[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Carl Schwan]

Le jeudi, mai 20, 2021 2:18 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development <development at qt-project.org> a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> On 20/05/2021 13:47, Alejandro Exojo wrote:
>
> > On Wed, May 19, 2021, at 8:16 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development wrote:
> >
> > > -   there's no registration required;
> > > -   the $newthing has proven stability, staff, resources, etc., and won't
> > >     disappear in a few months/years;
> > >
> > > -   ...
> > >
> > > then anything is fine.
> > > All other things being equal, the simplest measure would be to simply
> > > move over to Libera. (...)
> >
> > Can Libera already be considered so quickly? A fork of a software is not so easy
> > as the "fork" of a service, isn't it? We don't know if they will disappear in a
> > month, or if Freenode will be fixed by then. Or if another "fork" appears.
>
> Sure, that's a fair question.
>
> Personally,
>
> 1.  I trust the staffing (coming from Freenode);
> 2.  I trust the organization being entirely under EU law (it's in
>     Sweden), with a strong privacy policy;
>
> 3.  I trust it not disappearing tomorrow; most of the sponsored servers
>     are switching from Freenode to Libera, and many big projects are moving
>     there (e.g. Ubuntu just voted in favor. Of course none will move
>     overnight, just like Qt isn't moving overnight; decisions +
>     practicalities will take some time).
>
>
> > Also, I don't understand how not having to register can be a requirement at all,
> > given that one needs to register, sometimes multiple times, to use some of the
> > other official channels. E.g. to participate in the mailing list I of course
> > need to subscribe to it, and to get an email account at all I would either need
> > to register with some provider or use a work email address (or self-host or...).
>
> Or self-host, indeed. But nothing apart from your email is needed, and
> that email is NEVER used for any commercial or marketing or research
> purpose. Which is the same requirement for the mailing lists. It might
> not be the case for some 3rd party services.
>
> > If at all, not requiring registration makes me more concerned about spam,
> > trolling, harassment, etc.
>
> Which you can easily ignore (see user mode +g, +R). None of this has
> been a major problem on Freenode so far.
>
> > I have my own biases after going through many pains to have a modern-ish IRC
> > experience (self hosting Quassel, using IRC bouncers, etc.). I hope that the
> > current active community of people on IRC doesn't get alienated if something
> > else is chosen, but I also hope that something with proper features is chosen so
> > I can be back online on those communities, because my paste experience with IRC
> > makes me not want to go there again unless really needed.
> > FWIW, I'm now on other IM platforms, and all of Matrix, Telegram, Mattermost and
> > even Discord seem to have acceptable IRC integration, and some open source
> > projects treat both sides of the integration as official channels. People seem
> > to be aware of it, and the friction between the two feature sets and "idioms" of
> > the platform are more or less respected. So a middle ground is possible as well.
>
> Sure, but this doesn't bring an answer to the original question:
>
> -   Is the Qt community OK at staying on Freenode? (Currently it has an
>     official presence! Although noone seems to know better, esp. who is
>     the primary contact for this presence. Looking at the channels
>     registrations, the founders are Thiago, ossi, tronical, JP-Nurmi, but
>     that doesn't necessarily match who is the point of contact.)
>
> -   If no: does it wish to move to another IRC network -- to where?
> -   If no: does it want to drop its official IRC presence? Implication:
>     the #qt* channels namespace will be released, and so up for grabs by the
>     first person passing by and registering channels in there.
>
>     Lacking some formal voting infrastructure, how do we take this vote?
>     I'd say, KISS: please reply to this email and express your preference.

I believe the best course of action would be to wait a bit until KDE moves
its freenode presence to libera (should happen soon). And then Qt can move
its freenode channels to libera and add Matrix bridging to the new channels
with the KDE-Matrix instance.

People who prefer IRC will still be able to use IRC, people who would like
to use a more modern chat protocol can use Matrix and both will be able to
communicate together using the Matrix bridge.

Currently, there are already some unofficial matrix channels bridged to the Qt
IRC channels (e.g. #_freenode_#qt-labs:kde.org) but making them official,
grouping them into a Matrix Space[1] and encouraging people to join them could
help to make Qt a friendlier project to join.

Cheers,
Carl

[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/17/the-matrix-space-beta

--
Carl Schwan
https://carlschwan.eu
KDE Developer, Co-maintainer of NeoChat the KDE Matrix client

>     Thanks,
>     --
>     Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
>     KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
>     Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
>     KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts
>
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