IRC network discussion - move to Libera Chat?

[ElizabethCody]

Over the past week, freenode has been undergoing a change in management with significant policy changes, such as the removal of changes to the rule against racism. As a result, many projects and original freenode staff have chosen to leave freenode and move to other networks. Most have chosen to move to Libera Chat, a network started by many of the ex-freenode staff.

Thoughts on moving the official Mumble IRC channel to Libera Chat?

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For the conclusion to this discussion see #5041 (comment)

[davidebeatrici]

We are aware of it, in fact it was mentioned on our Matrix channel (which is currently bridged with the freenode one).

We'll discuss about migrating to Libera in our next meeting, however I would like to make it clear that we didn't pick a side yet.

In particular, the official freenode statements look legit:

• https://freenode.net/news/freenode-is-foss
• https://freenode.net/news/for-foss

Also, in the past few days many channels (including ours) were attacked by spam bots claiming that they had been moved to Libera. I'm not saying the bots' activity is endorsed by the Libera staff, however I suspect there's something fishy going on behind the scenes.

With that being said, my top priority is maintaining free speech. I was not aware of the removal of the rule against racism, but I don't blame Andrew for doing it. You have to consider that nowadays anything can be considered offensive and/or racist and that mentality is already causing serious damage to the software industry.

I converted this issue to a discussion; we want to have a clear view of the situation before taking action.

[Kissaki]

Unless verifyable and telling numbers are shared I will not believe “basically everyone moved”.
Freenode and its userbase is huge.

[sudoforge]

@Kissaki I understand the desire to see verifiable numbers, but any early comparison may be challenging due to the "split" -- some channels, such as Mumble's, remain on Freenode, requiring users who want to be a part of it to remain there. Just to name a few communities that have moved:

• Ubuntu
• Arch Linux
• Golang
• Vim
• Wireguard

These few communities are by no means the majority of the Freenode network, however, they are fairly large and may serve as an example to point to of the way things have been and will continue moving.

[Lartza]

Unless verifyable and telling numbers are shared I will not believe “basically everyone moved”.
Freenode and its userbase is huge.

What's unverifiable about multiple projects moving to Libera? What's unverifiable about the dropping /lusers count from 76k from what I heard 65.4k now in last week? (Can't confirm latter number, not part of freenode anymore. First number is visible on netsplit.de) Why do we even need to verify anything? The network is hostile towards those changing network, had all staff at least I trusted quit, what is there to keep? What is even a single reason to stay on freenode?

[ElizabethCody]

Unless verifyable and telling numbers are shared I will not believe “basically everyone moved”.
Freenode and its userbase is huge.

A lot of "telling numbers" regarding freenode's demise can be found here: https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-a7ff310d59231e5d808ca2f34f275d02?from_ts=1621726832231&live=true&to_ts=1622331632231&tpl_var_network=%2A

As this page notes, freenode stopped displaying their registration figures last night. This is telling in and of itself.

[Kissaki]

Thanks, those are some interesting numbers. Especially the user count. 60 k freenode vs 30 k libera is a huge part for such a short time. (I’m a bit skeptical about such a simple and easily influenceable number like user count though. But I guess the FOSS community is in large part very invested and caring people, so it’s not like it’s necessarily implausible.)

More than anything it shows a huge split of the FOSS community as a whole. I guess there is no way around a split community anymore. Although maybe two servers is not the worst of things. IRC has always been server network based.

I don’t think every leaving user is a moving user either though.

[wally4000]

@MaxwellCody Just FYI, the rule against racism isn't removed. It's still there in green on the bottom.

[ElizabethCody]

The replacement paragraph doesn't explicitly mention racism; however, after further review, it is indeed mentioned elsewhere in the current revision.

[ghost]

I propose two potential solutions:

1. We continue using freenode as we have been. While those staff volunteers that left (and made several disparaging remarks about the situation on the way out) feel they were no longer able to work in conditions they were undoubtedly aware of, it doesn't bode well that the majority of them moved to libera. Whether we volunteer or work at a business, we don't always like our bosses or our coworkers. The false dichotomy of the sociopolitical situation we are facing has gone on long enough. Leaving freenode to go to libera will just be trading an occasional annoyance with an influx of toxicity.
2. The preferred solution would be to abandon IRC entirely and move our chat infrastructure to Matrix, with the long term goal of moving to our own community funded Matrix server. This way, we don't have to continue evaluating the motives of why volunteers leave to go elsewhere, or where entities like freenode and libera are getting their funding.

