THE hardcore "IRC community" is being further fragmented/split/fractured; yet worse, many people abandon IRC altogether, based on aggregation of numbers of online users. The video above tells the story of one community among many, long present in Freenode.
"If you piss off the biggest supporters of IRC, you will never succeed in this space."Later this month we'll write some articles about where IRC stands on the grand scheme of things. If Lee's goal was to simplify IRC and make it more widely available/accessible (to more people), then it clearly wouldn't succeed; he hardly bothered studying the needs and wants of core users of IRC. If you piss off the biggest supporters of IRC, you will never succeed in this space.
It's all very sad because I wrongly assumed Lee would do the right thing, eventually. He didn't mean harm but actual harm was done. Looking back, I regret some of the things I said about Freenode; the turning point, for me at least, was the mass-confiscation of about 700 channels. He never properly explained this or apologised for that. It all went downhill from there.
We remain heavily dependant on IRC, but managing the communications' flow is a lot harder because over 100 users are scattered across 3 different networks and bridges have their limitations. I'd estimate that I spent over 50 hours so far... probably a lot more than 50 in fact... on all this IRC chaos (explained in the video above). And this chaos prevails. For 13.5 years I never had any issues with Freenode. They say you can make order out of chaos, but in Freenode's case it already feels like a lost cause. ⬆
Credit: Photo above is Fair Use