I professionally worked with some members in the channel who attested to my identity and true ownership of the channel and I offered to provide a signed pgp message using my registered email to prove that I owned the channel using a domain name that I own which matched all of my information (basically a true cryptographic proof of identity).

Instead of this, the oper made me announce my intentions to “re-take over” the channel to the other members saying that if nobody contested then he’d return ownership. I did this for about four months every week. Then the oper decided to give owner perms to his friend saying that I wasn’t active enough to administer the channel. After his buddy took over the channel, there have been no administrative actions taken (ie no mode changed) because there haven’t needed to be any? It’s almost as if I knew how to administer an IRC channel and configured it in a way where it didn’t need to be touched? Either way it was pretty much a slap in the face after spending years growing a community for their platform. If anyone is a member of this channel and wants to start fresh ##embedded channel somewhere else, happy to do so. I hope others do the same.

Looks like the former staff member resigned recently. Good on you buddy. But you still have a special place on my no fly list :).

It's also a testament to the beauty of IRC. "we don't like the change. So here's a viable alternative".

We could say something similar happened with WhatsApp, but the difficulty of moving everyone to another platform is so much harder.

It's more of a testament to how niche IRC is that a 20K user migration is significant.

I have a hard time believing anything from Telegram because of the owner. But that number does seem feasible.

> People did leave WhatsApp

I don't think people joining Telegram directly leads to people actually leaving WhatsApp. I joined Signal, but am still in WhatsApp because most people are still on there.

* IRC users have the technical acumen to move.

* IRC users aren't strangers to setting things up and configuring them, so the switching cost isn't as big

* There's a shared ethos about IRC, but not so much for an app that reaches everybody on the planet. You can convince one demographic much easier than all of them.

* IRC is interoperable and easy to change servers, unlike apps with proprietary protocols. If Yahoo started doing horrible things with their email, then people who notice would switch to GMail or another host.

For example the SerenityOS project used to advertise on their site that they had a channel on freenode but now they link a Discord instead.

http://serenityos.org/

Non-technical users have the same sort of experience e.g. switching cell phone providers (provided your area has number portability), switching between subreddits, etc., and those moves definitely happen.

You can make yourself look like a fool though, and you have.

So I'd assume these numbers include tons of people who just have no idea anything happened yet.

It also includes people like me who are just signed in to both until my last couple of groups switch out.

The Freenode numbers, though...

The only reason it's not still running is because eventually the server that I had the detached screen sitting on was decommissioned.

(Ok, admittedly it was probably rebooted a couple of times between that I stopped attaching my screen session and when it was decommissioned. But the server used to be up for hundreds of days at a time without reboots so the point still stands that I "was" on IRC for a long while even after I had stopped "being" on IRC. I don't even remember anymore if I was connected to freenode or IRCnet or both though.)

The Freenode Users line is around ~48k right now according to the hover-card and sits at 48k on the graph axis as expected. The Libera Users line represents ~31k users according to the hover-card but sits at 54k on the axis. I've seen stacked graphs before, but 48+31 isn't 54 so I am not sure if that's what it's trying to show.

Maybe I need more sleep :(

The right axis* has the scale for libera (20k-36k) currently at 31.2k.

It's a really confusing graph so maybe another kind of graph could represent this data better.

* fixed!

It'd be one thing if it were two different quantities being measured, but we're explicitly meant to be comparing Freenode to Libera.chat, so they should really be plotted on the same axis.

Do you have the raw data from which the graph is produced (without JavaScripts or pictures)?

For a more historical view

Btw I used datadog like 5yrs ago when they had a decent free plan for one server and I loved it aswell.

Transitioned to frontend dev recently so I have no use it for now though.

Edit: okay so the site uses datadog charts, now I get your comment.

Please, which tool(s) did you use for the charts?

notice that just because I said I'm freenode staff... that doesn't actually make me freenode staff.