Introducing Remotes

Hello, World.

Since the beginning of the internet, IRC has provided a pipeline of communication leading to innovations that the world hadn't seen before. The internet was one thing as was e-mail, but it was the real time connectivity of IRC that finally shrank the world to one community. Many different kinds of people across borders formed groups across all kinds of different sectors which relied on, and benefitted from IRC and its ability to connect like minded passionate people, not just neighbors, together, be it FOSS, to translators, to whistleblowers, to you-name-it. IRC was the free world.

IRC continued, in a decentralized form, with powerful IRC clients, like BitchX and mIRC which both incorporated extensible scripting capabilities, and also, eggdrop bots that would stay online and provide the same programmable interface to IRC.

However, the great attack against IRC eventually arrived. Similar to those we see on the message boards today, the freedom of IRC was too much for some to bare. It needed to go. The IRC War came and went quickly, and IRC, from a great millions of users when the internet was only millions of users, shriveled into a shell of its former self. From there, purpose driven communications applications, with user interaction and narrative driven and controlled by the leadership of said apps, flooded the world.

Today, most people are engaged on their phones, all day, and live by the rules governed by code written by the developers but chosen by few leaders of large entities. Slavery has never been so far and wide. Never before has such a small group of people controlled the lives and destinies of so many.

It pains me to see this go down this way.

Technology, and the knowledge to build said technology, deserves to be shared with the people. It causes the greatest progress in humanity when it's all shared - the FOSS movement that we harbor at freenode is a prime example. However, another war between the powerful and the divided -- the people -- continues. When we, the people, become too powerful, we are divided, again and again. It's the oldest play in the book, and alas, the most used tool by the powerful.

There is another way forward, and we're taking you there. It is a small world after all ♫.

Introducing Remotes by IRC.com by freenode

Originally we had peer to peer. This changed to servers, which became cloud platforms and eventually serverless deployment of backend code. Today we're taking this one step further -- the frontend and backend are now one.

Remotes provides a canvas where you can run code in the cloud, and locally, at the same time. We believe in a different path forward, where instead of app developers dictating how you run code, you choose how you run code. Everything, including the IRC client, the Text Editor and the Code Editor are simply modules that you can choose to require in your code or not. You can also modify and change everything, as everything is simply a DOM element. It's a new way of computing - with the source code itself as the OS interface.

You can share modules with others thru npm. We're bringing the environment that led to everything we have today back. It's time for the return of the power of the people.

We're really excited about this new technology and hope to bring coding, and IRC, to people everywhere. Coding is cool AF, and we're going to teach it to you all! Take control of your destiny.

Remotes is in BETA. Simply message me on freenode (root) to get an invite. We predict launch day to be in the next month or so.

Just getting started

We've already taken IRC further in the past couple months than it has in its entire existence, and we're not done yet. We're still just getting started. In the following months, you will become more empowered than you have ever been before, because you deserve freedom; because you deserve the freenode.

freenode is FOSS, freenode is freedom, freenode is IRC, and freenode is for you. Ask not what you can do for freenode, but what freenode will do for you.

Welcome to the freenode autonomous zone, the home of internet freedom - where we are fighting the good fight, for you.

For freedom,

HIH Andrew Lee (root)

President of the freenode autonomous zone