OFTC Lost Almost Two Thirds of Its Users in 5 Weeks
HAVING just run /lusers in OFTC, I was greeted or confronted by the following output (emphasis added) regarding users:
22* There are 30 users and 11732 invisible on 19 servers 22* 22 :IRC Operators online 22* 3975 :channels formed 22* I have 2045 clients and 1 servers 22* Current local users: 2045 Max: 8883 22* Current global users: 11762 Max: 32418 22* Highest connection count: 8884 (8883 clients) (432609 connections received)
So they went from almost 33k to just over 11k. It didn't even take long and days ago, late on Tuesday, there was another big tumble:
'Open' and Free Technology Community (OFTC) has still not bothered to explain why this is happening. I tried asking them several times. No response. So "open"... so transparent.
The interesting thing is that almost nobody ever reports these things about IRC. The mainstream media only ever cared about IRC (in this past decade or two) when Freenode was collapsing. It completely ignored IRC otherwise.
IRC turned 36 this month. It's still one of our best options for secure communication and self-hosted group-wise chats (yes, encryption is possible, even end-to-end).
If IRC falls over, society will be worse off. Decentralised and security-oriented communication methods are being replaced by back-doored (wiretapped) things that are sold to us as "modern". █