---
title: Footnote
date: 2021-06-15
tags:
 - irc
series: freenode
---

- [Final Chapter](/blog/final-chapter-2021-05-20)
- [Epilogue](/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26)

---

Before the darkness was the darkness, the darkness was a child. This child found
themselves lost and without purpose. Life was scary. Things were changing
constantly, and they found themselves at a loss. One day they were walking about
the etherial network and stumbled across a meeting house.

The child looked inside and was confused. There were hundereds of rooms with
even more people inside. There were rooms on every topic. There was a shower of
culture and an outpouring of knowledge. Hanging out here would permanently
change the course of the child's life.

---

Horrified by the room takeover golem, the remaining regulars had fled their
former homes. This was not a home for legal reasons, but it was their social
home on the etherial network. Sadness had turned to rage had turned to
depression had turned to laughter. One of the former regulars was a apprentice
scryer, so as a lark they decided to set up some meeting rooms to scry their way
into rooms in the old meeting house. It was a one-way scry and all they could do
was watch.

---

Historically, IRC spam has been a unique form of art. Yes, I'm serious. There
have been legitimate works of art created in the desire to disrupt conversations
on IRC. It sounds absurd, but it's true. One unique quality of these artworks is
that in order to see them, they must be shared with others. At some level you
can't view this art alone, and that makes it beautiful.

Fighting IRC spam has turned into a full time job. There are hundreds of
different bot kinds and so many different ways to spam that fighting it is
difficult due to the server software being very simple. Historically IRC
developers have not wanted to add hooks so that people could run a bit of code
on each message as it was being processed. There were legitimate fears that
doing this would allow a malicious server admin to log every channel, not just
the ones they have joined. IRC was created at a time where all of the admins
knew eachother; but they were part of different organizations, each with their
own rules and subtly different codes of conduct.

One of the best ways to fight IRC spam has been to wait until the spammer gets
bored and goes off to do something else. Users are not as understanding to this
method.

---

Someone had set up a golem-creating golem and aimed it at the meta-discussion
room of the former meeting house. It did its job dutifully and continued
marching on:

> (pissnet) come to pissnet for cold wet chats!

The people watching the scry had never seen this brand of disruption before. By
now the people watching had amassed to over a hundred and they were all bored
and eager for something new. Something new was here!

> (pissnet) come to pissnet for cold hard piss!

Over time, the shadowy group behind these golems became known as the urinators.
These urinators became a bit of a hero to the people who watched in horror as
the situation developed. The golems got discovered and ejected, and even earned
the ire of the anti-golem golem. The disguise was clever, the ejections where
swift, but the watchers laughed as the golems kept getting more and more
creative.

---

The darkness was dismayed. Everything was falling apart around them. The
maintainers of the maintenance golems had fled. The spellcrafters that empowered
them [had sworn to give no more
assistance](https://atheme.github.io/atheme-open-letter/). The halls themselves
were starting to show the rot that had built up over the last 20 years of them
existing.

The darkness pondered amongst themselves until they pulled back a memory from
the past. A memory from the child. The halls themselves had to be replaced!

---

The watchers looked on in horror. The scryer had given up hope and decided to
move on with their life. The urinators had suceeded in shutting down the things
that were fun to the watchers. The urinators won.

Some urinators created their own halls. It was an experiment in anarchy for
running these types of halls. It is astounding that it managed to stay as stable
as it did.

---

I have been completely unsure how I should broach the topic of pissnet in these
articles. For people unfamiliar with IRC culture, you must think I'm making shit
up or something. It is _so_ out there that it's almost like an abstact art
gallery or something. But no, pissnet happened. It started as IRC spam and then
turned into this: [letspiss.net](http://letspiss.net/). I don't really think I
can suggest readers of this blog go there. It is some kind of weird anarchist
IRC hackerspace, but most of the users are ircops and can see your IP address.

Like, for people that are really deep into IRC culture, the whole pissnet
shitshow was so out there that they thought the people that were telling them
about that were making that shit up.

But it's real.

---

> We are moving past legacy freenode to a new fork. The new freenode is
> launched. You will slowly be disconnected and when you reconnect, you will be
> on the new freenode. We patiently await to welcome you in freedom's holdout -
> the freenode. If you're looking to connect now, you can already /server
> chat.freenode.net 6697 (ssl) or 6667 (plaintext). It's a new genesis for a new
> era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode
> is IRC. freenode is FOSS. When you connect, register your nickname and your
> channel and get started. It's a new world. We're so happy to welcome you and
> the millions of others.

The darkness smiled and replaced the halls where they were. The darkness hoped
that millions would follow.

They didn't come.

---

- [Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC
  network](https://www.devever.net/~hl/freenode_suicide)
- [the end of freenode](https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/)
- [All Freenode Channels and Users
  Gone](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/o0263h/all_freenode_channels_and_users_gone/)
- [Last remaining >1000 user community channel seized by freenode
  staff](https://linux.chat/linux-on-freenode/)

Freenode is dead. The spirit lives on in [Libera.chat](https://libera.chat/).
