What is IRC? It stands for internet relay chat, and despite being developed in 1988, it is still a very useful means of low-bandwidth communication, serving hundreds of thousands of users daily across the world. We have created our own IRC Server at irc.sylnt.us, port 6667. Won't you join us?
"Some have asked why we run our own servers instead of using a public one such as freenode.net. We did this to have control of the TOS, copyright, DMCA, and other legal issues. I like freenode (and their TOS) a lot, but we're building a community and we should make our own choices.
Landon, our overlord of IRC, set this up with a lot of help from his team. He also set us up a link-shortener sylnt.us domain for the Twitter account: that rocks! So send him some love if you see him on IRC - he's doing a bang-up job!
Speaking of Twitter, Bender, our IRC bot, posts the headlines to our Twitter account, so feel free to follow us there."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Pav on Monday February 24 2014, @04:12AM
The reason I'm personally uncomfortable with this is trust. I don't think you guys are from Dice or NSA etc..., but after the whole Slashdot/Dice thing I'm not excited by the concept of trusting a single entity again. What happens if some Russian bot herders think you might be a good target to "ask" for a contribution "or else", or if a bag of cash says "shut down the site + IRC today"? Yeah, the latter is unlikely, but I would have said it was unlikely for Dice to think it was a good idea to de-emphasise its community. As things stand there's no fallback. At least with FreeNode they have experience with DDOS and could stand up to a MUCH bigger botnet. It's also much harder for the community to be scattered/destroyed. I suppose a malicious entity with ops could make the FreeNode channel invite-only however.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Natales on Monday February 24 2014, @05:03AM
Look, the genie is out of the bottle. We, this "fuzzy" community, represent a very specific segment of the nerd/geek population at large, and *we* are here to stay. Even if the site fails, we will rebuild. Besides, don't underestimate the level of collective intelligence and will of this community (or money for that matter). The title of this site is spot on: it's people, and we have power.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Barrabas on Monday February 24 2014, @06:30AM
We won't be a single entity for long.
We haven't chosen a business/financial model as yet, but my best guess is that we'll be non-profit with either a board of directors or using the co-op model (everyone owns the business).
This doesn't *completely* eliminate selling out, but the risk is spread among several individuals. For example, Craig Newmark is still keeping craigslist [wikipedia.org] true to its non-commercial nature, despite losing 25% of the company to eBay.
(I'm currently running the show here at SoylentNews)