We believe in honoring and respecting our peers in the community, focusing on making the ecosystem stronger instead of seeking to make our foothold in it stronger. The fall of Freenode reminds us all of the importance of a healthy community of equal peers working to improve standards in the interests of us all, rather than in the interests of a small few.
This is very reassuring to see, just a few days after I became a paying sourcehut customer. I’m glad that some of my money is going to such a good cause :)
I would love to become active on IRC at some point. I could not put a sustained effort to navigate IRC due to my reserved nature. Any one have any tips or articles where I could do this?
I would love to become active on IRC at some point. I could not put a
sustained effort to navigate IRC due to my reserved nature.
I’m fairly shy and reserved myself. One thing to keep in mind is that
in most IRC channels, an overwhelming majority of the people are idle
most of the time. So it’s one of those situations where showing up is
90% of the battle. Just show up, lurk, and contribute if/when you feel
called to do so.
For members of minority groups, some of us have found text chat to be
one hell of a social equalizer.
How to use IRC mainly? What is the right kind of use?
Is it considered good to ask questions, lengthy questions? Sometimes I noticed that some questions go unanswered and having to ask again when I don’t know whether if the question was framed wrong or simply nobody just noticed it.
Then there is the inside jokes that I don’t get :) How and where to learn these? Also, Etiquette and cultural aspects mainly.
The compassion you’re showing puts you ahead of the curve already. So I personally wouldn’t worry about it.
Incidentally I run an irc network, you’re more than welcome to join and get a feel for how it is ; https://darkscience.net
There are some IRC etiquette guides, mostly they relate to the idea that you should ask precise questions, not flood the channel and stick around to get answers.
Sometimes people don’t know the answer and it may be lost to history, rule of thumb is: if you can’t see your own question anymore with your client full-screen, it’s ok to ask again.
You’ll get the hang of it in no time, it’s only an intimidating medium in the beginning, you may find that it’s actually liberating in many ways. That’s why I stick to IRC.
soju is a massively welcome alternative to ZNC. It uses far fewer resources and has just the perfect amount of features (for me, anyway). There’s no webGUI but I suspect if you run ZNC you won’t struggle to get to grips with soju.
Our work focuses on making IRC easier to use and more accessible to a broader audience of free software contributors.
It’s funny I can’t help but see parallels to the GitHub vs. email patch workflow (that Sourcehut strongly favours) here. Feels like the GitHub model did precisely this (make code contribution easier to use and more accessible to a broader audience).
I’m glad they’re staying on Libera instead of setting up a new IRC network. They don’t seem like the kind of folks to want to set up a Matrix bridge, and I’m no longer the kind of folks that wants to run an IRC client.
Well, not only that, but Drew has also blogged about how much he hates IRC<->Matrix bridges [1], and the Sourcehut mailing list has also swatted the idea down [2], so… pretty much 99.999999% chance there will never be first-class Matrix support from Sourcehut.
I think what I’m more thankful for with them staying on Libera is that they then can’t (easily) do what Drew threatened to do in the Geminispace and hard-ban clients (and thus by extension users) who disagree with his protocol UX opinions [3].
Wow, [1] and [3] really put it together for me - his more-or-less explicitly stated mission in life is to completely isolate himself from anyone who disagrees with his views on technology. Drew is the Jakob Ammann of computers.
I really enjoy IRC, so it’s nice to see this even I don’t use SourceHut.
But I am also a heretic that uses IRC through my Matrix server. :) I believe both can work together til the end of the universe, and probably IRC will be still used after that happens…
That’s what I love about it honestly; everyone gets to pick the client that works best for them. I connect from Emacs; my friend uses an electron app that’s too resource-intensive to even run on my laptop, but we all hang out together in harmony. No one’s trying to protect their turf to boost bogus monthly-active-users charts.
Indeed! I like using Matrix with my fiancee since it works for us when we chat together. Also a lot of FOSS projects are on Matrix, so it made sense for me to start using it. It’s super cool that I can use my selfhosted Matrix server to connect to IRC too: I use Heisenbridge for this, but there’s a way to connect to Libera.Chat through their bridge, although I’ve heard it can be a bit buggy. Heisenbridge has been great though.
What encryption do you have in mind? IRC already supports SSL, and end-to-end encryption would not be feasible with their goal of minor backwards-compatible improvements.
I don’t get why encryption is always brought up when talking about IRC. What’s the threat model here? I mean, I’m all for E2EE (I know you didn’t say that specifically) but that makes more sense for actually private conversations—IRC is for public discourse and must be used as such.
For one-to-one end to end encrypted chat, OTR works well enough. It
isn’t universally supported. I use it though. For secure group chat,
if you trust someone to host, it’s pretty straightforward to set up a
private server with TLS.
No sense in talking about encryption in 2022 if we aren’t better at hiding metadata. As far as I know dark IRC servers on Tor hidden services are still state-of-the-art for private groupchat.
This is very reassuring to see, just a few days after I became a paying sourcehut customer. I’m glad that some of my money is going to such a good cause :)
I would love to become active on IRC at some point. I could not put a sustained effort to navigate IRC due to my reserved nature. Any one have any tips or articles where I could do this?
