Hi all,
For those of you who have not woken up to this sad day yet. Andrew Lee has taken his stance as owner of freenode ltd. and by the (one sided) story of the former volunteer staff members basically forced the whole community out.
As there is history of LTM shutting down networks before (snoonet), it is appropriate to expect that the intentions here are not aligned with the communities and specially the users who's data he has access to via this administrative takeover.
I think it's our time to take swift action and show our support to all the hard working volunteers who were behind freenode and move all our activities to irc.libera.chat.
Probably not the best timing, but should we consider (again) running a more advanced free software chat system? E.g. Outreachy uses Zulip, Mozilla - Matrix, there are probably more.
Yeah I'd say not the greatest timing to start such a conversation under pressure.
FWIF I'd rather not. The signal to noise ratio tends to be very poor on all of them with their stickers, gifs and all the active media crap embedded in them.
FWIW we face the need to paste images very often (screenshots of booting bare metal), so having a native image pasting is a plus to me.
Actually, text pasting as well. If you've ever encountered someone pasting 50 lines of a traceback to IRC, you know why.
Other features I'm looking for include:
1) Native authentication
2) Chat history and offline messages
3) Editing and deleting messages
4) Threads (or any other way of sub-division of channels)
5) Moderation tools (better than #openstack-unregistered which is hostile to newcomers)
Nice to have:
6) Mobile client
7) Non-trivial syntax
And yes, I do know that all of these (except for #3) can be simulated more or less with 3rd party tools. But this is not friendly to newcomers who don't have an own bouncer and familiarity with how things work in IRC (which does not match how things work in any other current chat - see #openstack-unregistered for an example).
Dmitry
P.S.
I don't suggest the infra team maintains a matrix server. I do think that we, given how much money is made from OpenStack, can afford to do the same thing as Mozilla: pay Element for a hosted Matrix instance (and let them bother with scaling).
I find the current situation of putting the burden on Freenode volunteers a bit unfair and vote against moving to Libera for this very reason.
- jokke
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Managing Directors: Charles Cachera, Brian Klemm, Laurie Krebs, Michael O'Neill