Today I got kicked off of Freenode for trying to help someone.

Every part of that sentence has backstory. It’s… complicated.

I started using freenode probably in 1998 or 1999. It was the place to go when you wanted to discuss free software. That’s 23 years ago. Freenode has become synonymous with free software support.

I expect most of you are aware that a few weeks ago someone took over the freenode network for no readily discernible reason. And things have gone downhill since then.

Meanwhile, I’ve kept trying to do my job. Part of which is supporting the Centos user community and ensuring they get the answers that they need when they need them.

Most of us moved over to Libera chat pretty quickly after the Takeover occurred. But like I said, freenode is synonymous with open software. And so the general user population, who haven’t read all of the assorted news, still go to freenode when they want answers. Aye, there’s the rub. Because when they get there, they are met with a toxic, juvenile group of people who have no interest in helping them, and are really just there to stoke their own egos.

Imagine, if you will, that you have been hanging out in the same Cafe for 20 years. You know everybody there. They’re all kind, with their own weird idiosyncrasies. But you know that it’s a comfortable, safe place.

Then, one day, the entire management has changed. There’s a few familiar faces in the customers. But for the most part they’re all new. And they’re screaming at each other. Swearing, making Nazi jokes, or just generally being vulgar.

That’s how the freenode thing has been for me. I have been on freenode almost every day for more than 20 years. Now all of a sudden the people running the show are juvenile strangers who seemed to delight in cruelty.

So, while my banishment today was not unexpected, it was a sad, pathetic end to a long era. Somehow, we have allowed this community resource to be taking over by a narcissistic millionaire who just considers it his plaything, or a way to get petty revenge. Tragic and pathetic.

Today, someone asked a question, they waited a reasonable time for an answer, and I told them maybe they should look over on Libera.chat for their answer. That was deemed worthy of booting me off of the network where I have spent thousands of hours helping hundreds of people solve their software problems. For 20 years.

Track: Turi
Turi, 1980
September 20, 2007

My ear on the rail,
something I’d read in a book,
I proclaimed sagely that
something was coming.
The thrum in the rail
a cicada buzz
heralding the approaching storm,
a minor earthquake
making the pebbles dance
a jitterbug with the distant diesel.

Or not so distant.

My companions scattered
leaving me lying on the ground,
my face on the fiery steel.

Around the bend
not twenty paces away
bigger than a house
it bears down on me
whistle screaming like a tortured soul.

Leaping for the side of the cutting
gaining the edge
just as the behemoth
roared past,
an angry beast
dragging vacuum in its wake.

Heart a running rabbit
trying to break through my ribs,
forty eight cars, pounding past,
each one no farther away
than the reach of my fingers,
feet scrabbling at the
crumbling red clay.
Ten, twenty, a thousand years
as the KR express
bellowed past, shaking the whole world,
inches from my slipping Batas.

Then

Gone

around the next bend
and gone.

Fly and Douglas
on top of the cutting
laughing uncontrollably at my
weak kneed terror,
the scream I didn’t even know
poured from my lips

Then I, too, was laughing,
crying, laughing,
relief, terror, and
joy to be alive,
to be so very alive

The Kentucky legislature is considering a bill to require “social media web sites” to not “censor” content which is political or religious.

A new Big Government Bill was filed yesterday pic.twitter.com/40wuAuVTtZ

— Joe Sonka 😐 (@joesonka) January 14, 2021

It is immediately evident, from the text included in these screenshots, that the legislators in question have not the vaguest idea of how the web works, and what “social media” means.

This website, for example, is a social media website, in the original definition of the term. The concept was, when the term was coined, of social/public/citizen journalism. I am a “citizen journalist”, and this is a social media website, because I publish my content here, and allow for social/public commentary.

You can bet that I delete/hide/shadowban people who post comments that are not appropriate, and I plan to continue to do so.

I suspect that, to these legislators, “social media” means Facebook, Twitter, and some vague notion that there are other things, like Parler, which they might include. ie, massive scale sites, run by huge organizations with staff of hundreds of thousands. They seem unaware that there are hundreds of large social media sites. Here’s a list of some of the larger ones. Here’s a slightly more comprehensive one. Neither one of those even scrapes the surface of the thousands of blogs, newspaper comment sections, mailing lists, message boards, and so on, that comprise most of the Internet.

You do not have a constitutional right to have your content hosted on any of those sites.

They also have this bizarre notion that you, as a member of the public, have some kind of a right to make whatever comments you want on my website. This notion is not supported by the constitution of the US, or the constitution of Kentucky. Compelling a corporation to host the comments of random strangers on the Internet is contrary to any notion of free speech, and is equivalent to claiming that I have an obligation to leave graffiti on the walls of my house because it represents the protected speech of the random tagger.

Please know that if you comment on this post, and I find the comment doesn’t spark joy, I will delete that comment in a heartbeat, and I don’t have to give you any justification for doing so. The very notion that the Kentucky government will fine me $75,000 for doing that is absurd and unconstitutional.

