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@realrasengan
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realrasengan commented May 31, 2021 •
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This is a good write up, thanks for writing this. I just wanted to clarify a few things and answer the open ended questions:

Why did Christel leave? What was in her "14-paragraph e-mail"?

Swapping a banner on the frontpage [1][1.5] caused the former staff to go up in arms. This was not a valid reason to go up in arms since freenode has had a history of banner ads [2]. It was a poor excuse.

[1] https://gist.github.com/pinkisemils/39d4ded8b1639b6f39dcab15618649f5

[1.5] https://archive.is/thjkc

[2] http://techrights.org/2021/05/22/freenode-ads/

Why didn't Tom give Andrew access to DNS?
He knew[4] Andrew's a legal owner. And Tom would still have access, Andrew just asked to add himself, right?

I'd like to clarify - I already had access. I was cut off from access since Tom Wesley added himself to the account as owner on April 3 and subsequently enabled mandatory 2FA, locking freenode limited's access out. I think anyone who had access to a domain that they own and was cut off would demand access back -- I'm no different.

Thanks again for writing this, I sincerely appreciate it.

  • Andrew

@unsurethinker
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unsurethinker commented May 31, 2021 •
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This is a good write up, thanks for writing this. I just wanted to clarify a few things and answer the open ended questions:

Thanks a lot for your answers!

Also do you by chance know what event between April 19 and May 11 made Freenode Staff leave?

When did you start suspecting that Freenode Staff is going to leave? Were you afraid that you may not have people to run the network?

And why did they decide to leave in the first place? Did you... I don't know... threaten them that they won't be allowed to act independently any more?

Swapping a banner on the frontpage [1][1.5] caused the former staff to go up in arms. [...] It was a poor excuse.

Yeah, that looks weird. It wasn't even something new to argue about. I mean Tom knew about the older banners, as he was the one merging the removal of the previous banner:

freenode/web-7.0#454

Maybe there was something else, and the banners story was just a catalyst to that...

Do you by chance know what was in that "14-paragraph e-mail"?

[2] http://techrights.org/2021/05/22/freenode-ads/

Thank you for the link! Added it to the list.

I'd like to clarify - I already had access. I was cut off from access since Tom Wesley added himself to the account as owner on April 3 and subsequently enabled mandatory 2FA, locking freenode limited's access out.

Oh, by the way! When did you get the access back? Or do you still not have it?

PS: To other people reading this, I'd also love to know what libera.chat-people think about it. Especially about the events in April.

@Citillara
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Thanks for all the write ups and summaries

Quick questions from an outsider :

  1. Who pays for the DNS ?
  2. Who were the people responsible for the management of the DNS over time (before and during the incident) ?
  3. Was any of those issues discussed in a common room (public or private) with all the protagonists together before it reached the breaking point ?

@tobixen
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tobixen commented May 31, 2021

The summary may be quite so biased, but I do understand that I may have been a bit too quick taking side in this drama. There are clearly wrong-doings at both sides.

Most of the channels I've been hanging on at freenode has now moved to OFTC, and I've been encouraged to take my channels there as well. It seems like a quite reasonable move.

@tobixen
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tobixen commented May 31, 2021

In their latest post they noticed that some channels have put "we've moved to libera.chat #xxx" in the topic, and blocked the channel, preventing anyone to talk in it, or even kicked all the users to force them to move.
New freenode staff thought it's unfair. If someone wanted to stay at freenode, they should be able to stay and talk. If nobody can talk in a channel then is not a channel anymore - it's just a billboard advertising another network.

I find this to be a bit biased. I can understand the line of thought - it's clearly not in the interest of Freenode nor in the interest of the owners of Freenode to have the channel disrupted like this. Consider someone doing something similar at some other platform - say, StackExchange - if anyone would block discussions of some particular topic or product at StackExchange and told people to discuss it at some other platform, the owners of StackExchange would see that as a problem and deal with it rather instantly.

However, Freenode is not StackExchange. Prior to the corporate takeover, the channels on Freenode was considered not to be Freenode ownership, but the ownership of the communities. More than that even, it was considered to be official communication channels for those projects and communities. Those communities wants the move of the official communication channel to be as smooth as possible, from that point of view closing the channel and putting a redirect notice is appropriate. By all means, I do agree that those who "want to stay at Freenode" should be allowed to discuss at Freenode. However, the very most of those who remains at Freenode does so not because they actively "want to stay at freenode", but because they "didn't get the memo". By removing the notice from the topic, one is building a new community out of people who "didn't get the memo" and believe they are still participating at the official communication channel. That is rather deceptive.

