Communication Islands in IRC
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) still good for the task and lean.
MOST of the people in the world - perhaps over 99% (all but fewer than 80 million) - never heard of IRC. Even fewer people used it. Very few know how to administer IRC (including installation, maintenance etc. rather than just moderation) and over time there are probably fewer of them, not because IRC is dying but because veteran IRC users/admins are literally dying (IRC started in the 1980s).
IRC is a valuable skill. It can support encryption between users, not just between users and servers, and it lessens a reliance on third parties. "Self-hosting pays off," an associate told me today, "as usual" (I told him that we had hit max users (all time since self-hosting) some time last night). psydroid then said "you retain full control, so there are no worries of being dependent on some third-party possibly hostile entity (Freenode, Libera, Google etc.)..."
To be clear, the old (original) Freenode also had censorship, not just Libera. They often exercise censorship against users rather than channels, so in other words, they could choose who could and could not be in certain channels at the network level, irrespective of who runs the channel/s and what for. Freenode, Libera, OFTC and others all do this and their interests aren't the same as channel operators'. It's not a new issue. When I started using IRC in the early 90s we needed moderation because of flooders (vandals basically).
IRC - as a concept - is not centralised and this is very much necessary when discussing more controversial issues or privacy-sensitive stuff, such as whistleblowers. It's wrong to (mis)place trust in some apathetic third party. Wikileaks had its own IRC network, but the issue therein was, an FBI mole had entered it (or a young man from Iceland who later became FBI mole, apparently under conditions of blackmail).
Sites that control their communications also control their destiny. And that's the core point. Stop outsourcing. █
