Congrats to Linux.org for Adopting or Getting Back to IRC
Point well observed and argued perhaps (published yesterday), but lacking in substance/solutions:
"...and an answer is... IRC"
Some years ago the person who runs linux.org came to IRC to speak to me. He was very friendly.
Two people of ours, including some in IRC, have pointed out that IRC is back on linux.org (to quote the announcement, not to paraphrase it).
Both of them also follow Soylent News (SN), which wrote about it (still a top story after 4 days, 22 comments in there thus far).
This topic matters to SN regulars as they can recall the Net before GAFAM took over a lot of it... and destroyed it ("old timers" know the difference and some miss the 1990s Slashdot). Case of point, as per yesterday: "our mail server ended up on Gmail's internal list of non-compliant senders."
As an associate put it, "Google (and Microsoft) aim to eliminate all bit players and self-hosters from the world of e-mail. That much has been clear for well over a decade, maybe even two decades. More of the same is being served up in place of the web, too, as its only competitor, Firefox, has dropped below 2% market share."
As far as we can tell, the co-founder of Slashdot, Jeff Bates, still works for GAFAM. He went astray, chasing money.
Notice that linux.org has its own IRC network, which might be hosted by some giant (we've not checked), but they can always take the domain and rehost elsewhere. They're not "some channel" in somebody else's network, which can deteriorate or betray unsuspecting communities.
This is the way the Net ought to work and was originally designed to work.
We've meanwhile noticed a measurable increase in the number of unique IRC networks tracked by netsplit.net:
Only one network there, LinuxShellz, has "linux" in its name, so linux.net isn't there at the moment. Many networks are not indexed there, so netsplit.net does not see the full scope or extent of IRC 'userbases' ('IRCverse'?). Across networks it sees almost 300,000 simultaneous non-unique users.
IRC as a protocol turns 38 this month. It's not going away any time soon. █