than HN. | [deleted] | ecmascript wrote: | Yeah maybe true :) | wchar_t wrote: | I suppose that Freenode will survive the mass exodus going on | right now, but will become something akin to the Sourceforge of | IRC afterwards. | SamBam wrote: | I'm interested in the fact that, given all the shadiness about | ownership etc with Freenode, there is not a single name of a real | person anywhere on the site that I can find. Indeed, there is | only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in | Sweden." | | I don't know enough about Freenode. Is it normal for the staff of | such a project to be secret? (Or, at least, secret if you haven't | been following the previous history of Freenode?) | rwmj wrote: | A year or two ago the Freenode admins were subjected to an | intense and somewhat bizarre campaign against them where | unsubstantiated and false claims about them were spammed into | Freenode channels (also incredibly annoying for those of us | trying to run free software through Freenode channels at the | time). So I can kind of understand that they might want to | remain anonymous. | pmlnr wrote: | Yep. No names, no contact, no impressum, but "trust us, we're | the good ones" - right. Than act like it. | politician wrote: | Trust is built over time. The same complaints exist even if | they provided all of the information requested. "How do we | know these people are really the real people that worked on | freenode?" Etc. | | The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat, | but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a | more complete story will emerge. | dannyw wrote: | That's how the internet worked for decades. | cpach wrote: | I'm not sure I follow. What do you mean by The Internet in | this context...? Organizations such as ICANN and IETF are | not exactly anonymous. | admax88q wrote: | It's not how it works now. | | I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of | freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the | staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat. | | With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make | sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service | is more clearly documented and understood by everyone. | | At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit | they have established should be clearly displayed on the | web page somewhere. | pmlnr wrote: | Yes. Look where it got us: fb, twitter, reddit, etc taking | it all over, because people "trust" them - see ominous zuck | quote. Why? Because ordinary people need faces and names. | So unless libera is aiming for the oldschool nerds, like | us, they need to align with 2021. | politician wrote: | FB requires true names. | cblconfederate wrote: | FBI can fetch the true names thus nicknames became | irrelevant | pmlnr wrote: | That's not the point (edit): the only thing I'm missing | from libera is an impressum. Mentioning a nameless | swedish nonprofit is actually worse in my eyes, than | calling it xyz's server in the basement. | pessimizer wrote: | That is the point. People don't use Facebook because they | like using real names, people use real names on Facebook | because they were forced to in order to stay on Facebook. | | When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require | real names. | icedchai wrote: | It actually doesn't. It requires your name _look_ like a | true name. I know plenty of folks with fake last names on | Facebook. | qu4z-2 wrote: | My understanding is it requires true names and is | unevenly enforced. | icedchai wrote: | If it's unevenly enforced, then it's not "required" in | any practical sense. Nobody I know has ever been kicked | off for a fake but reasonable looking name. Facebook is | not a government authority. If you ask for a picture of | my ID, I can generate a fake one without consequence. | smhenderson wrote: | _So unless libera is aiming for the oldschool nerds, like | us_ | | Isn't that exactly who they're aiming for though? | remram wrote: | Freenode operated this way and failed. | Macha wrote: | Failed how? | | Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but | it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed | solution is basically to do this out the gate. | | Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC | funded chat service with lots of users and a looming | prospect of having to be profitable without losing them. | | Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a | non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of | money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather | used it to set up new events like freenode live. | teachingassist wrote: | You use and buy things from corporations all the time, | without knowing a single name or face behind it. 2021 | hasn't changed that. | GavinMcG wrote: | But those are isolated transactions, and I can return a | product to the store. | | We're talking about networks and communities here. Those | aren't as interchangeable as things we buy. | dannyw wrote: | They're pretty interchangeable: "/topic We have moved to | irc.alternate.server. Join us in #project". | munificent wrote: | _> without knowing a single name or face behind it._ | | That's because we are ensconced in a framework of | corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that | generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it | isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses | happen all the time. | FractalHQ wrote: | Meanwhile Discord is one of the most commonly used | platforms for young people, where everyone is an anime | girl named after their favorite song. I wouldn't be so | sure about your assumption. Facebook is becoming | increasingly known as an uncool boomer thing. | pmlnr wrote: | OK, it looks like nobody understood my point, | fascinating. | | Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are | contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their | community there trust the entity running Discord. | | I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with | that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't | mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity | behind them. | | I was never talking about the community on top of a | platform, but the platform itself. | sdevonoes wrote: | Trust has nothing to do with names, contact page or | impressum. | | The other way around also works (e.g., Facebook has all the | impressum and contact pages you want, but it's the least | trustful tech company out there). | neatze wrote: | Trust is established through interactions (behavior) and not | by; real names, titles, certifications, wealth, and location. | lisper wrote: | > Trust is established ... not by; real names | | That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity | is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the | persona and back to the person behind it. A single person | can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be | trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains | this kind of gaming of the system and so makes | trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish. | | This is not to say that the costs of using real names | outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say | that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of | establishing trust is just wrong. | neatze wrote: | Irrespective of real/fake name, behavior is most critical | factor in trust, furthermore behavior changes, so | interactions is your only information for degree of | trust. Your real name is just label nothing more. | | Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier | to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title, | etc ... | GavinMcG wrote: | It's also established by pointing to one's past behavior to | demonstrate a track record of trustworthiness, of certain | values, etc. If it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg is | leading the charge, here, you'd be unhappy. | neatze wrote: | If new product/service is not lead by Mark Zuckerberg you | should not trust it ether, since you have no track | record, furthermore past performance is not guarantee of | future results. | CaptArmchair wrote: | fwiw: the privacy page states that it's a non-profit under | Swedish Law, mentions the GDPR, sets terms regarding your | personal data which ought to be aligned with the GDPR and | refers to the Swedish Authority for Private Protection if you | want to file a formal complaint. | | It's odd to only get a mail address - policy at libera dot chat | - and no further formal contact information of the non-profit | as a legal entity in Sweden. | | I suppose you could try an inquiry via the Swedish tax office | asking them for a formal statement from the public record. I | don't know any Swedish but I suppose there might be a search | engine which lists public information about non-profits? | | Even so, there are other hints: the footer features a link to a | Github organization where you can easily track development in | the open. Of course, that still doesn't give the project a | clear, identifiable "face" or formal point of contact. | | Other commenters argue "anonymity is how Freenode got big, and | how the Internet used to work and that's perfectly fine since | it fosters trust." | | I think this only holds so much water today. It's not about a | relationship between users of a service which provides the | affordances to hide behind an anonymous handle. This is about | the relationship between users and the operators of a service. | You trust that an operator "won't do harm" when you log onto | their service. | | Such trust is tenuous at best if the decade has demonstrated. | Legal frameworks such as the GDPR and privacy laws exist for | the exact purpose of protecting users, and creating a legal | liability on the part of all too zealous operators of services. | | Moreover, the GDPR framework actively tries to de-incentivize | gathering and storing any personal data which can be tracked to | identifiable individuals without due cause. | | Testing Libera Chat's trustworthiness would be, theoretically, | as easy as sending a formal subject access request under the | GDPR rules to the listed mail address. | | Now, I'm aware that all of this are round about ways of | figuring out whether this service is legit. It would help if | their website just listed formal contact and legal details that | identify the legal entity which can be held liable. | | Then there's Freenode Ltd which is a UK company. Since Brexit, | the GDPR doesn't apply. Given the latest publicly published | updates, I don't feel similarly confident about the credibility | of any statements regarding the safeguarding of personal data, | nor backed by a similarly strong legal framework as far as my | own rights go (I'm not acquainted with British privacy laws). | Macha wrote: | The GDPR has been replaced by the "UK GDPR" with the same | requirements as part of Brexit. Unless the UK government | decides to change it, you have the same protections. | freeone3000 wrote: | What personal data are you actually sending to the IRC | server? They can associate your IP with your Nick, and | that's... It. I suppose chat logs are also your data? And the | results of the port scans, if those are saved? But this seems | honestly less than what the average website visit sends out | euroclear wrote: | It would include your email address if you register with | NickServ. | SamBam wrote: | Associating everything you've ever written with your IP is | a pretty big one, if there was ever any expectation of | anonymity. | nemetroid wrote: | Registering your Swedish non-profit with the authorities is | required for many useful things (e.g. having a bank account), | though technically not mandatory. There are several free | services for querying the registry, e.g. | https://www.allabolag.se/. | | I wasn't able to find Libera Chat there, though it might | simply be the case that the registration has not been | finalized yet. | cpach wrote: | According to The Swedish Tax Agency there are no civil laws | regulating exactly how to form a non-profit organization. | But it's customary to create a "decree" (stadgar) that | declares such things as location ("sate"), purpose, rules | for how to operate the organization, rules for how to elect | the board of directors, etc. Not sure if they have done any | of those things. | | If the organization hasen't created a decree and elected a | board, then it will not count as juridical person. | | _[Edited slightly]_ | piokoch wrote: | The Old Internet way, you knew people by their nicks. The only | thing that mattered was what they are bringing to the table in | terms of valuable input. Sex, race, nationality, education, | believes, age, etc. were irrelevant. | | Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if | not offensive. | TrispusAttucks wrote: | The golden era. When the only identity that mattered was your | username and behavior. | Quarrelsome wrote: | I recently tried to join a discord that was tangentially | relevant to the trans community and the amount of self- | identification they wanted was troublesome to me (region, | age, sexual preference, opinion on pronouns/pronouns, etc). | | EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News | karma scores are fucking cold. | UnpossibleJim wrote: | S'ok. I was asked for my preferred pronouns on an | application (for a job I didn't care too much about, but | the pay was OK) so I put my preferred pronouns as | he/him/dude, which are my actual preferred pronouns. I | was told never apply to the company again. They make | video games... | cout wrote: | My first response to reading this was "dude isn't a | pronoun", but after thinking about it, I realize it is | being used more and more as a pronoun and not just as a | noun. | | I wonder what other words can be used as a pronoun? | hunter2_ wrote: | A name for the male segment of this class of words is | "bronoun," which includes things like bro, man, guy, etc. | | Basically anything you can use in place of a name, so | long as the grammatical usage is namelike. | | "That guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a noun | | "Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can | tell because "he" also works grammatically) | | However, I think these would need to be in the initial | position(s) when slash-delimiting one's pronouns, because | the final position is for a possessive form. That is, | they're analogous to "he" but not analogous to "his" (and | using them like "him" would be a stretch, as far as I can | figure...), which might be what got GP in hot water. | wearywanderer wrote: | > _" Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you | can tell because "he" also works grammatically)_ | | You don't think that's merely people being lazy and | leaving off a word that can be inferred ('That')? This is | something I often do in casual conversation, particularly | vocal conversations: | | "I am wondering what you mean" - 'I' is a pronoun | | "Wondering what you mean" - 'Wondering' is now the | pronoun??? Clearly not. It's just a way that people are | lazy and sloppy with grammar when correct grammar isn't | important. | UnpossibleJim wrote: | It really isn't a pronoun, but goes into the implicit | versus explicit thing. If your pronouns are "He/Him" you | want to be called "Man", implicitly. If I don't say | "Dude", explicitly, how are they to know?... Plus, I've | met several people who chafe at being called "Dude", and | I prefer it TBH. "Hey, dude" or "Dude's got good coding | practices" are perfectly fine by me, but I'm also in my | 40's and it shows =/ | [deleted] | google234123 wrote: | When I first read this it did sound a bit funny - I'm | guessing they thought you were trying to be humorous, | but, like the other reply, I can also totally understand | that you actually enjoy being called dude. | wrycoder wrote: | LOL. Love it. But wouldn't it be dude/the dude/dude's? | api wrote: | Any group like that is going to get a lot of trolls, so | you probably experienced a kind of manual captcha. | Quarrelsome wrote: | sure, its a shame because I really like the content. | google234123 wrote: | You can also enter fake data (for the things that aren't | important: e.g. location), I do this all the time on the | internet. | icedchai wrote: | Is that a problem? Just give them fake information. | Quarrelsome wrote: | it changes how people might act around you. I always | wanted it to only be about the words. | tomjen3 wrote: | I am guessing you are downvoted because a transforum is | arguable one of the very few places where that question | makes sense. | | I would find it deeply wrong if HN were to ask for the | gender of their users, let alone their sexual | preferences, but I would expect the same of a dating | site. | | But I don't disagree with you in general. I also miss the | intimacy a nick could afford you. Somehow you could talk | about deeper things when nobody knew your name. | raehik wrote: | I also think asking for some of those things is absurd | and intrusive. I would feel a little (*not deathly) | uncomfortable baring my soul like that to some anonymous | Discord admins. I'd like to know what others feel/why | this is a downvoteable comment. | iron_ball wrote: | I participate in a Discord that is kind of similar. Not | the same one, because my example has totally optional | pronoun choice. But they have reason to be cautious of | newcomers: before they added an interview/onboarding | step, they were continually brigaded by trolls of various | levels of sincerity. The internet can be a harsh place, | and I understand the desire to create a refuge. | Quarrelsome wrote: | I totally get _why_ its like that, and I'm not upset, its | just unfortunate that this is a chasm of difference | between very early internet culture. | fao_ wrote: | I mean, most spaces have those as roles that you can fill | in, but don't have to. wrt pronoun roles, they are used | for figuring out how to refer to you -- it is after all, | a trans space where appearance and expectation won't | match up with people's preferences, and where people are | tired from the water-drip torture* that is constant | implicit and explicit misgendering. | | * - that is to say, each individual instance (drip) | wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost | constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can | cause a lot of anguish. | Quarrelsome wrote: | In this case they were mandatory. I get that it | represents an issue for that community but I'm merely | describing a schism compared with earlier internet | attitudes and some spaces today. | | I left the community because it just upset me to have to | do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does. | geenew wrote: | That was the ideal, and in my experience, the norm at the | time. | | The Hacker Manifesto said it nicely: | | "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the | switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service | already existing without paying for what could be dirt- | cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you | call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. | We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We | exist without skin color, without nationality, without | religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build | atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to | us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet | we're the criminals. | | Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My | crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, | not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting | you, something that you will never forgive me for. | | I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this | individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're | all alike." | | http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/7/3.txt | echelon wrote: | It was a simpler, more naive time. | | People are too forthcoming on the internet today, with some | divulging almost their entire being to the megacorp spy | machines. It's easy for stalkers, let alone adtech and | three letter agencies, to find and track people. | | I prefer today's tech, but yesterday's freedom, mindset, | and lack of tracking. | Spivak wrote: | The beautiful era where everyone had to either adopt the | persona of being a cis het white western man or be subject | to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. I tried | being a girl openly on the early internet when I was young | and naive but after constant jokes like "how are you using | IRC from the kitchen?" and "tits or gtfo" you just give up | and learn to talk like a guy. | _-david-_ wrote: | > being a cis het white western man or be subject to all | manners of harassment and offensive jokes. | | Believe it or not but cis white western men were and | still are subject to all manners of harassment and | offensive jokes. As a cis white western man myself I | personally have experienced harassment online. | Spivak wrote: | I didn't say they couldn't be. You're doing the thing | where you assume that a implies b means that b implies a. | | "If you did not pass as a cit het white man you would | likely be harassed for it on the early internet." | | is not the same thing as | | "If you were harassed on the early internet then you must | not have passed as a cis het white man." | | During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't | respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in | building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I | didn't use that machine and I also got injured." | tyrust wrote: | That's all fun and cool until you want to hold $handle | accountable for forwarding all your messages to their | favorite state power. | SamBam wrote: | There aren't even nicks, though. | tyrust wrote: | Yeah I think this person is just waxing poetic about | something vaguely related to your original comment. | cblconfederate wrote: | And species (nobody knows i m a dog) | bwindels wrote: | Hackles [1], is that you? | | 1: http://www.hackles.org/ | cblconfederate wrote: | We are Legion | emptyparadise wrote: | I'd trust a dog (or any other furry community member) on | the internet over an international corporation any day of | the week. | andai wrote: | tfw my dog is a member of the furry community | unilynx wrote: | We're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in | the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard | greeting.. | kragen wrote: | No, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would | immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot | of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was | the default. | cout wrote: | I encountered the "a/s/l" question on numerous Undernet | channels when I started using irc. | | We would joke about it in programming channels, but | people really did use it in non-programming channels. | wgjordan wrote: | In my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was | common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on | AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on | technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels. | TimTheTinker wrote: | I don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this | greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM). | wrycoder wrote: | Yeah, I was on irc in the 90's and missed that one. I had | to look it up on urbandictionary, which was entertaining. | unilynx wrote: | There was a time where the 'hackers' where in the | minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was | replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat | solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was | never a real thing in western/northern europe | | Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks | in the 95-98s | novok wrote: | When I got the asl question i found it rude and told them i | don't like answering the question. It often had a sexual / | dating connotation in my mind, which i didn't like. | wearywanderer wrote: | In my experience the "a/s/l" question has only ever come | from people who wanted to have text sex with you, and | outside of those sort of chatrooms was only ever said as an | awkward joke. | jrochkind1 wrote: | And that is _exactly_ what led to the current problem with | freenode, right? | | I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has | it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal | organization or legal rights that let one person who had | enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he | owned it. | | You want that not to happen again, you might want to do | _something_ different. And indeed the announcement | acknowledges that, that 's why there is "a non-profit | association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal | stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a | bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it | will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended). | kodah wrote: | No. Freenode was purchased by an entrepreneur and former Mt | Gox employee supposedly to facilitate a conference called | "Freenode Live". It had nothing to do with use of real | names. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Somehow I think we're not having the same conversation. | It's not that it had to do with use of real names on | freenode. It's that it had to do with no formal legal | structure for freenode (and a formal legal structure | requires real names associated with it). | | The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the | authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they | actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... | they got away with it. | | The comment at the top of this thread was talking about | how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that | sort of thing happening again before investing energy in | this new thing, one would want to know more about the | formal legal structure and who is behind it. | | The "old internet" way is "We're just some people | cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to | know each other's real names." That has plusses and | minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they | have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone | else for personal profit, even though all the people | informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns | out it's hard to stop them. | [deleted] | GavinMcG wrote: | I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those | characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as | male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for | participating online. | sneak wrote: | Indeed, but many other women experienced none of that | because, while it may have been sexist, non-gendered nicks | were assumed homogenous with the group (ie male). | | It really was a lot more about what you brought to the | table than identity. | GavinMcG wrote: | But the other side of that is that potential targets of | harassment can't _bring_ all of their experiences to the | table. Many people who didn 't experience harassment | still had to self-censor to avoid attention. | api wrote: | If you doubt this, create an alt with a woman's name and | try participating in programming, hacking, or gaming | groups. Prepare to be covered in drool, get lectured | condescendingly, and get lots of dick pics. | ggreer wrote: | I have run this experiment in several communities, | including Xbox Live (which is full of annoying | teenagers). My experience wasn't much different from | choosing my normal male-coded nicknames. Instead of | assholes calling me, "fag", they called me "bitch". Also | I got more comments related to sex instead of violence. I | didn't keep track of actual numbers, but the amount of | harassment and trolling I received felt about the same. | | Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The | only area in which women reported significantly worse | harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men | were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. | It really seems like a wash to me.[1] | | 1. | https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online- | haras... | belval wrote: | One of these is not like the other. Programming and | hacking are usually much more respectful groups than | gaming. | | Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people | screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really | limited to women. | | That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a | girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't | play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting | team killed for making callouts. | gsich wrote: | Male until proven female. | falcolas wrote: | Dog until proven otherwise. | | And even then, everyone's still a dog. | KingOfCoders wrote: | I can only speak about my experience and other people have | their experiences, which do not want to invalidate. | | Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) | I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and | #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything | beside Linux and Java. | | Ah the times of Nickbot. | | Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, | everyone was suprised about everyone else. | | (this was some years before the WWW, and before digital | photography etc.) | cout wrote: | I don't doubt that in those days women experienced | harassment online. There was a running joke, "there are no | women on irc", implying that anyone claiming to be female | was actually a male pretending to be female to gain | attention, or even channel ops. What is an IRL female to do | in such a culture? It wouldn't surprise me to learn any of | the people I used to chat with were females pretending to | be male to avoid the drama. | kragen wrote: | This is true, and the expectation of "real names" has made | this enormously worse. If you were "snopes" or "diogenes", | nobody could harass you online for being a woman, because | they didn't know you were a woman. Even a feminine name was | no guarantee that your real-life gender identity was | female. Contrast Fecebutt, which extorts photos of your | government ID from you by cutting you off from your social | network, then publishes your walletnym for every wanker to | see. | | During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for | many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian. | dijit wrote: | I have anecdotes both for and against this from women who | were on the internet before anything that could be | considered a "women in tech" movement existed. | | I can't say from a male perspective. But I think it's not | as black and white as you paint it. | | The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you | didn't try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the | majority of people just didn't really care. | | There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people | are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without | major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up | if you are one of those. But those people would find | another reason anyway, I truly don't believe it's "because" | a person is female. | | So "male passing", on IRC, about technical topics, is | "human passing" in most cases, and when it's not, nobody | seems to really care, or that's what I've been told. | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: | Most people not caring isn't the problem though, because | it doesn't take that many people to constantly harass | someone. | falcolas wrote: | A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the | internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated | differently. | | This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating | yourself is the only way to be treated differently from | everyone else. | | I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed | from that. | duckfang wrote: | Weirdly enough, "Tits or GTFO" was primarily a 4chan-ism. | Everybody was "anonymous", so if someone claimed to be a | woman, she needed to show tits. | | Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any | sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, | and general hate. | ljm wrote: | Is it not apparent in the description that you were also | assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and | balls or GTFO' being a thing. | | The point being that whatever noble intention was behind | this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not | a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a | woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their | own gender out of it, played along with the guys who | would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or | stuck only to conversations where all of that could | remain ambiguous. | thefunnyman wrote: | Rule 29: On the internet men are men, women are also men, | and kids are undercover FBI agents. | duckfang wrote: | When the more puerile culture of The September that Never | Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take | hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what | that place was like and agreed it was a seething | cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were | *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on | the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs. | | Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or | Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever | nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more | feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more | were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the | gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" | (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) | people join for the first time, the old guard of the | internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always | dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly | weren't it. | | It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web | 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real | names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for | "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like | Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of | course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just | as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") | walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name | online. | | Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I | don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, | ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, | etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its | unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those | areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably | male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture | capital and startups. | | (I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as | it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all | the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's | marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional | monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.) | panopticon wrote: | It likely originated there, but I observed it all over | the place. MMOs, IRC, other message boards, etc. From my | experience, it was a common fixture of the late 2000s | internet culture. | elliekelly wrote: | > A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the | internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated | differently. | | This is the problem, isn't it? The women who state (not | "announce" - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I | attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online | and then _dare_ to request they're treated the same as | their peers. They want to be treated _differently_ than | women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon | users. | elliekelly wrote: | > The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you | didn't try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman | the majority of people just didn't really care. | | Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral | username means people "don't really care" you're a woman | because they just assume you're a man. But often the mere | mention of the fact you're a woman, however relevant to | the discussion, is viewed as "constantly talking about" | your gender. | [deleted] | splithalf wrote: | When is it ever not relevant? It's all most humans can | think of, arguably for valid if not good reasons. | zozbot234 wrote: | "Passing as male" isn't really a thing on IRC, or even on | many forums/BBS's. The default is a totally genderfluid | nickname. | jfengel wrote: | The difference is that if you chose to have a male | nickname, or if you otherwise decided to advertise your | masculinity (bragging about your genitalia, talking about | your wife, even hinting at clues like your favorite truck | or beer), there would be no repercussions. | | Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she | wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she | mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by | women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a | job, she would be known as female and harassed. | | Every single woman had to think about that, every single | day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires | a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup | is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but | just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to | everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't. | | Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by | men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. | No, you may not hit on every single person on the | Internet just because you think they are female." They | object, but to women, that's something they've done every | single day of their online lives. | dijit wrote: | I've condensed and repeated the anecdotes of others, | which have been shared with me in this thread, and what I | say now has no reflection on that. | | But: | | > bragging about your genitalia, | | If you're not doing this ironically, then what the fuck | communities are you in? | | > talking about your wife | | Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than | the other examples. People do talk about | spouses/partners. | | > even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer | | Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully | sexist of you to assume not. | GavinMcG wrote: | > Women -definitely- can like these things | | Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if | they _don 't_, or if they like _other_ things, speaking | up about _those_ things isn 't equally easy. | | Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment | explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves | the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap | point with an offhand accusation. | wearywanderer wrote: | In my circles, if you start bragging about your dick, | you'll be asked to prove it or 'stfu'. | [deleted] | GavinMcG wrote: | When it comes to nicknames, sure, but that's not really | the substance of a forum/channel/etc. | Lammy wrote: | It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on | various sites where people use "he" by default to refer | to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when | they're known only by nickname. | zozbot234 wrote: | Sure, but "he" is a default pronoun in English. | frereubu wrote: | That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like | "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer | than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group | of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if | they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture | of men and women. | makomk wrote: | The thing about singular they is that it only really | became "perfectly good usage for longer than people | think" within the last few years, _well_ after the heyday | of Usenet. I don 't think it was even a major contender | for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun | before then. | M2Ys4U wrote: | TIL Usenet was in use in the 14th century. | | What newsgroups did Chaucer post to? | chimeracoder wrote: | > The thing about singular they is that it only really | became "perfectly good usage for longer than people | think" within the last few years, well after the heyday | of Usenet. | | The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of | style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th | century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender | Macha wrote: | > In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender- | neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in | manuals of style and school textbooks until around the | 1960s | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender | | (Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/2012053002 | 4829/http://www.nytime...) | | Of course: | | > More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, | and singular they is becoming the dominant form | | But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody | flips a switch and everyone across the world updates | their habits, so it takes time. | | While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in | school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he | or she" being the taught solution for a single person of | unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is | going out of favour. | jiofih wrote: | It is in the Bible at least? There a million verses with | "He who does not xxx... is" that are intended to be | gender neutral. | gbear605 wrote: | That depends on your translation - some translations will | translate those to "They who do not". Many of the ones | who translate it as "he" are maintaining the Hebrew lack | of gender neutrality, but that's arbitrary. If the | ancient Israelites spoke Finnish instead, the sentences | would be gender neutral. | jannes wrote: | The bible wasn't written in English. What exactly is your | point? | Lammy wrote: | For people who pass as male online, yeah. It makes me | feel out of place any time it's happened to me. | emilfihlman wrote: | That's your internalised view of the world. It's not "male | passing", it's "human passing". | shadowgovt wrote: | These are not equivalent. | | The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it | turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When | someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't | news; tied to a woman, it was. | okprod wrote: | Very different in 90s AOL. "a/s/l" was the norm and everyone | had a profile | owlbynight wrote: | Yeah, I miss it a lot. | runjake wrote: | I don't know what IRC you were using, but it isn't the IRC I | knew. | | I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by | "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry) | and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted | with. | | Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike | up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask | for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had | established enough "rapport" to do so. | blibble wrote: | after the disgusting harassment their staff received a few | years back I can understand not wanting their realnames | anywhere | | ("freenodegate") | cheph wrote: | I give it 2 years max until they sell libera.chat to the next | "totally trustworthy guy who gave them his word" for a pack | of magic beans. | | Count me out of this scam. | FDSGSG wrote: | What about all the children harmed by the freenodegate | conspirators? | mst wrote: | That was a fun year. | QuinnyPig wrote: | No it wasn't. | sdevonoes wrote: | If I were the author of this project I wouldn't like to share | my name just like that. I don't know, perhaps it's just me, but | what's wrong with this? | smarx007 wrote: | How do you expect me to accept a privacy policy of your | website if two parties are not identified? Every | legal(-looking) document begins by identifying the parties | (not necessarily names, though a quick lookup on | https://www.allabolag.se will get you the names of the | directors). Also, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-37-gdpr/, p. 7 | requires DPO to be identified. | boomboomsubban wrote: | P 7 says they need to publish the contact details, which | presumably "You may also exercise your rights by contacting | policy@libera.chat" fufills. | | Also, their privacy policy does begin by listing one of the | parties as the Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat. | smarx007 wrote: | > which presumably "You may also exercise your rights by | contacting policy@libera.chat" fufills. | | I guess you are right. | | > Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat | | Which could not be found in the national registry. | Compare to https://www.kth.se/en/om/kontakt/kontakt- | kth-1.1947 which promptly resolves to | https://www.allabolag.se/2021003054/kungliga-tekniska- | hogsko... | Thorentis wrote: | How is this better than Matrix? Freenode had posterity going for | it. What does a brand new IRC network in 2021 have to offer than | Matrix does not? | staz wrote: | it easier to change what server you connect to in your client, | especially if all the channels you connect to move over, than | to adopt a new protocol/client/ etc.. | joepie91_ wrote: | I'm a fan of Matrix as a project, but I don't think that "the | house is on fire, we must evacuate" is the correct moment to | tell people to move to a different messaging protocol and | ecosystem entirely. That's a big change for a community. | rockdoe wrote: | Talking about Matrix...matrix.org had an IRC bridge to the | Freenode network. Is there any up for libera.chat? | | (The bridge is unreliable, but still very handy to stay | connected to old friends) | fundamental wrote: | I don't think one is setup currently, though based upon some | of the IRC channels I'm in it sounds like one is getting | actively worked on. | jordemort wrote: | Hoping there's one soon, the only