> In the future, each server on the network will be bound by the IRCNow Constitution. IRCNow's governance is modeled after the US constitution and its principles of government. This network exists for the public interest, to promote liberty and justice on the Internet.

oh no

constitutional primitivism sure is a hell of a drug, huh?

@ariadne ...IRC Judiciary?
The IRC Legislature?

@ariadne

@ariadne i love it when people argue in favor of human rights by making the case that it's the thing that a bunch of conniving genocidal maniacs & human traffickers would have wanted

@arrjay the IRC Electoral College

@JamesWidman they probably think it’s “fake news”

@ariadne that's why you always revert back to v0.931.pre-alpha.dev

@ariadne

it's kinda wild to me that someone would think "we want to base our set of rules on a real-life national constitution" and then go "it shall be the u.s. one, even though, as the second-oldest constitution (first is san marino's), it has a lot of flaws that have since been deeply analyzed and corrected in later national constitutions (and, to some extent, in amendments to the u.s. one)"

like, how america-brained someone must be to not even consider "what if some other constitutions got some things right that we should borrow instead?" -- which is even more ironic, because it is well-known that the u.s. constitution's writers took partial inspiration from the iroquois confederacy's laws in addition to european ones

granted, the whole idea of "let's just adapt a national law for our small community" is by itself misguided

@ariadne this… what?

A user accused of abuse who flees to another server must be handed back to the server the abuse was committed on to be judged.

I suppose this is a warning sign:

Each server is guaranteed a republican form of government

This all reads like the wet dream of one of those US-american micronation dudes…

This…

• https://ircnow.org/index.php?n=Minutemin.Server
• https://ircnow.org/index.php?n=Minutemin.Duty

… totally reads like religious zealotry.

@ariadne @arrjay I assumed you were joking about this, but they do in fact have an IRC Electoral College.

They're also picking their vice president as the second place candidate in their presidential election. That's going to work great up until the point where people disagree about how to run things.

@jamesh @arrjay thanks i hate it

@mirabilos @ariadne It's probably fine. Their constitution explicitly states the admins cannot establish an official religion.

@jamesh @ariadne yeah, what is with that?

@ariadne Are black servers only counted as 3/5ths of a white server and denied a vote?

@ariadne They literally claim that the top reason IRC has lost 90% of its users because:

> Most [IRC servers] do not allow freedom of religion or freedom of the press.

They also have some text describing a "minutemin" "bootcamp" which includes "civics" courses such as:

> How to Ask Good Questions

Thank you for alerting us to this rich text!

@ahills why would an irc server need these things

@ariadne as an staff member on one of the IRC servers, what would you suggest as improvements that could be done or do you think this network is a lost cause? As far as I know the elections and constitution stuff haven't been used yet and have just been on the website for years so there might be room for changes.

@BobParody i mean i think you all should sit down and figure out some real, practical governance for an IRC network, rather than some idyllic propaganda, especially of a nation that has fallen into neofascism…

@ariadne I don't really think many people here (me included) have much knowledge or experience with governance of IRC networks. Do you have any suggestions on where to learn more about network governance?

@BobParody

1. sit down and figure out your actual policy goals

2. craft processes around them

IRC does not need complex governance, it needs trust in the staff who run it.

@jamesh @ariadne @arrjay They're taking the US constitution as a model *without* the amendments?

(In the US, there was exactly one Presidential election that actually worked like this -- the first contested election, which ended up with Jefferson nominally serving as Adams's VP while undermining his administration from within, to the point of surreptitiously funding pamphlets attacking Adams.It was an obvious enough failure to get immediately patched by the 12th amendment, in 1803.)

@ariadne sounds like someone got told they weren’t the President of IRC and this is the response

@cobweb it really does have some “hold my beer” energy to it

@ariadne In practice none of this actually applies and pissnet is better coordinated than IRCNow. There’s no single staff channel (equivalent of pissnet’s #opers), and NgIRCd is horribly broken in ways too numerous to list (but the founder, jrmu, refuses to give up on NgIRCd and suggests that if you don’t like it you should start another network with another ircd and somehow bridge it).

Here’s a far-from-complete list of the ways in which NgIRCd is broken:

• There’s a bug that allows for s2s injection if charconv is enabled. This is now disabled on all IRCNow servers, but it took a few weeks to get everyone to do this. One server refused (claiming that disabling charconv would introduce other bugs somehow) and eventually got delinked and switched to unrealircd, but now seems to be back again.
• Sometimes random modes and bans get set on channels on netjoins, and there’s no way to unset them without a pseudoserver. I’m sure there’s a memory safety bug here somewhere.
• There’s no timestamps so it’s easy to abuse a netsplit to nick-collide someone off the network or take over a channel.
• On netjoins, servers send incorrect messages like MODE +o nick1 nick2 nick3 nick4, resulting in desyncs.
• Cloaking is horribly broken. There’s two kinds of random cloaks: one which is always enabled and one which can be enabled by setting umode +x. The configuration of this isn’t consistent across the network (some have no cloaking, some have umode +x cloaking, and some have always enabled cloaking), and servers apply umode +x cloaks remotely, which results in bans and G-lines not working properly access the network. I’m also not sure if there’s even a way to set CIDR bans, since K/G-lines apply on the cloaked IP rather than the real IP.
• Every K/G-line set leaks the oper’s real uncloaked IP address to the entire network (as well as the ban reason and mask the ban was set on), because anyone can set umode +s (or join &SERVER) to receive snotes.
• There’s no oper override logging, or way to opt out of oper override without completely disabling it for the server.
• It’s not modular and there’s no reloading the code without restarting the server.

It is literally the worst ircd I have ever used.

@ariadne I’ve been reminded of several more unfixed major bugs:

• You can set bans with spaces in them, which breaks s2s and allows you to set arbitrary modes on channels (and cause desyncs, since the server you’re on won’t see those modes but others will) as long as you can set bans. This allows you to escalate privileges from halfop to founder and set oper-only modes.
• Remote LIST exists and isn’t rate-limited, so you can easily flood off any server and cause a netsplit. Combined with the “bans with spaces allow for privilege escalation” bug and lack of timestamps, this means you can easily take over any channel and escalate your privileges to +q (founder).
• Apparently there’s a way for neither user to get killed in case of a nick collision resulting in weird cursed ghost users. I don’t quite understand this one.

I’m pretty sure jrmu knows about all this but does not care enough to switch to a less broken ircd.

@rst @jamesh @ariadne @arrjay

learning from history is hard...

@noisytoot @ariadne Even without using bugs ngircd is still fundamentally flawed in it's federation design and someone was able to hijack jrmu's account: http://xfnw.freeirc.org/no-real-bugs.html . I think jrmu's reluctance to switching to a different ircd is "minimalism" but sometimes a few extra features and bug-fixes are good. NgIRCd is still missing sasl too with no plans on adding it.

@noisytoot pissnet is the ultimate expression of IRC freedom anyway

@jamesh @ariadne @arrjay isn’t that how things started in the US as well? And that practice lasted, what, two elections?

@fluffy @jamesh @arrjay yes, adams undermined jefferson