In my opinion it's wrong to consider what is in the best interest of Freenode - it goes against the spirit of free and open source software. The right thing to consider should be - what is in the best interest of the projects, communities and society as such? For the project, it's best that all discussions happen in one and the same place, anything else would split the community and break communication lines.

Competition is not always good. For the biggest projects there may perhaps be room for smaller non-official channels, but for the "long tail" there is hardly enough activity to support one IRC network, having a community split due to confusion on where the official communication channel can be found means there won't be any activity at all.

At least StackExchange offers some unique features, but the differences between the different IRC networks is negligible for the end user.

@unsurethinker
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I find this to be a bit biased. I can understand the line of thought

I'm just trying to describe what happened and why (as I understand it at least). I'm not saying they did a good thing. 🙂

Actually, even Andrew Lee says "I was wrong with yesterday’s move" in his blog post.

The right thing to consider should be - what is in the best interest of the projects, communities and society as such? For the project, it's best that all discussions happen in one and the same place, anything else would split the community and break communication lines.

Oh, it's not that easy.

Imagine that a lot of channels at libera.chat set their topic to "libera.chat spies on everyone's messages and sells them to google for ads! We've moved to OFTC" and lock the channels. What should "libera.chat" admins do?

Actually, if we declare that a locked redirection channel is fine, then we can push it even further. For example #archlinux should register a channel on every IRC network (ircnet, undernet, oftc, efnet, rizon, quakenet, dalnet, etc), lock it, and set its title to "The Best Linux Distro Ever!!! Find us at libera.chat #archlinux".

And every other channel should do the same. Because it's "in the best interest of the projects", it advertises the project, and helps users to find it. And "it's best that all discussions happen in one and the same place".

That looks... wrong.

But the other option is also bad. If we declare that "channels must never be locked", we'd basically forbid people to use "+m" or "+i", which is also not a good idea. For example "+m" is a good temporary spam protection. And "+i" may be useful for a small channel of security researchers, that don't want everyone to know about the bug before they develop a fix.

So, in general, I'm not sure. I'm wondering myself what a good long term decision should be in that case...

Suggestions welcome!

@tobixen
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tobixen commented Jun 1, 2021

Imagine that a lot of channels at libera.chat set their topic to "libera.chat spies on everyone's messages and sells them to google for ads!
We've moved to OFTC" and lock the channels. What should "libera.chat" admins do?

It's not that easy. There are at least four dimensions here.

The first dimension is the statement that channel content (or any data at all) is sold to Google, etc. I wish people would be honest and I would like to trust people - but when notorious liars even gets elected to office I'm starting to lose hope in the humanity ... but I digress. If the statement was a blatant lie, then perhaps it would be appropriate to modify it. "The official $product chat channel has been moved to OFTC due to a false rumor that the channel activity is sold to Google".

Another dimension is the redirect information. I think that putting topic information on every other network where to find the official chat channel is not that terribly bad. I do remember we had a split community channel after the split between EFNet and IRCNet, and tried to mend it through information in the topic (plus some people that would hang on both networks and explain people why there was no activity on the "wrong" network). There are plenty of projects registered on github with information that the official project home is at gitlab or bitbucket or sourceforce or vice versa, I think that's also generally accepted.

The third dimension is the concept of "ownership". People who have established a chat channel on a network, have registered it, has channel oper mode, and have been staying with the channel for a long time would usually feel that they do own the channel - particularly if one also is a maintainer of otherwise an official representative for the project. The active part of the community who always hangs around in the channel and is active there from time to time may also feel some kind of ownership to the channel. I've always considered Freenode as some infrastructure that just sits there and is kind of owned by the community. Now it appears we were all wrong, Andrew Lee is the legal owner of all Freenode and all the channels - just because the person who happened to register the freenode domain name has happened to sell that asset. It just doesn't feel right for many people.

The fourth dimension is the channel locking. Under the paradigm that the channel oper owns the channel, it's perfectly OK. From the paradigm that Andrew Lee owns the channel it's not acceptable. To me it feels completely wrong to enter some network, register a channel, and then immediately lock it, but when an official project channel is moving home I think it's acceptable. I also think it's acceptable for the network opers to unlock it after some grace time.

