Coty,
On 5/19/21 15:28, Coty Sutherland wrote:
Hi all,
I was just notified about some mess going on with Freenode which has
seemingly resulted in a mass exodus of users from the freenode servers.
I read about this last night and I immediately thought "I wonder if Coty
will say anything about this." :)
It's an "interesting" situation, for some values of "interesting."
We (well, Coty) maintains a presence on #freenode because it appears to
help some people. Probably a very small number of people (relatively
speaking). Removing that resource may cause some people to fail to get
help. OTOH, we don't maintain a presence on fb, AIM, or Parler and we
prefer the mailing list for most interactions for a whole host of reasons.
I don't think there are any people who are using #freenode because they
don't trust the ASF infrastructure. I think they just want to use IRC.
(Which, for those who are unfamiliar, is like Slack but without all the
stupid cat photos.) #freenode was great because you didn't have to pay
The Man to run an IRC channel/server for you and you also didn't have to
run it yourself. It was a nice, shared infrastructure. All of that still
exists. It's just got a bad taste to it because something that was free
and grassroots is now owned by a corporation and Corporations Are Bad m'kay.
If we want to provide support via IRC, there is nothing wrong with
#freenode in spite of recent events, IMHO.
I think the question should be "is a realtime support system appropriate
for our community?" I tend to think not, but I'm not the only one here.
If we are going to "quit" #freenode, should we put our efforts into
pointing people to the mailing list(s) instead of pointing them to
another competing platform? I think we should funnel people to the
mailing lists. If the mailing list has too high a bar, then I guess we
can point them to Slack. (Does Slack require an account? Requiring
signup sucks. At least subscribing to a mailing list doesn't mean you
need another entry in your password safe.)
Anyhow, I'd love to hear what others think. But I would suggest that you
consider your motivations before doing anything. Specifically:
1. Why abandon #freenode?
2. Why move to anything other than mailing-list?
-chris
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