I’m fairly shy and reserved myself. One thing to keep in mind is that in most IRC channels, an overwhelming majority of the people are idle most of the time. So it’s one of those situations where showing up is 90% of the battle. Just show up, lurk, and contribute if/when you feel called to do so.
For members of minority groups, some of us have found text chat to be one hell of a social equalizer.
Good luck.
Thanks, I will try again soon.
What kind of tips and resources are you looking for? I mean, you can just join #lobsters on Libera and start with that.
How to use IRC mainly? What is the right kind of use?
Is it considered good to ask questions, lengthy questions? Sometimes I noticed that some questions go unanswered and having to ask again when I don’t know whether if the question was framed wrong or simply nobody just noticed it.
Then there is the inside jokes that I don’t get :) How and where to learn these? Also, Etiquette and cultural aspects mainly.
The compassion you’re showing puts you ahead of the curve already. So I personally wouldn’t worry about it.
Incidentally I run an irc network, you’re more than welcome to join and get a feel for how it is ; https://darkscience.net
There are some IRC etiquette guides, mostly they relate to the idea that you should ask precise questions, not flood the channel and stick around to get answers.
Sometimes people don’t know the answer and it may be lost to history, rule of thumb is: if you can’t see your own question anymore with your client full-screen, it’s ok to ask again.
You’ll get the hang of it in no time, it’s only an intimidating medium in the beginning, you may find that it’s actually liberating in many ways. That’s why I stick to IRC.
https://github.com/fizerkhan/irc-etiquette
Thank you for the encouragement, I connected to your network using hexchat. I will test the waters now.
soju is a massively welcome alternative to ZNC. It uses far fewer resources and has just the perfect amount of features (for me, anyway). There’s no webGUI but I suspect if you run ZNC you won’t struggle to get to grips with soju.
It’s funny I can’t help but see parallels to the GitHub vs. email patch workflow (that Sourcehut strongly favours) here. Feels like the GitHub model did precisely this (make code contribution easier to use and more accessible to a broader audience).
Sort of like how WhatsApp made chat easier to use and more accessible to a broader audience?
Yeah and how a lot of people seem to love Discord (personally I’m not a fan though).
I’m glad they’re staying on Libera instead of setting up a new IRC network. They don’t seem like the kind of folks to want to set up a Matrix bridge, and I’m no longer the kind of folks that wants to run an IRC client.
Well, not only that, but Drew has also blogged about how much he hates IRC<->Matrix bridges [1], and the Sourcehut mailing list has also swatted the idea down [2], so… pretty much 99.999999% chance there will never be first-class Matrix support from Sourcehut.
I think what I’m more thankful for with them staying on Libera is that they then can’t (easily) do what Drew threatened to do in the Geminispace and hard-ban clients (and thus by extension users) who disagree with his protocol UX opinions [3].
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html
[2] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CHDZ5y3gnJD4oj9XLk0ZRJQTmGm3D8g54anUef9Ue6t2zdgUsmdMUxDH1i4qOCccMb92etazPXe1rTbq5dW13-5OJDL_dCaS19K8zXkh7FT4%3D%40protonmail.com%3E
[3] https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/199#issue-812720321
Wow, [1] and [3] really put it together for me - his more-or-less explicitly stated mission in life is to completely isolate himself from anyone who disagrees with his views on technology. Drew is the Jakob Ammann of computers.
I really enjoy IRC, so it’s nice to see this even I don’t use SourceHut.
But I am also a heretic that uses IRC through my Matrix server. :) I believe both can work together til the end of the universe, and probably IRC will be still used after that happens…
That’s what I love about it honestly; everyone gets to pick the client that works best for them. I connect from Emacs; my friend uses an electron app that’s too resource-intensive to even run on my laptop, but we all hang out together in harmony. No one’s trying to protect their turf to boost bogus monthly-active-users charts.
Indeed! I like using Matrix with my fiancee since it works for us when we chat together. Also a lot of FOSS projects are on Matrix, so it made sense for me to start using it. It’s super cool that I can use my selfhosted Matrix server to connect to IRC too: I use Heisenbridge for this, but there’s a way to connect to Libera.Chat through their bridge, although I’ve heard it can be a bit buggy. Heisenbridge has been great though.
No talk about encryption in 2022? 😔
What encryption do you have in mind? IRC already supports SSL, and end-to-end encryption would not be feasible with their goal of minor backwards-compatible improvements.
I don’t get why encryption is always brought up when talking about IRC. What’s the threat model here? I mean, I’m all for E2EE (I know you didn’t say that specifically) but that makes more sense for actually private conversations—IRC is for public discourse and must be used as such.
For one-to-one end to end encrypted chat, OTR works well enough. It isn’t universally supported. I use it though. For secure group chat, if you trust someone to host, it’s pretty straightforward to set up a private server with TLS.
No sense in talking about encryption in 2022 if we aren’t better at hiding metadata. As far as I know dark IRC servers on Tor hidden services are still state-of-the-art for private groupchat.