@unsurethinker
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If the statement was a blatant lie, then perhaps it would be appropriate to modify it. "The official $product chat channel has been moved to OFTC due to a false rumor that the channel activity is sold to Google".

Here we consider it is fine for network admins to change topics if they believe it's a "blatant lie". Should they also remove the ownership from the channel owner? (otherwise he'd put that "blatant lie" back into the topic)

To me it feels completely wrong to enter some network, register a channel, and then immediately lock it, but when an official project channel is moving home I think it's acceptable. I also think it's acceptable for the network opers to unlock it after some grace time.

Here we consider it is fine for network admins to unlock the channel if they believe enough time has passed (i.e. changing -m, -i, -b, -q).

Together those mean that "in some cases" network admins can do whatever they want to the channel.
That makes Andrew Lee's actions "almost fine" - setup a redirection from a locked channel to an unlocked one "in some cases". 🙂

I'm stretching things here. But I think you understand the dilemma: if it's fine for other network admins to do something to the channel sometimes, then why is it wrong for Andrew Lee to do something to the channel sometimes? How would we define a policy of what's "fine" and what's "wrong"?

I think that putting topic information on every other network where to find the official chat channel is not that terribly bad. [...] There are plenty of projects registered on github with information that the official project home is at gitlab or bitbucket or sourceforce or vice versa

That's not exactly the same thing.

First, github hosts ~200 millions projects. Most of them are totally unrelated. So even if 100 thousands of them would leave, that'd be < 0.1%, and nobody would notice that (that was the mass exodus from github when it was bought by Microsoft in 2018). But IRC community is much smaller and tightly connected. Freenode hosted ~12000 public channels, ~20 big ones. When most big channels left — pretty much everyone noticed that.

Second, what you see on github is usually a "read-only mirror". But you can still get the sources. An IRC equivalent would be a "mirrored chat", e.g. people can join #archlinux @ efnet or #archlinux @ freenode, and see the same messages that are posted to #archlinux @ libera.chat.

And such mirrored chat looks like a good idea! Much better than an empty locked redirection-channel. I wonder how many channels did that when they moved...

Now it appears we were all wrong, Andrew Lee is the legal owner of all Freenode and all the channels - just because the person who happened to register the freenode domain name has happened to sell that asset.

For me it doesn't really matter if he's the legal owner or not. He was the legal owner for the last 4 years. What matters is what he does with that ownership.

@clort81
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clort81 commented Jun 8, 2021

The libera staff gleefully censor and remove and lock channels. Hypocrites.

@Nakilon
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Nakilon commented Jun 26, 2021

TLDR:

April, 3

  • tomaw cuts off rasengan's access to Freenode DNS
  • rasengan: wtf?
  • tomaw: fuck you

April, 10

  • rasengan: so?
  • tomaw: still fuck you
  • rasengan: talk to my lawyer then

April, 19

  • tomaw loses to lawyers

April, 23

  • tomaw registers Libera, sets people against rasengan

May, 11

  • people: we hate rasengan -- why? -- because "hostile takeover" -- what does it mean? -- we don't know, does not matter

May, 12

  • rasengan: "I want Freenode to keep on being a great IRC network but tomaw's hostile takeover seems likely to succeed"
  • people: we hate rasengan -- why? -- Wikipedia says he's a prince of Korea -- so what? -- we don't know, does not matter

May, 19

  • staff leaves, abandons infrastructure, does not fight the spam
  • people: we hate rasengan -- any explanation? -- no (lie, hiding the May 12 letter)
  • those who support rasengan are being insulted

May, 25

  • abandoned infrastructure and broken team results in a buggy script execution that blocks some channels
  • people: we hate rasengan -- why? -- "channels hijacking" (lie, hiding the explanation and apology)

June

  • people: we hate rasengan because "channels hijacking" -- it was in May 25, what about May 11? -- we don't know, does not matter
  • those who support rasengan are being banned

TLDR:TLDR:

April, 3: tomaw starts hostile takeover with DNS access blocking
April, 19: tomaw loses to rasengan's lawyers
April, 23: tomaw continues hostile takeover with setting people up against rasengan
May, 12: rasengan: "tomaw did hostile takeover"
May, 12: people: rasengan did hostile takeover -- any evidence? -- we don't need it, we just hate
May, 19: tomaw continues hostile takeover by making staff abandon Freenode, Freenode gets spam attack
May, 25: tomaw finishes hostile takeover, dragged people to Libera
June: people: rasengan did hostile takeover -- any evidence? -- we don't need it, we just hate

@tobixen
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tobixen commented Jun 26, 2021

In the end of the day, in many conflicts, it doesn't matter so much who is wrong or right - not even who is left or right - but more "whom do you trust the most". When one has chosen to trust one of the parties in a conflict, it can be difficult or impossible to understand the arguments of the other part.

