Our IRC 5-Year Anniversary (for Self-Hosted) is Fast Approaching
A week from now it's March already. Tomorrow the EPO's staff goes on strike again. Our 5-year Gemini(space) anniversary was marked earlier this month and in a matter of weeks we'll reach the 5-year anniversary of the collapse of Freenode (Leenode). To us, that collapse meant growing more independent.
To offer some more background, our IRC community formed in 2008. Many of the early people had come with me from USENET (Keith for example, the shrewd man from Slated.org). We set up channels in Freenode (18 years ago it was already the 'de facto standard') and before too long we attracted many readers of the Web site, as they also were IRC users and also frequented Freenode (they only needed to "/join"). Over the years we had many interesting guests, both bad and good (even people like Chris Lamb passed by). We got our share of bad experiences, including floods, DDoS, and worse. But that's just IRC being IRC... more so in a very large network any "Script Kiddie" or A-hole can easily enter to disrupt.
In 2021, shortly after the attacks on RMS (which soon extended to us, too), Freenode had fractures and a breakup. Prior to that we had heard that RMS proponents were being censored (e.g. banned from the network). In years that followed we invested in our IRC independence and our community consolidated around our own network. Sure, we had the occasional cretin impersonating other people and misusing the network for stalking (yes, Garrett did that for years; he even admitted the impersonation under sworn oath this past October), but all in all after leaving Freenode things were a lot smoother and we could keep things on topic. Months ago when many IRC networks came under attack (this was intentionally done on Christmas) we successfully blocked the perpetrators and our team keeps our ircd up to date for security's sake.
If you fancy IRC and appreciate digital autonomy, then by all means consider deploying your own IRC network. It's neither hard nor daunting. Myself and several other people in the Techrights team did that several times already (each one of us has the technical skills required for it). Each of us knows how to do this, which makes us incredibly resilient. █
Image source: Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine