the end of freenode ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the
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I lived on Freenode for several years. I went from UnrealIRCd+Anope, to Charybdis+Atheme when running community IRC server for users of a particular ISP. Putting purity and simplicity aside, it feels like Matrix is the natural path of progression for the old Freenode community.
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I realize a lot of people will not feel that way, for nostalgic reasons or because they want to make IRCv3 into their vision of what should be the future of chatting on the Internet and other reasons I'm sure. What do you think about the co-existence of IRC & Matrix?
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Matrix requires you use a bot to ban all users on the kiwifarms matrix server. It does this by kickbanning them as they join, one at a time. Serious downgrade over IRC tbh.
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There are server ACLs to ban servers from a room without domain names and/or a list of specific servers. No UI for it in Element though. Need to do it as a custom event.
Element is also missing a UI to do server administration and there isn't a good one available elsewhere.
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You can also block synapse from communicating with that IP address via the server configuration. It would be easier to manage it with OS tooling or block resolving domains instead of hard-wiring IP addresses / ranges.
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The Mjolnir bot is primarily for doing kicks/bans across a bunch of rooms and to do moderation more impersonally to protect moderators from having abuse directed at them, similar to using ChanServ for it.
It also works around not being able to do glob-based kicks/bans, etc.
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They do really need to improve the moderation tools.
However, a lot of it is simply the limitation of having an open federation model with a bunch of other servers where you don't have server administration privileges. You can't ban users on other servers via their IP, etc.
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On our freenode channels, we were being raided by a few people who would cycle through IP addresses using VPNs so the IP address bans weren't accomplishing much anyway. Most of the abusive behavior we had was via freenode web client for whatever reason and has largely stopped.
The most persistent troll harassing us hasn't yet moved to either Matrix or libera. They did make a couple Matrix accounts but I think they're slowed down / discouraged by most public servers requiring email registration. If they used libera web chat we could just block using it.
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They could just figure out how to set up a proper IRC client but at least for this most persistent / egregious troll who was bothering us (who we call Adam based on them often using that name for their sockpuppets) they seemingly got driven away by the fall of freenode.
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