way I connect to IRC | these days is through a Matrix bridge and I don't want to | run one myself :) | Apotheos wrote: | Do you have your own server? How hard was it to set up? | prepend wrote: | I think protocols are better than systems. Since matrix isn't | an RFC (yet?), I think there's still value in using an open | protocol over a particular system or project. | | I think an open source project is more scalable and reusable | than a proprietary one, but if the goal is long term | communication among diverse users, then using a protocol is | good. | SamWhited wrote: | This is one of the big issues with Matrix that doesn't get | talked about enough: it's not managed by a real standards | body. It was previously run by a company who kept trying to | monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split | off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how to | monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it). I'm not | against the devs being able to pay themselves, that's great, | but the specs themselves shouldn't be run that way. Existing | standards bodies have more experience, more legal protections | for the users, and are just generally better at developing | standards. | Arathorn wrote: | > It was previously run by a company who kept trying to | monetize the IP, then it was run by a few people who split | off that company (and still kept trying to figure out how | to monetize it and pay themselves a wage with it). | | This is just false. Speaking as co-founder and project lead | for Matrix, it's been the same team all along since we | began in 2013. We were incubated until 2017 in a company | which _never_ tried to monetize the protocol, and then we | span out to set up Element (formerly New Vector) where we | keep the lights on by selling Matrix hosting and support | /consulting. | | At the same time we set up The Matrix.org Foundation as a | non-profit neutral standards body, with an independent | board where the original founders are deliberately in the | minority - and when we set it up, half of the spec core | team were independent of Element too. (This changed as | folks on the team opted to join Element so they could work | on Matrix fulltime). | | Rather than spreading FUD about Matrix, why not collaborate | and work together? Or at least spend the energy on | improving XMPP rather than negging us... | vlmutolo wrote: | This topic seems to come up a lot, and I didn't know | that, for example, the Matrix founders are in the | minority on the Matrix Foundation board. | | Is there a place with this history or the governance | structure that people can link to the next time this | comes up? | Arathorn wrote: | https://matrix.org/foundation is intended to be the | single source of truth for this, and has bios of the | foundation board members (or Guardians, as we call | ourselves as 'board members' or 'directors' sounds boring | :) | SamWhited wrote: | I am not advocating for XMPP, nor am I nagging you. You | showed up to advocate Matrix on a thread about IRC, stop | accusing me of things and collaborate yourself instead of | reinventing the wheel in terms of specs and in terms of | standards bodies. Everything I said about the company and | foundation is accurate as far as I can tell. I am very | glad there is a foundation, but it's still not okay: | submit to an existing standards body and stop advertising | on threads about IRC. | webmaven wrote: | Negging != Nagging | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negging | SamWhited wrote: | Oops; either way, I was doing neither. They asked, I | answered, then they had a hissy fit because it turns out | they're apparently the CEO trying to score some users. | Let's just end this line of discussion and keep it | related to IRC and stop talking about Matrix. | natural219 wrote: | What are you even talking about lol | SamWhited wrote: | What part confused you? If I can clarify I will. | natural219 wrote: | You just seem to be making many negative claims with | little substance behind them. | SamWhited wrote: | I don't understand what you want; it's all true as far as | I can tell, do you want a detailed technical breakdown of | the protocol in an HN thread? This doesn't seem to be the | place but the graph protocol mechanisms are pretty easily | verified from their spec | callahad wrote: | > _Existing standards bodies [...] are just generally | better at developing standards._ | | Speaking in a strictly personal capacity, I don't think | that point can be taken for granted. The W3C's missteps | with HTML5, and WHATWG's success, is a particularly notable | failing of a dedicated standards body. The Rust programming | language is also developed and codified outside of a | traditional standards organization. | SamWhited wrote: | That's fair; I don't mean to suggest that all standards | bodies are perfect all the time, or that they've never | made mistakes :) just that it's better than making up a | foundation spinoff from a company that doesn't have any | experience and will re-invent the wheel yet again instead | of submitting the standard to one of the existing | standards bodies. | joepie91_ wrote: | Matrix as a protocol is still in active development. | Unlike "low-level" protocols such as HTTP, the Matrix | protocol is much closer to end-user experience and so it | must be able to move relatively quickly to remain | competitive with proprietary systems. This generally does | not fit into the process of standards bodies like the | IETF very well. | | There's a reason why eg. the WHATWG exists, basically. | SamWhited wrote: | Sure, it doesn't have to be the IETF, that was just an | example. But even they tend to do this well (by eg. | spinning off a smaller more agile standards body to keep | up with building extensions more rapidly). | | Also, rapid development has its own set of problems as | we've seen with XMPP (where no two clients support the | same set of features because new ones are being developed | to keep up with various proprietary things all the time). | | Anyways, point is, don't reinvent the wheel, I'm sure | _one of_ the standard bodies could have been a good fit | if we needed this at all, but Matrix definitely isn 't a | good fit for this Freenode replacement and this is one of | the reasons why (the other is that Freenode works just | fine and the point is that this is a drop in | replacement). | fastball wrote: | > real standards body | | Who decides when a standards body is real? | SamWhited wrote: | It just happens over many years and many successfully | published and adopted standards. I don't have a good | definition for you (although that's a really interesting | thing to think about, maybe it's worth writing about) but | I suspect most people know them when they see them. | anoncake wrote: | So only "standards bodies" should create standards, and | you have to create standards to become one? Then | standards bodies cannot come into being and therefore | don't exist. | SamWhited wrote: | You're making giant leaps from what I said. I didn't say | it's an absolute truth forever and always throughout the | universe that you can't create new standards bodies. I | said this was a bad place to do it. | pferde wrote: | Well, if this comment is not a textbook example of FUD, I | don't know what is. | roblabla wrote: | Matrix is an open protocol[0]. It's not managed by the IETF, | but it has an open process for submitting changes. See the | Spec Change Proposal instructions[1]. | | [0]: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/ | | [1]: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals/ | prepend wrote: | I read a bit about that and I think it's positive, but a | single company controlling a standard and considering | changes is not the same as a protocol. | roblabla wrote: | https://matrix.org/foundation/ at the bottom of this | page, you'll find the people who are actually in charge | with accepting protocol changes (the Spec Core Team). | It's true that most are part of New Vector, the for- | profit company behind Element and Matrix, but Alexey | Rusakov is not as far as I could tell. So there is at | least one non-New Vector voice. | | It honestly feels pretty likely that this is just a | maturity thing - as more products are built around | Matrix, the Spec Core team will likely become more | diverse. | joepie91_ wrote: | As I understand it, there's actually an explicit desire | for more non-NV people to become involved with the SCT. | There just aren't very many other organizations to fund | it yet - SCT members need to eat too. | Arathorn wrote: | The situation here is that when we set up the SCT we | deliberately picked a 50/50 mix of core Matrix team and | community members. What we didn't anticipate is that the | community members then were sufficiently sucked into | Matrix that they were prepared to work on it fulltime, | and a bunch joined Element as the only viable way to do | so. Given the team is functioning pretty well and we're | improving Matrix, it feels nuts to penalise people based | on who they work for, hence the current blend. | remram wrote: | That process seems to be "our company will decide what we | want to do with our proposal" | nivenkos wrote: | Isn't that pretty much always the case though? A standard | is only as good as it's most popular implementation. | Arathorn wrote: | yup, much as the W3C and IETF "companies" decide what | they want to do with proposals to their standards bodies. | The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit foundation too. | Boulth6 wrote: | I don't know why but comparing Matrix.org Foundation with | standardization organizations such as IETF seems just not | right. Maybe it would be more correct to compare | Matrix.org with XMPP Software Foundation? | SamWhited wrote: | XMPP is actually managed by the IETF. The XSF just | develops extensions to the protocol (but it's not the | official steward of XMPP, confusing as the name is) | Arathorn wrote: | I'd genuinely be interested to know what the difference | is between something like IETF / IEEE / ITU / W3C and a | non-profit which was created as a standards body for a | specific standard (e.g. Matrix.org Foundation or XSF). Is | it just that you're recognised as a peer by the other | long-established standards bodies? Or is there a | standards-body-for-standards-bodies somewhere? | freeone3000 wrote: | I mean, yes? The IETF has additional cachet as having | created the internet. ITU and IEEE are international orgs | relied upon not only by companies, but by governments. | The W3C isn't as important as it once was, because people | stopped listening to them (WHATWG is the new org). But I | would trust the IEEE and IETF like I would the ISO, and | Matrix.org as far as I would trust Microsoft. | Arathorn wrote: | > But I would trust [...] Matrix.org as far as I would | trust Microsoft. | | Ouch. Did you read https://matrix.org/foundation or | https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix- | doc/blob/matthew/msc177...? | | I'd agree that skepticism was warranted if we hadn't | split out the Foundation and the protocol was de facto | controlled by Element. But instead we made damn sure to | create the Foundation independently and frankly protect | it from being sabotaged by Element or any other | commercial entity building on Matrix. To suggest | otherwise is pretty insulting to the other | Guardians/Directors whose only role is literally to | oversee and ensure that the protocol isn't sabotaged by | commercial entities. | | This is _very_ different from Microsoft 's model. | roblabla wrote: | I for one do not trust the ISO at all. They are a