[ghost]

I mean to say someone that has greater outwardly visible participation in the project or someone who is able to take point on this, or generally sees to relations such as that. Not someone I agree with, necessarily. From the activity on @ZeroAbility 's Github profile and the project contributor insights, he struck me as someone that may be a more recent contributor. If this is not true, I apologize. I also mean to generally refer, outside of the context of the conversation, to whoever has the most history with the project. Not general experience. Because there is no basis by which to gauge actual competence on this website, I don't think that's really an appropriate topic to even breach @davidebeatrici.

I just don't like Github...
We could really say the same about your profile and just coming to our project and unloading all of this on it without understanding how we do things. If you made that account specifically for this purpose that would be tragic. You can't quantify a person's worth or experience based on surface level information. People and communities are more complex than that. I at least tried to fairly articulate my point and reasons why in a concise and productive way for our benefit. You didn't agree and had things to say about it. That's fine. It just wasn't leading anywhere productive. Disagreement is healthy. Letting it run your life is not.

[Kazukuta]

Letting it run your life is not.

Fortunately it is not presently doing that, though I am familiar. It is certainly correct that the discourse here is leading nowhere. I'm not using this profile to engage in arguments with you anonymously, but rather because there has been at least one incident of someone attracting frivolous legal filings from Andrew Lee by openly criticizing him - which I did certainly do in this discussion.

As someone that is a strong advocate of open communities it simply frustrated me to see apparently dismissive opinions of what is generally understood to be an open-and-shut situation in the IRC community. Of course you are welcome to your opinion, regardless of its basis.

[Kazukuta]

I just don't like Github...

To clarify, I don't mean to imply that you have no experience based on your github activity, just specifically the level of presence in the project.

[davidebeatrici]

Public presence, okay.

[Kazukuta]

Public presence, okay.

That's all I can see, so yes.

[sudoforge]

If the team wants to move to Matrix, that's great. Just be sure to set up an IRC bridge :)

[JuniorJPDJ]

Well, there's matrix channel with bridge already. They are probably talking about not using bridge anymore.

[sudoforge]

Oh, I misread the earlier comments as "move to Matrix". Whoops.

I'm not part of any Matrix communities at the moment; I've simply read brief summaries about it and skimmed through the matrix.org website. While I personally would be able to continue using weechat to view Matrix servers/channels through my terminal-based chat client (via weechat-matrix, a third party plugin maintained by an individual), I think it would be beneficial for the IRC bridge to continue to exist for users who use other clients.

[Millesimus]

To add another potential solution:

3. Self-host a Matterbridge and use it to bridge the Mumble channel on freenode with a Mumble channel on libera. Then you can just wait how things turn out, how your community votes with its feet and re-evaluate later. As a bonus, you could easily bridge to other networks as well.

[Kissaki]

We had our team meeting yesterday and discussed the whole Freenode situation.

We are all aware of claims, criticism and concerns regarding Freenode and it’s management. We are aware of strong opinions and heated discussions. Politics and the general move of the community aside, we do believe Freenode as a network continues to be committed to host FOSS channels and communities like before.

Ultimately, we made the decision to drop IRC as our chat platform, and move entirely to Matrix.

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We evaluated more modern chat platforms and technologies before, last year, and in the end established a Matrix channel bridged to IRC, which allowed users to make the choice of what to use and still communicate, basically transparently, with each other across the platforms.

Matrix as a more modern chat platform provides significant improvements to users and us. Chat history, message editing and formatting, accounts to better allow moderating on issues.

Performance on matrix was an issue in the past, but this is no longer the case.

Given the general move and mobility of the FOSS community on IRC right now, the uncertainty of it, and getting the chat platform topic on discussion again is a good opportunity to make this decision and change.

We will post a separate announcement as a news post once we made the necessary changes, and will update our contact page accordingly. This may take a few days or few weeks.

Multiple clients exist for the Matrix chat platform. You can use Elements for example, as a webapp, desktop app, Android or iOS app. You can find us there at https://app.element.io/#/room/#mumble:matrix.org