[gentoo-user] why libera?

[gentoo-user] why libera?

[caveman رَجُلُ الْكَهْفِ 穴居人]

hi.  i personally think gentoo should've gone to
OFTC instead of libera, because:

- OFTC is the true libera, thanks to its better
  tor support, which is not surprising as it is
  the home of the tor project.

- OFTC has more users at the moment, and is
  specifically designed for FOSS projects.

- OFTC is older than libera, with less problems to
  solve.

despite libera being called after liberty in latin,
its tor support is hypocritical, as it requires
registering SASL over an un-tor-ed connection,
hence revealing your IP address, which defeats the
whole point of tor (hiding your IP address).
OFTC, on the other hand, is the home of the tor
project, and has best tor support.  so, in a
sense, OFTC is the true libera.

the only reason that i can think of that would
explain why a group of people would create libera,
is because their /hobby/ is to maintain IRC
servers.

i'm not for freenode either.  the latest move was
unacceptable, and it's good that people started
leaving freenode, to show the new owners that
while they can purchase a bunch of servers and
domain names, they cannot purchase people.

so i like that this freenode drama happened.  but
i dislike that we solved it by creating libera.  i
think we should've solved it by going the simpler
solution:  go to what already exists, and already
has more liberty (more tor friendliness): OFTC.

but, what happened is that we -instead- went to
the freenode copy-cat, with the same hypocritical
tor support, aka libera, which is as far away from
liberty as freenode was away from free.

while this subject is still warm and in the
making, i recommend gentoo to change its opinion
ans switch to the OFTC.

rgrds,
cm.

Re: [gentoo-user] why libera?

[Michael Cook]

On 5/28/21 2:44 PM, caveman رَجُلُ الْكَهْفِ 穴居人 wrote:
> hi.  i personally think gentoo should've gone to
> OFTC instead of libera, because:
> 
> - OFTC is the true libera, thanks to its better
>    tor support, which is not surprising as it is
>    the home of the tor project.
> 
> - OFTC has more users at the moment, and is
>    specifically designed for FOSS projects.
> 
> - OFTC is older than libera, with less problems to
>    solve.
> 
> despite libera being called after liberty in latin,
> its tor support is hypocritical, as it requires
> registering SASL over an un-tor-ed connection,
> hence revealing your IP address, which defeats the
> whole point of tor (hiding your IP address).
> OFTC, on the other hand, is the home of the tor
> project, and has best tor support.  so, in a
> sense, OFTC is the true libera.
> 
> the only reason that i can think of that would
> explain why a group of people would create libera,
> is because their /hobby/ is to maintain IRC
> servers.
> 
> i'm not for freenode either.  the latest move was
> unacceptable, and it's good that people started
> leaving freenode, to show the new owners that
> while they can purchase a bunch of servers and
> domain names, they cannot purchase people.
> 
> so i like that this freenode drama happened.  but
> i dislike that we solved it by creating libera.  i
> think we should've solved it by going the simpler
> solution:  go to what already exists, and already
> has more liberty (more tor friendliness): OFTC.
> 
> but, what happened is that we -instead- went to
> the freenode copy-cat, with the same hypocritical
> tor support, aka libera, which is as far away from
> liberty as freenode was away from free.
> 
> while this subject is still warm and in the
> making, i recommend gentoo to change its opinion
> ans switch to the OFTC.
> 
> rgrds,
> cm.
> 
> 
Tor simply introduce too much chance of abuse. If people didn't abuse 
it, it wouldn't be blocked.

Re: [gentoo-user] why libera?

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 6:10 PM Michael Cook <mcook@mackal.net> wrote:
>
> Tor simply introduce too much chance of abuse. If people didn't abuse
> it, it wouldn't be blocked.
>

Yeah, as much as I love it, this service obviously is going to be
abused, especially for something like IRC.

Really though the main reason they went with Libera was that it was a
much simpler move.  Libera was basically feature-complete, while OFTC
lacks namespaces and channel management features.  They're looking to
change that, but Libera was a drop-in replacement.  Gentoo has a LOT
of IRC channels and managing them all would be painful on OFTC.

You also have the issue of nick collisions.  Having everybody change
nicks would be inconvenient, and chances are there would be collisions
across the networks.  A Gentoo dev can't very well expect somebody on
OFTC to give up their nick that they were using perhaps for many
years.  Libera was new so collisions were unlikely unless it was
intentional abuse.  We did have a case of that, but the Libera admins
were happy to fix that (only one case I've heard of and it was obvious
abuse with many Gentoo nicks being registered to one person).

There was also some discussion about moving to something other than
IRC as a primary communications medium.  The general sense was that
this was going to be more controversial, that alternatives had some
issues, and again Libera was an easy drop-in replacement.

Supporting some other network or technology down the road is always
something that could happen, either as an alternative or primary home.
However, the general sense was that it would make more sense to just
consider that and transition in a more orderly way down the road.

-- 
Rich