profit- | seeking organization with an opaque standardizing | process. That the ISO9660 standard (you might know it as | the .iso file format) from 1988 is still locked behind a | 140chf payment is a disgrace. And that won't even give | you the full standard, because ISO loves doing this thing | where a standard will reference 5 others, which | themselves reference 5 others, etc... | | IETF is one of the best standardizing organizations out | there, I'll certainly give you that. They have fairly | transparent process, and a really good track record when | it comes to creating robust protocols. | | Thing is, I don't see why Matrix.org would have any more | or less "cachet" than WHATWG, or Khronos Group. In the | end, the identity of the standardizing org doesn't really | matter too much. What matters is that the incentives of | the standardizing org are aligned with those of the | community. | ognarb wrote: | Not all the reviewer are from the Element company. | rdpintqogeogsaa wrote: | To be fair, IRC hasn't had an accurate RFC in decades. | https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ is the closest to accurate | client<->server protocol documentation, but is fully outside | the IETF process. | delfinom wrote: | The ability to google for it and not just end up with 40000000 | pages of movie results? | viraptor wrote: | I checked. "Matrix chat" does not have a single movie | reference in the first 3 pages of results. It's really not a | problem. | Biganon wrote: | If your search engine thinks you speak French, you might | get results about that scene in the movie with the glitchy | cat... | phaer wrote: | Wasn't there always the the argument of bridges whenever people | tried to convince others to switch to Matrix? | | IMO it doesn't need to be "better", there are different | requirements and preferences among users and between Matrix, | IRC and Jabber, each of those ecosystems got their own set of | issues. | rataata_jr wrote: | Can you use Matrix from Emacs? | mouldysammich wrote: | https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el there is this | medstrom wrote: | There is also weechat.el, and weechat has a matrix plugin. | SamWhited wrote: | I'm not really a fan of IRC (a federated network where some OSS | projects were on their own servers or different ones would have | limited the blast radius of a hostile takeover of one server | like this), but Matrix is bloated and slow and the protocol | makes no sense for chat (though it may have other | applications); it's not a great fit for a large network with | lots of people who may or may not have modern hardware. Not to | mention that the servers would take a lot more resources to run | on Matrix (assuming it eventually gets roughly the same size as | Freenode was). | Arathorn wrote: | Wow, that's a lot of negativity. You forgot to disclose your | XMPP/XSF affiliation, btw. | | Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M | folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or | indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts | as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode. | | Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated, | but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's | Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining | memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo). | Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are | positively skinny. | packetlost wrote: | I've tried Matrix multiple times, and each time have been | turned off by the broken and/or slow clients, both on | mobile and desktop. No thanks. | ameminator wrote: | Speaking of disclosure, aren't you the CEO of Matrix? | Arathorn wrote: | I'm the project lead of Matrix (as it says in my HN bio). | (I'm also ceo/cto of Element, but that's less relevant). | remram wrote: | Less relevant? You are the CEO of a company which sells | Element Home, a product based on Matrix... and you accuse | others of not disclosing properly? | gojomo wrote: | An entry in the HN bio should be considered sufficient | disclosure. | squeaky-clean wrote: | I disagree, I don't click the bio link for every comment | I read. I'd have never known they were the project lead | if another commenter didn't call them out on it. | 40four wrote: | Sorry, but I agree with @gojomo. Making it public in your | bio that you are afilliated with a project, is very | sufficient disclosure in my opinion. | | No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you | read, but conversely we shouldn't expect him to preface | every single one of his comments with "Hey guys, I'm the | project lead of Matrix." | | Arathorn is very active in comments, and it's well known | to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix. | gojomo wrote: | You may want to make clicking through a habit when | commercial & project interests may be involved. | | HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such | disclosures all the time - but making them available in | bios is practical. | | You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts | may exist whenever there's no bio info at all - as with | your user page. | | Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their | affiliations declared for when they're flacking their | company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net | upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be | cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but | things to think about. | judge2020 wrote: | Clicking through to everyone's profile is only | occasionally useful and an impractical suggestion. | gojomo wrote: | When a commenter takes strong stands on the relative | merits of projects or commercial products, and there's a | whiff of involved partisanship, a clickthrough is pretty | easy & wise. | | And, it often has the added benefit of more useful | credibility context than just revealing blatant | conflicts. | | It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for | every comment, "how much involvement in these particular | topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on | topics for which the commenter often comments, or | multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion | - where such a standard would be onerous for both the | author, _and_ the readers. | | Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're | covered for comments related to those affiliations, as | it's then easy to check for anyone observing any | partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading | with redundant disclosure-noise. | fwip wrote: | They don't need to add the disclosures all the time - | they've got a lot of posts that aren't about Matrix. | | But bringing up that you're the project lead of the | project your discussing seems like an obvious step. | remram wrote: | Considered sufficient by who? I sure don't, and this is | not a site rule either. | gojomo wrote: | A "...by reasonable readers" can be assumed. | | If you want scrupulous disclosure of relevant | affiliations inline in every single comment where they | could apply, I think you're in the wrong place. | | As you note, it's not a site guideline. As I've noted in | a sibling thread, it wouldn't fit the minimalist HN | presentation, and would place an onerous burden on both | writers & readers. | | It'd also especially encumber people with deep personal | knoweldge and interest in some topics, if every related | post required boilerplate "I'm employed by X"/etc | inserts. | | But putting it in the bio for the curious/suspicious is a | very honorable thing to do! | SamWhited wrote: | You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP. | Also I have no real affiliation with the XSF except being a | volunteer and maintaining a library and having written a | few specs (in the past I have had more strong affiliations, | but never any financial considerations or anything that I'd | need to disclose, I have just volunteered more in the past | than I do now) | [deleted] | kbenson wrote: | > You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for | XMPP. | | Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like | saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose | their affiliation when advocating against renewable | energy sources. | | It's not about whether you are advocating for or against | something specifically, it's about whether you have a | vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably | affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how | you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious, | nobody can be completely impartial). | | To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should | have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't | think the reason stated for not doing so is really | evidence either way. | SamWhited wrote: | I was arguing that it makes no sense to use Matrix for | this and they should continue using IRC, but yes, I have | written some XMPP related specs in the past. But fair | enough, consider this my belated disclosure. | [deleted] | mike-cardwell wrote: | "Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow" | | The protocol may not be, but in practice, the servers and | clients that nearly everyone uses sure as hell are. | | I run a synapse server for half a dozen people on a | reasonably beefy box and it sure feels that way when I'm | using it on a daily basis. | 40four wrote: | Really? I run Synapse for a half a dozen people, on an | EC2 Ubuntu server with 2GB memory and it works great for | me! | mike-cardwell wrote: | Yes. 8GB and 4 Xeon cores here. | Arathorn wrote: | Are your users in loads of massive federated rooms? | mike-cardwell wrote: | No. they pretty much only use it to talk to each other. | Until their clients start randomly complaining about | encryption keys and they no longer can. | Arathorn wrote: | This sounds really weird. What was the perf problem you | were seeing? (aside from whatever has gone wrong with | encryption failures) For context, message sending latency | should be measured in tens of milliseconds, at worst, | unless the server is completely overloaded with | federation traffic. | jrwr wrote: | Overall, I would pick XMPP over Matrix at this point. it is | rather bloated and the clients are a little bit obtuse for | newbies. I do wonder what the DAU for Matrix is at this | point. as I suspect that 32 Million number might be a | little overstated. | Arathorn wrote: | frankly, as long as folks are communicating via open | standards rather than being locked into some vendor silo | then they should use whatever protocol works best for | them - XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these | days. | | Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around | 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major | underestimate given other stats which suggest only about | 30% of public servers enable phone-home. | zaik wrote: | > XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days | | Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption? | Arathorn wrote: | Yup, OMEMO and Olm are bit compatible. In fact XEP-0384 | went through a phase of recommending Olm as the | implementation to use (grep | https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html for Olm). | | (Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement | E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the | Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa) | benschulz wrote: | > You forgot to disclose your [...] affiliation, btw. | | Um.. :D | quaintdev wrote: | Psychological projection | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection | est31 wrote: | The implementations might be bloated (js heavy, etc), and the | non bloated implementations written in C++ or Rust or so | don't have the full feature set yet, but is it really the | protocol to blame? | | In which way does the protocol make no sense for chat? IRC is | extremely complicated as well and a giant pile of hacks. | SamWhited wrote: | For clients maybe not, but for servers the protocol itself | is to blame, yes. A giant distributed graph database where | everything has to be synced constantly means you use a ton | of memory. IRC is definitely complicated, and arguably a | pile of hacks, but an event based system (more or less) | makes a lot more sense for chat where you want realtime | communication (more or less), not to wait while you sync | nodes in the graph to every place that wants them. | joepie91_ wrote: | This makes no sense. Propagating a bunch of messages | doesn't suddenly use a ton of memory just because you're | organizing them as a graph rather than a linear pubsub- | style stream. | SamWhited wrote: | Sorry, it was a bad explanation. The point is that you | have to keep a lot of past state in memory for future | messages to make sense and sync properly, unlike an event | based system where you (more or less) only need to | perform some action when you get an event then forget | about it. This is an IRC thread though, sorry I got | sucked in but let's not let the Matrix CEO derail it and | try to score users. The whole point is is that it didn't | make sense for them to switch to matrix because it uses | more resources than most IRC servers and because they are | trying to be a drop in replacement, not make users sign | up for new things. | joepie91_ wrote: | You don't have to keep that much state in memory at all, | actually. I'm not sure why you think that you do. | | Most of the state resolution (eg. the auth chain) | involves calculations of which you can cache the result | without needing to care about the inputs beyond that - at | least, unless you need to recalculate them once later if | delayed events come in. | | Ultimately, the performance problems that Synapse has are | problems with Synapse's implementation choices | (especially around the database schema), not with the | protocol nor with the state resolution algorithm. | Dobbs wrote: | > posterity | | This is what it has going for it. It is meant to be a drop- | in(ish) replacement for freenode. All the same clients, all the | same protocols, all the same channels (in theory). | cheph wrote: | > It is meant to be a drop-in(ish) replacement for freenode | | A drop in replacement for a place that was run into the | ground by the people who now will run the drop in | replacement. | | Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. | | If the sarcasm is missed, there is nothing at all funny about | this abomination. I would much rather trust Andrew Lee than | this bunch. | dddw wrote: | Anyone noticed their twitter handle @liberachat is tempbanned? | orliesaurus wrote: | Well I joined so I guess I might see you on #libera, #stripe or | ##orliesaurus | techrat wrote: | https://www.kline.sh/ | | Statement from the ex-Freenode Staff is now official. | spike021 wrote: | It's too bad they couldn't export the nick db from Freenode and | do some kind of auth to allow people to keep their identities. | Biganon wrote: | And in addition to nicks, all the channels and who is their | Founder (at least), or even all users with special roles | harikb wrote: | Yeah, this is the biggest issue I see. I am guessing at least a | few will lose their well-known-ids to someone else. | tannhauser23 wrote: | The owner of Freenode might have a problem with that. | eatbitseveryday wrote: | The word "Libera" definitely initially speaks like "Liberia" the | West African country. I wonder if one would mistakenly think this | was African chat. | superkuh wrote: | First a pandemic and now my online home of the last 20 years | being torn apart. This is really upsetting. The people of | freenode are something special. I really hope the community can | manage the switch without loosing too much of everything. Already | the channel registration on libera is throwing established | communities into chaos. | | I really hate that corporate shell game bullshit and attempts at | monetization are being made by a dude that professes to love IRC. | I wish andrew could acknowledge the hurt he is causing but it | seems like saving face matters more to him at this point. | drenvuk wrote: | it will settle. Just keep trying, we'll get back together. | hashkb wrote: | > seems like saving face matters more | | This is sadly always the case. For everything. We'd rather let | people die (e.g. Challenger) than admit any fault or delay to | fix a problem. | ilaksh wrote: | If he has caused that much of a problem, then just move on. | Block him, stop mentioning him by name, and forget about it. | For the open source community, he no longer exists. | | I mean I feel like changing the domain name is less of a | problem than the one all of the 4000 people named Andrew Lee | who are not that guy now have. It's a lot harder to change a | legal name. So they will have to live with his bad reputation | potentially rubbing off on them. But luckily online most people | use aliases so that should mitigate it somewhat. | | Libera.chat is a more modern name anyway. | na85 wrote: | Libera.chat is actually an awful name, but I still embrace | the change and have already bid Freenode a permanent | farewell. | estaseuropano wrote: | That is a subjective opinion, not objective fact. I think | it rolls nicely. | fairity wrote: | It is both harder to spell and pronounce than freenode, | and objectively worse, by those measures. | outworlder wrote: | Is it hard to pronounce by whom? English speakers? I | promise you any speaker of a latin-derived language will | have no problems whatsoever. | geppetto wrote: | Well "libera" means free in Italian so it makes sense to | me. There are also other projects with sound the same such | as libre (spanish I guess) office. I like it. But I'm | biased being from Italy. | flyinghamster wrote: | More to the point, .chat is one of those latecomer TLDs | that is thoroughly abused by spammers. If they send email | and they want it delivered, they're going to have a great | time with that, unless they have a .net or something they | can use. | Arnavion wrote: | >If they send email and they want it delivered, they're | going to have a great time with that, | | Your sass is unnecessary. Their nickserv registration | email was delivered to gmail just fine. | thaumaturgy wrote: | Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An | unsettling number of people now seem to be under the | impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all | email is Gmail and Gmail is all email. | | Even if Gmail is currently delivering the messages (for | now...), other service providers have to manage spam in | their own way, and TLDs are sometimes a really strong | signal for message reputation. For example, 99% of email | traffic from .info addresses is spam, and the other 1% is | mostly spam too. | outworlder wrote: | We have advanced a lot since the age of spamassassin. | They will be fine. | | My nickserv registration worked fine btw. | unixhero wrote: | Hosting an irc Network is more work than you might think. | Just a new domain name and a VPS with a service running on it | might not be enough. | a1369209993 wrote: | Supposedly[0] all the servers and other network | infrastructure are intact, and it's solely the domain names | (freenode.{org,net,com}) that were compromised. Grain of | salt, obviously, but they have at least _claimed_ there isn | 't a problem there. | | 0: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba01 | 8af4... | tinus_hn wrote: | So what happened to the original service running on | freenode.net? Is it down now? | Arnavion wrote: | Nothing. It's still up. | tamrix wrote: | Freenode has been dead for years lol. No where near the same | level of activity it used to have. | deelowe wrote: | If you've been on for 20 years, you'll remember they last time | this happened. It'll sort itself out. | dang wrote: | Looks like the relevant previous threads are: | | _Leaving Freenode for a new network_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440 - May 2021 (253 | comments) | | _Freenode resignation is official, not a draft_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926 - May 2021 (10 | comments) | | _The Freenode resignation FAQ, or: "what the fuck is going on?"_ | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169301 - May 2021 (8 | comments) | | _I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338 - May 2021 (262 | comments) | wrycoder wrote: | Out of curiosity, why did HN bury that last one, with 555 | points and 262 comments, eight pages down within twelve hours? | Freenode and irc are of considerable interest to the hacker | community. | eklitzke wrote: | Did you read the first comment in the thread? It pointed to a | draft announcement that was not intended for public release. | wrycoder wrote: | Yes, it was an unintentional leak. That was obvious. | | What was more interesting - as is usually the case - was | the HN discussion, from which I learned a lot. | floatingatoll wrote: | When something that isn't final or certain reaches the FP | (such as rumors, predictions, or leaked drafts), the mods | will often quash the post for being such, even when for | example it's an Apple rumors post with hundreds of | comments. I've seen occasional exceptions to this, | primarily when it's lawmaking or RFC-type work, as those | drafts are quite often newsworthy. A leaked FYIQ draft | from an IRC admin wouldn't have registered to me as | newsworthy, not until it was published, so I would have | made the same decision the mods did. | ben0x539 wrote: | Seems tricky. Surely the 262 comments were intended to be | public. | aeturnum wrote: | I mean, clearly they are public since we are all looking | at them. | | I think this is a good reaction to accidentally | publishing information that was intended to be private. | Nothing is deleted, but you stop telling new people about | it. People who already know can keep reading and talking. | tootie wrote: | Aside from not really knowing what Freenode is/was (a bunch of | IRC servers?) none of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee | is actually doing that is so objectionable. | mjw1007 wrote: | I have no special knowledge, but I think it goes roughly like | this: | | - a few years ago, the previous head-of-staff ('christel') | became an employee of Andrew Lee's company | | - sometime last year they left the company and also stopped | being active as a staff member | | - the rest of the staff elected a new head ('tomaw') | | - Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's successor | (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of successor) | | So I think it isn't so much about anything Lee has done, so | much as the fact that he's no longer taking a hands-off role, | as (the staff apparently think) he promised. | | Also perhaps that his claim to be in a position to take | charge is based more on his ability to pay for lawyers than a | solid legal foundation (it's clear that he bought something, | but not so clear what, and not clear that it was the seller's | to sell). | | I think the underlying problem is that freenode's previous | parent organisation was dissolved in 2013, apparently without | setting up an official successor. | | https://web.archive.org/web/20130322063238/http://blog.freen. | .. | ryanlol wrote: | > - Andrew Lee didn't recognise tomaw as christel's | successor (and maybe tried to appoint his own choice of | successor) | | Is this really correct? As far as I understand tomaw tried | to claw back freenode assets from rasengan which initiated | this whole mess. | tootie wrote: | Seems he hasn't done much of anything and it's more that he | rubbed everyone the wrong way. And is being opaque in his | decision-making to the point that the volunteers believe | he's being dishonest. I get it, but it still seems like an | overreaction. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | "Asserting control." Basically the old admins are having a | conniption fit because they don't get to do whatever they | want. | nolok wrote: | Freenode was a very popular (for its target) irc server used | by a lot of open source projects and communities over | decades. | | Freenode was managed by volunteers without any official | organisation. A couple years ago, the person that the | volunteers considered their "head" informally made a UK | company that would own at least the name and domain name, | merely out of a wish to have some legal structure instead of | random staff users owning random parts of it. How much of it | is owned by the company is very vague, staff are not on | contract, servers are loaned without any paper signed by | third parties, ... | | Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew Lee's | company, who made the promise to the staff to not involve | himself. Then that head pushed for profits ads on the | website, with no warning nor explanation, and with the | profits going to said company. Staff complained a lot, head | is removed from the freenode staff and then removed from the | board of the company she had sold. | | Conflict of management erupts, and was justified freenode | having no clear admin structure. But Lee comes out of it | acting as if he was the boss and owner of the entire | platforms, ask that servers and users data gets transferred | to him. When staff rebels and refuse that, he "removes them", | which ends up with the hilarious moment of him asking them to | de-op themselves (remove their admin status) which he can't | do himself since he doesn't even have the authority. On | several occasion he claims that "the board of freenode voted | to have you removed", while he means the board of his private | company freenode ltd (which the staff have no relation of any | kind with), and he is the only member of said board. | | Most of staff agrees about a need for a proper structure, but | refuse to see everything transferred to an opaque and for | profit company. Lee argue that's it's the only solutions. | Several head of major communities or projects hosted on | freenode make the suggestion of transferring the control and | data to an official not for profit like the FSF and Lee and | staff being given the lead in the interim to a proper | governance. | | Lee reacts by trying to "bribe" some of them with admin | powers and/or financial sponsorship for their project if they | side with him, which goes terribly wrong, and them saying | "Now I will never have anything to do with Freenode under Lee | anymore". | | That's a summary of the event as understood by me. It seems | the governance issue was real, but it also seems one side is | saying "it should be owned by a non profit with clear | governance and clear rules for data protection" and the other | side, Lee, is saying "all the data and admin privileges | should be given to my for profit that doesn't report to | anyone else than me". | | Frankly, while there is gray on both side, his action made it | pretty clear that I wouldn't want any of my data in his | hands. | gpvos wrote: | Putting adverts on the website, apparently. Some projects | just fiercely want to stay noncommercial, so they will object | at this. I am reminded of a comment from the time when | Wikipedia was trying to figure out how to cover their costs: | _The bigger danger isn 't advertisers manipulating content, | but that people will no longer see Wikipedia as theirs, they | will see it as yet another place that corporations bombard | them with adverts._ -- Sid | http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2007/01/02/wikipedia- | advertisin... | fairity wrote: | > Putting adverts on the website, apparently. | | Where is this motive made apparent? | asix66 wrote: | Interestingly, at the bottom of freenode's website [0] is a | link to a non-comercial CC license [1]. So not sure how | anyone could "sell" freenode. At the top of the site is a | link (not given in this post) to a commercial product, so | again, not sure how they can do that given the CC license. | That said, I am no legal expert. | | [0] https://freenode.net/ [1] | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ | crdrost wrote: | Yes. Freenode was the largest public IRC relay network, | something like 30 servers, 80k+ users, 40k+ channels, | originally directed to open source software but e.g. I would | mostly hang out on ##math and ##physics and help students out | with problems. This is not a "back in the day" situation, | like, it continues to be extremely popular as far as non-Web | non-Email internet usage goes. | | As for the situation, if I understand correctly: | | - Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain | names without telling the community of maintainers who | actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers | running. | | - The maintainers perceived the company that now held the | domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the | company but it looked like its corporate filing status was | out-of-date or something. | | - In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain | names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company | had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name" | (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made | references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks | which documented the transfer, and other such things... there | was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing | "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not | appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean | our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is | costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain | that the main burden is on you rather than on us?" | | - And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer | of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and | having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came | across as a domineering outsider. | | For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically | decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate | one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on | over to the new domain. | pmlnr wrote: | I love how everyone skips the part that freenode's | democratically elected former leader was the one who simply | sold something they shouldn't have been able to - blame | should first be directed at them. | lapinot wrote: | Possession of stolen good is equally punishable as | theft.. | ryanlol wrote: | >you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get | paid for is costing you millions? how?? | | Sounds like you forgot about the very expensive conference | freenode staff organized with rasengans money | fairity wrote: | > None of that really makes clear what Andrew Lee is actually | doing that is so objectionable. | | I second this sentiment. Can anyone summarize objectional | actions that Andrew has either taken or committed to taking | in the future? | | As far as I can tell, he found a way to purchase legal rights | to Freenode. And, he's communicated this control in a way | that pissed off existing mods. | | But, as a Freenode user, what I really care about is how this | will impact me as a user. If the only potential impact this | will have on me as a user is a smaller user base, there's a | clear solution: don't leave? | varjag wrote: | Freenode is a volunteer-run organization, with some | volunteers doing the work for better part of two decades. | There is no unique technology behind it; it's a community | that's been successful for many years thus far. | | From what has been revealed, Lee wiggled himself in from | conference sponsorship side. He used this inroad to strike | a secret ownership deal with a person who the rest of the | crew reckons was not in position to decide. Freenode is not | a commercial enterprise. It's more like a community soccer | club sold to a sponsor by a guy who happened to be a | secretary with a stamp - after the years you've been | tending the lawn and volunteering with training. | | Yes, they are understandably pissed off, as one would be | with hostile takeover by some renegade crypto prince (yes | he really claims he's a prince). | fencepost wrote: | Also relevant is that while they might be able to fight | it that would involve substantial personal outlay of | lawyer money by volunteers (all so they could continue to | volunteer) and as unpaid volunteers the first thing | attacked would likely be questions of standing. | BFatts wrote: | There are reports of Lee, or one of his contacts, offering | admin roles for money basically to allow for paid | harassment. Whether that is true or not isn't clear to me, | but that would be a big issue if true. | globular-toast wrote: | I suspect IRC will always have a place in my heart, but it | doesn't seem to be what it once was. Is there some hip new place | where people hang out to discuss and help with stuff like JS | frameworks and the like? I don't necessarily want to go there, | but I'd like to know where it is. | OrvalWintermute wrote: | Freenode has been a positively awesome and welcoming group of | communities. Was particularly pleased with the security | enhancements over time compared to most IRC networks | | Looking forward to joining Libera Chat. | sillysaurusx wrote: | It might prove foolish to move decades-old communities to | something that can't withstand HN front page, or freenode | jumping. (Libera is currently down for many people.) | | One thing I learned with my own community is that building one on | negatives isn't sustainable. Think about it: all of the big | communities had a positive purpose for being created. They stood | for something. What does Libera stand for? | | Mission statement is crucial, and it seems to be absent here. | jacob019 wrote: | I don't think that's fair. Give them a chance to scale up the | new service. | dannyw wrote: | Libera is just the new freenode. You probably wouldn't blink an | eye at it. | junon wrote: | Goodness, they set this up in record time. Cut them some slack. | Even #help states in the topic to allow the dust to settle a | bit. | aw4y wrote: | amazing how it's called "libera" (free as in freedom) and you | cannot connect if on VPN -.- | mrweasel wrote: | Well, that not really true is it. I'm on a VPN and it works | fine. They also write that they're working on being available | on TOR. | | Perhaps it's your VPN provider? | aw4y wrote: | it's ProtonVPN, paid version. weird, uh? | nso wrote: | It looks like the DNS is still propagating through the | internet, and from some servers it does not resolve yet. | Also it looks like they are just generally down a lot right | now. | threatofrain wrote: | Related discussion | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440 | EamonnMR wrote: | While we're talking about IRC/former freenode, what where your | favorite freenode channels? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-19 23:00 UTC)