A few weeks ago, Greg Stafford passed away. He was best known as the founder of Chaosium (one of the greatest role-playing game publishers in history), co-designer of RuneQuest (one of the greatest role-playing games in history), and creator of Glorantha (one of the greatest fantasy universes in history).

Since then, there has been a lot of talk about his life and legacy, but I can mostly recommend Ken and Robin’s Special Podcast Episode, which has several anecdotes about Greg, and the Chaosium Forums’ Condolence Thread, which has quite a few nice pictures, stories, and words on the subject.

Now, the folks at Chaosium recently made a call to play a game in honour of Greg next weekend (November 10th). Although you can frankly play any game and be certain that Greg Stafford had at least some kind of indirect influence over its design and/or its author, it’s obviously even better if you play a game that is more directly linked to him. Sadly, our weekly Friday game night is on a hiatus from our Call of Cthulhu campaign – that would have been our best homage to Greg, short of playing RuneQuest or Pendragon. But what we’re doing is still not too bad, as we just started a 7th Sea one-shot adventure, and John Wick, the game’s author, recently posted a nicely worded blog post about how much influence Greg had on his career (which includes L5R in addition to 7th Sea).

So I guess we’ll be plundering ships and fighting sea monsters for the occasion.

Farewell, Mr. Stafford.

Last month marked IRC’s 30 year anniversary! Jarkko Oikarinen booted up the first IRC server some time in August 1988 at the University of Oulu in Finland.

The New Stack reminisced about the good ol’ days:

“It’s the kind of place that slaps you around a bit with a large trout.”

Developer Khaled Mardam-Bey enhanced his 1995 Windows IRC client mIRC
with a /slap command based on an old Monty Python skit. Typing /slap
and a user’s name would type out a sentence indicating that you were
slapping that user around with a large trout.

I used mIRC in the late 90s and early 2000s as a French student, and definitely remember this “feature” that I found funny but totally random. Of course, that’s because I didn’t know the Monty Python back then… I hadn’t given it any thought until recently!

This IRC anniversary is also a good opportunity to see how resilient open and decentralized communication protocols are – while proprietary platforms like ICQ or AOL IM came and went away, IRC just carried on. As Drew DeVault says, please stop using Slack.

Of course, IRC has its share of problems, but it’s sad how Slack is solving them not by improving IRC, but by building a different, proprietary solution. I guess this is what happens when the Internet stops being built by universities, governments, and communities, and is instead built by publicly traded companies and VC-backed start-ups… although you occasionally find a rare one that does the right thing.

Indeed, I had checked IRCCloud a while ago, but figured I wanted to keep “having fun”¹ managing my own ZNC bouncer with multi-client support and notifications. But now, I realize that they’re helping with the IRCv3 standard (like, say, implementing reply threads and avatars), so I started supporting them by using (and paying for) their service (which, incidentally, you can point to your private ZNC if you wish to). Their client is pretty good, too (both online or as a phone app). Basically that’s me voting with my wallet.

Long live IRC! Or Matrix. Or something.

Today, Eugen, the creator of Mastodon, the Fediverse’s probably most popular instance implementation, tooted this:

He’s basically quickly explaining to newcomers how to find someone whose account lives on a different instance – something that might be understandably foreign to people used to silos like Twitter or Facebook. But then he adds:

It’s very similar to how e-mail addresses work.

That’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about the Fediverse: it’s not clear how a Fediverse service like Mastodon relates to someone’s online identity. The added element of having multiple instances to choose from is often compared to e-mail, where people can choose between Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo and thousands of other providers, while still being able to communicate… but the important difference is that email lets you decouple your identity from your service provider. You can be john@doefamily.com, with your email hosted with Google or Fastmail or whoever else you want. And if you want to switch providers, you can do so without having to tell anybody: they still email you, and receive emails from, the same address as before.

That’s not the case (yet) with the Fediverse. If you’re @johndoe@mastodon.social but want to move to pawoo.net, you’d have to migrate your profile and tell people to follow you over there.

I suppose that a technical solution is possible, and might follow the same model as e-mail, where mail servers first ping the receiver’s domain’s DNS table and ask for the actual mail server via MX records. There’s also some other more complex stuff on the receiving end to prevent spam via other DNS records like SPF and DKIM. Mastodon, or any other Fediverse server, could similarly ping doefamily.com and see that @john@doefamily.com is hosted on pawoo.net, thus sending a notification to @johndoe@pawoo.net.

The question is: should it?

I have no idea. That’s the other thing that bugs me: the Fediverse seems still unsure about what it is – it’s only sure about what it’s trying to be and not to be.

For instance, someone proposed recently that the term “instances”, which comes from a rather technological background, be replaced with the term “communities”, to show that this is more about finding a place where you feel “at home”. Since the whole point of the Fediverse is to be able to communicate with other instances, it might seem odd to have to pick an instance based on other factors than price/performance¹, but the reality is that instances have different moderation policies, might block other instances, and, more importantly, the UX (at least with Mastodon) gives a prominent place to your instance’s Timeline compared to the rest.

As such, Fediverse instances look to me like Twitter’ified versions of internet forums where you can also reply to threads from other forums. Maybe you’re @ilovepikachu@pokemon.social and you talk about Pokemon all day long, but sometimes you also talk politics by replying to someone on anticapitalist.party… but does that even make sense? Wouldn’t you just have a profile on each instance/community, using each profile appropriately, the same way we’ve had different accounts on a handful of forums since the late 90s?

The answer, of course, is often a vague “it depends”. The Fediverse is what you make of it… or something. But for a technology predicated on “taking back what’s yours” from the evil Silicon Valley corporations, the Fediverse doesn’t seem to have a good story about how you can own your identity and your data. I guess that’s what the IndieWeb movement is trying to address more directly.

In the meantime, I maintain my own Mastodon instance – something I don’t need to do for my e-mail.