TLDR:TLDR:
April, 3: tomaw starts hostile takeover with DNS access blocking
May, 25: tomaw finishes hostile takeover, dragged people to Libera

This is the most biased summary I've seen so far.

It's all down to the point of view. If you regard Freenode as a property of rasengan, then the first line above may be correct. Juridically, yes, apparently he has bought the domain name from Christel, and hence he has the juridical right to define what freenode.org should be. How much of the infrastructure he actually owns is another question - I don't know the answer to that one (rasengan claims he has spent a lot of money on running freenode, the other side claims that most of the hardware comes from donations from various other companies)

Freenode was not a product, but a community - even more, a collection of communities. I think a majority of participants on Freenode considered Freenode not to be some piece of property owned by one person, but more like free public infrastructure. I think most channel opers and open source project maintainers considered that when they had a channel on Freenode, the channel was owned by the project community or the project manager, not by rasengan. From that point of view, it's much easier to support tomaw than rasengan.

Freenode was not run by employees, but by unpaid volunteers. It's my understanding that all of them decided to leave, and all of them wrote their personal reason why they left. It is difficult for me to imagine that all of them supported a "hostile takover run by tomaw". Though, in the end of the day, in many conflicts, it doesn't matter so much who is wrong or right - not even who is left or right - but more "whom do you trust the most". When one has chosen to trust one of the parties in a conflict, it can be difficult or impossible to understand the arguments of the other part. It's not completely unlikely that they all chose side simply because they trust tomaw more than rasengan, and not due to the realities on the ground.

@Nakilon
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Nakilon commented Jun 27, 2021

but more "whom do you trust the most". When one has chosen to trust one of the parties in a conflict, it can be difficult or impossible to understand

Timestamps isn't a hard thing. It's just numbers. Anyone who can read and understand numbers should be fine with that. Or do you chose to ignore the knowledge about text and numbers just for having fun of throwing shit around? We here all saw how and why it started, we saw who was the noe who really did histile and destructive actions, while such as you were just joining the train of hate and copypasting each others comments to flood the webpages m,making it harder for people to see timestamps.

one has chosen to trust one of the parties in a conflict

Yeah, that's the way you look at things -- by chosing the sides. I instead look at texts and numbers, at timestamps, I don't chose a side, I say only about facts. And unlike your new subset staff or linux channels ops or other haters only a few people were interesting in provinding you facts, the truth and making real timestamped notes instead of just copypasting hate. Rasengan was the one who made you a letter on May 12. Another guy who is interested in truth unlike tyou is the current gist owner. Others were posessing the information but didn't want you to know it, didn't want you to follow what's going on, to fool you. And you love to be fooled by them.

Freenode not to be some piece of property owned by one person

Exactly, but tomaw decided the opposite. It is there, written black on white, with timstamps, but you don't care, you just hate and keep pushing your shit outside fo organism all over the place.

It is difficult for me to imagine that all of them supported

OMG, this "argument" is targeted on 12 y.o. audience or what? In 1940 it was also difficutl to imagine how germans and then half of europe joined the party of burning jews. Grow up and learn psychology. Then rethink what happened.

in the end of the day it doesn't matter

Oh I forgot, you are a kind of nazi-apologist -- you take a part in building shit and after it makes the consequences you just leave laughing. You won't grow up, won't learn psychology, won't erthink what happened. Your only goal was to take part in hate and once facts have started to come together and the picture started to be clear to people you start trynig trying to assure people they don't even need to figure things out, lol. This is more than stupid, this is harmful, and you know it, because adding harm is what you aer here for, even if it's just your comments that can't overwrite the gist above.

@tobixen
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tobixen commented Jun 27, 2021

Godwin

@Nakilon
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Nakilon commented Jun 27, 2021

You finally admitted you always had nothing to add other than hate.

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