Video download link | md5sum 57f27b19c575a30fda9749b60077c9c2 TechRights (TR) or BoycottNovell (BN) IRC Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: So our IRC community turns 15 today (sort of) and I've decided to do a video reflecting on the fact that some of the same people are still there after 15 years

THE collapse of Freenode happened about 2 years ago. Sure, how time flies...

We've thankfully made our way out of there and most of the "important" people came over to our own network (yes, we lost or shed off some participants, but that's the cost of relying on a third party like Freenode for 13 years!).

"In hindsight, if we made it through 15 years, then why not 15 years more?"As the video above notes, aside from the roots of the community (genesis story), we've managed to log every single day since then (every hour, too, owing to collaboration and coordination among peers) and we've managed to defeat very aggressive trolling/sabotage/vandalism campaigns. The worst trolling was around 2009. The logs are now in IPFS and in Gemini as well, so it's virtually impossible to issue a complete takedown request against them. For a period of time we delayed the release of logs in order to protect sources.

I first used IRC almost 30 years ago and IRC is still going strong. It predates the World Wide Web and can outlive/outlast the World Wide Web. IRC is vital to us and to many other projects. The community came to depend on it.

As it turns out, Chris Lamb (later a Debian Project Leader) joined us on the first day and said (it's buried many pages in the distant past), "Pray, please inform me what is currently happening in this communications medium?"

In hindsight, if we made it through 15 years, then why not 15 years more? ⬆