It is ok if it never gets adopted as mainstream communication. But for the target audience (like opensource support communities being the target audience of Libera), it works quite well.
In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.
Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.
They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.
That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.
Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.
It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.
I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.
I disagree with that characterization.
> and survived
Survival is not the issue. Mastodon will survive. Tumblr survives. Even MySpace survives. But major disruptions tend to lose users.
(And yes it's true that the potential Twitter acquisition is a potential major disruption. But it's not going to be shut down after a $44 billion investment.)
As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done.
Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trickling in to the channels in the new servers. Seems seamless enough to me. I doubt such an easy migration is possible if Twitter disappears suddenly.
It's probably more about how much the new owners will want to drop into it and how long before it moves to x.com (?) and becomes an everything app
Why did you feel the need to mention this 100% obvious fact?
Of course I meant that the new owners wouldn't shut down something they just spent $44 billion on, thereby throwing their investment in the trash, not that Twitter would magically get a $44 billion operating cash infusion.
It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously
Okthanksbye.
> It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky.
---
I see you've edited it now to be more clear
Resources donated by an organization in the form of a server linked into a larger network, a committee that vetted new server applications to the network, volunteer administrators for the network and the individual servers, coordinated regional and global upgrades. And as network users increased, reforming under a hub and spoke models to improve scale and capacity.
And when a single IRC server went away after some time operating for its various reasons, the network kept going.
Could the average IRC user start/host their own instance *and* link it to the larger network? No. But they didn't need to.