Then there’s the even more complicated question of what constitutes a political or religious comment. I would say that practically any comment is political speech, in the right context.

Now, obviously, they don’t intend to apply this law to me, in the unlikely event that it would pass. Presumably they want to apply it to Twitter – a company that has no staff or offices in Kentucky. So there’s also the question of how they would have any power to enforce this.

I wonder how many other industries state and federal legislatures attempt to regulate without the barest attempt to understand. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess “all of them.”

Edit: I just found the original document – https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/recorddocuments/bill/21RS/sb111/orig_bill.pdf – and it defines a social media site (among other things) as a site with more than 75 million subscribers. While this changes the details, it doesn’t change the principles behind my remarks here.

I have placed an archived copy of the bill here.

A few weeks ago my work project made an unpopular announcement.

If you are not already familiar with the Linux landscape, and CentOS in particular, you will find that I am unable to explain the announcement to you without a 20 minute history lesson. Even with colleagues who are in the software industry, but are unfamiliar with the Linux distro landscape, it has been challenging to explain 1) what changed and 2) why people are angry.

The details of how operating systems are made are mostly boring, and you *want* them to be boring. If your operating system is getting your attention, it’s almost never for a good reason.

But they are angry, and their reasons are (mostly) good ones. That said, this announcement was an announcement, not a discussion. Which is to say, it’s the new reality, and people need to adjust to this change. Which is fine to say, but rather harder in practice.

This morning I sent out the monthly newsletter for the project, as I do every month. Except, this month, I’m getting a stream of hate mail, vitriol, snarky comments, and so on, from people who have evidently not read what I wrote, or who still feel that, somehow, their anger justifies them being terrible humans.

Look, I get that folks are angry. And I even agree with their reasons. But lashing out at *me* because you’re angry about a decision for which I’m the spokesperson doesn’t make any sense. Not only will it not change the decision, but it makes me less sympathetic to your complaints.

I got email this weekend from a computer science student in Italy, asking about mod_pony. He told me that they use mod_pony in their class as an example Apache httpd module, but that the original article pointing to the mod_pony sources was 404’ing, because my svn server has been retired.

So … I am pleased to announce that mod_pony is now on Github.

This is all a demonstration of the Internet reality that no matter how silly you are, someone, somewhere, is going to take it seriously.

(See also: Acme::Time::Asparagus for another illustration of this.)

When Parler started up their website with (supposedly) no content moderation terms of service, I was skeptical. I wrote about it at the time, but unfortunately did so on Facebook, making it more work than it’s worth to track down.

I ran a community website for 25 years (roughly) and content moderation was the most difficult part of it. Nobody wants content moderation, except when they do. If you take down my comment, that’s censorship. If you take down someone else’s, that’s setting the right community tone.

Every site has content moderation – it’s just a question of how it is done. It’s a question of deciding what is appropriate (or on topic) and removing things that are not.

On Parler, for example, if you make pro-Democrat comments, they get shouted down and are moderated by virtue of being drowned out. On Twitter, on the other hand, if you make pro-Nazi comments, they get actually removed. These are just two versions of the same thing.

But with a site like Parler, which was created, presumably, specifically to get past the unfair moderation rules of Facebook and Twitter, you have another problem. The site is specifically intended to allow the most egregious breaches of common etiquette and good manners. And, of course, to be friendly to the kind of thugs and fact-averse people who were responsible for storming the Capitol last week. This means that they’re continually going to be pushing the envelope, and then you run into a kind of content moderation that we all eventually are subject to – when your content actually breaks the law.

Calling for the execution of elected officials (or, indeed, of anyone) is a violation of federal law.

I ran into this with my Kenya website, when people were calling for lynchings and genocide. So, y’know, I had to do something about that. And after 25 years of that, I called it quits.

Parler has now encountered this same reality, albeit at a much larger scale, and for a much heftier bill. Anybody with any community website experience saw this coming, and I’m frankly astonished it took so long.

AWS has very very permissive content policies – basically “don’t break the law”. But when they warned Parler again and again, and Parler did not do anything about it, they had to take action.

If you refuse to moderate the comments of your community, eventually someone else will step in and do it for you.

And if you do it in a way that makes news in this way, finding another provider to host your content is going to be very tricky.

(Cory has an excellent discussion of this over on Twitter.)

After three months of great progress (139 miles in September, 260 in October, and 251 in November) December was a bust, with only 32 miles.

I hate biking indoors. Hate it hate it hate it. And the cold and wet killed my progress.

Goals for 2021:

January, get back up over 200 miles (yeah, even if I have to do it indoors. Ick.)

And then keep it above 200 all year, hopefully 350-400 during the summer months. If I can get back to 15 per day, that’s 360 (with one day off per week), so this should be doable.

If I can get through the winter months. Did I mention I hate biking indoors?