A Total Lack of Transparency: Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) Fails to Explain Why Over 60% of Users Are Gone (Since a Week Ago)
THIS is a quick status update. But there's not much new information - the latest information mostly being a lack of comment/response from OFTC, a leading Internet Relay Chat (short: IRC) network.
Several attempts to politely reach out to OFTC [1, 2] for an explanation remain fruitless. They don't want to talk about it, just like GNOME Foundation refuses to say what's going on (secret expulsions) and even bans people who ask. This is what happened to OFTC last week (annotated screenshot):
As shown by querying the server*, they had a maximum of 32418 users recently (online at the same time; that's nearly more than the current average at Libera.Chat, being 32821). Now it's just 11803. They lost nearly two-thirds and we don't know why. We really don't know. They know, we don't.
They queried clients repeatedly (for version-related information) and then loads of users got eliminated. Several of us can corroborate this. From my end:
* Now talking on #techrights * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * jelly has quit (Remote host closed the connection) * jelly (jelly@00012145.user.oftc.net) has joined #techrights * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * jelly has quit () * jelly (jelly@00012145.user.oftc.net) has joined #techrights * jelly has quit (coulomb.oftc.net charon.oftc.net) * jelly (jelly@00012145.user.oftc.net) has joined #techrights * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ * Received a CTCP VERSION from CTCPServ
They did this at least 7 times last week.
Freenode is now below 10k channels (with about 5,400 users remaining; it used to be almost over 100,000 user and channels count used to be over 50k). To quote: "During last connections to freenode its servers reported an average of 5417 users and 9981 chat rooms."
IRC is getting smaller. We don't know the full story, except the one about Matrix bridges. █
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* Running /lusers in OFTC moments ago:
* There are 30 users and 11773 invisible on 19 servers * 20 :IRC Operators online * 3930 :channels formed * I have 3039 clients and 1 servers * Current local users: 3039 Max: 8883 * Current global users: 11803 Max: 32418 * Highest connection count: 8884 (8883 clients) (416959 connections received)