I don't think people are realising the danger the Fediverse is in.
The only thing stopping corporations and VCs taking over this place is that the Fediverse is spread out on many different servers, which makes it very difficult to purchase.
If most of the Fediverse ends up on mastodon.social, which is now a strong possibility, there will be nothing to stop most of it being sold to Musk or Zuckerberg or whoever.
The bigger mastodon.social becomes, the more likely a buyout is to happen.
(1/4)
You paint a very rosy picture of the Freenode situation. As a result, many people moved to Discord (and to a lesser extend Matrix) and the significantly smaller libera.chat is still waaay to centralized as if people didn’t learn anything from this disaster.
Also in the case of Freenode/libera.chat basically all the admins also switched, meaning little institutional knowledge was lost. This is mostly because the person who took Freenode over was indeed such a nut-case. In a typical corporate takeover the staff is (at least for a while) retained, meaning they can’t just set up shop in a different place easily.
In addition, I’d reckon that at least part of this is due to the fact that IRC is somewhat centralized - to my knowledge (I only lived at the very tail end of the “popularity” of IRC) you couldn’t really be on one server and chat in a room that was on another server, right? Technically the protocol did have the capability for multiple servers to communicate (such as what would occur with netsplits), but you didn’t usually add someone’s server to the network as far as I understand (unless that is just a trend I missed out on).
[The rest of this probably deserves to be its own parent comment, but I’ll leave it as a reply here since it is partially relevant to the topic of IRC in this thread]
I’d think that at least systems like Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy have some resilience to this since they are very interoperable by their nature, but it’ll still need a ton of work done in order to get there.
The biggest problem is not the technological aspect of these applications / The Fediverse, but the onboarding and “human element” to them. I operate my own Matrix, Mastodon, and now Lemmy instances but out of the three I feel like Matrix was the only one where I was able to “see the world” so to speak without any extra steps. With Mastodon I had to subscribe to a relay in order to receive posts from other instances, and for Lemmy… well I’m still working that one out and trying to figure out how it works (I see new posts to the communities I’m subscribed to, and will see that it says there are three comments as an example… but they’re not visible?) - so I just don’t see how others are going to be able to avoid joining massive instances since you don’t have those issues there (or at least, to the same degree).
Basically any IRC client supports connecting to multiple servers simultaneously, so joining channels on multiple servers was never an issue. Also originally the “network” in IRC implied open federation just like you are describing, but over spam and moderation issues it evolved into a allow-list federation and ultimately incompatible s2s protocols. I sometimes wish people on the Fediverse would learn a bit more about the history of federated systems like IRC to avoid falling into the same traps 😅
As for your hidden comment number: there is currently a bug in Lemmy that shows message edits as new comments in the UI.
Ah, I see! I guess you truly do learn something new every day - I appreciate it!
I hope that we one day return to a world where everything is open and has less walled gardens, as it truly does pain me to know all of the capabilities we could have that are just intentionally always locked away 😮💨
You paint a very rosy picture of the Freenode situation. As a result, many people moved to Discord (and to a lesser extend Matrix) and the significantly smaller libera.chat is still waaay to centralized as if people didn’t learn anything from this disaster.
Also in the case of Freenode/libera.chat basically all the admins also switched, meaning little institutional knowledge was lost. This is mostly because the person who took Freenode over was indeed such a nut-case. In a typical corporate takeover the staff is (at least for a while) retained, meaning they can’t just set up shop in a different place easily.
In addition, I’d reckon that at least part of this is due to the fact that IRC is somewhat centralized - to my knowledge (I only lived at the very tail end of the “popularity” of IRC) you couldn’t really be on one server and chat in a room that was on another server, right? Technically the protocol did have the capability for multiple servers to communicate (such as what would occur with netsplits), but you didn’t usually add someone’s server to the network as far as I understand (unless that is just a trend I missed out on).
[The rest of this probably deserves to be its own parent comment, but I’ll leave it as a reply here since it is partially relevant to the topic of IRC in this thread]
I’d think that at least systems like Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy have some resilience to this since they are very interoperable by their nature, but it’ll still need a ton of work done in order to get there.
The biggest problem is not the technological aspect of these applications / The Fediverse, but the onboarding and “human element” to them. I operate my own Matrix, Mastodon, and now Lemmy instances but out of the three I feel like Matrix was the only one where I was able to “see the world” so to speak without any extra steps. With Mastodon I had to subscribe to a relay in order to receive posts from other instances, and for Lemmy… well I’m still working that one out and trying to figure out how it works (I see new posts to the communities I’m subscribed to, and will see that it says there are three comments as an example… but they’re not visible?) - so I just don’t see how others are going to be able to avoid joining massive instances since you don’t have those issues there (or at least, to the same degree).
Basically any IRC client supports connecting to multiple servers simultaneously, so joining channels on multiple servers was never an issue. Also originally the “network” in IRC implied open federation just like you are describing, but over spam and moderation issues it evolved into a allow-list federation and ultimately incompatible s2s protocols. I sometimes wish people on the Fediverse would learn a bit more about the history of federated systems like IRC to avoid falling into the same traps 😅
As for your hidden comment number: there is currently a bug in Lemmy that shows message edits as new comments in the UI.
Ah, I see! I guess you truly do learn something new every day - I appreciate it!
I hope that we one day return to a world where everything is open and has less walled gardens, as it truly does pain me to know all of the capabilities we could have that are just intentionally always locked away 😮💨