Hello, On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 12:04:51PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
Hi everyone,
as some of you noticed, lately there've been challenges around Freenode, the IRC network that has been home to a number of openSUSE channels for years.
See, for example, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-... https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/
I don't think being a Korean prince disqualifies anybody from operating an IRC network. Using that fact to disqualify a particular person is an ad-hominem attack which is no way relevant to their ability to run the network. That said there is clearly a feud among the freenode network operators, and because of lack of transparency all sides are coming up with sensational, unverifiable, and unrefutable claims. With the recent forced takeover of hundreds of freenode channels by the staff and adjusting the ToS around the time of the takeover to justify it the current operators have proven themselves unfit for running a community network. In the end the irc channel moderators and the users of the network suffer the fallout, and the recent events have shown that moving away from freenode is the only reasonable way to mitigate that. It might be reasonable to ask if some more recent protocol like Matrix would be less prone to issues like this. With more modern protocols with native authentication it might be also easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time. Unfortunaltey, the openSUSE community over at Matrix does not look particularly thriving. Thanks Michal