bash.org is gone

The internet archive is becoming one of the most valuable sites on the web, specially to avoid paywalled corpo pages.
- And people are abusing the fuck out of it by uploading tons of copyrighted movies. No one seems to be policing it either. I'm very worried that its days are numbered.
  
  The Internet Archive has special status that gives it protections. What might kill it is the erosion of support for public libraries and such. The advancement of media companies' attempt to have absolute control over everything they release, by binding it into their own services.
  
  Yeah probably. It's the ordinary playbook of allowing one site to become extreamly popular so it's much easier to monitor users and shut down if needed.
  
  Imagine how many copyrighted books are in IRL libraries. Now imagine that IRL libraries can copy any book in any amount. Congrats, now you imagined what libraries in Europe can do.
- What will we do when the internet archive goes down
  
  thats okay, someone will have put all the information on an impossible to search for or browse discord server, that'll surely last forever. /s
  
  Join the crowd on tik tok I guess
  
  There's the Internet archive archive. It's being funded by all the excess donations that archive.org themselves can't find a way to spend.
- Anyone who archives data so it wouldn't be lost is MVP
  
  I download the internet archive once every month and copy it to stone tablets. Even if the world’s electricity reserve runs out, we’ll still have those.
  In unrelated news, I’m looking for people with access to big stone quarries.

IRC was so much better than Discord. People are stupid.
- Relevant xkcd
  
  Oh that is so true!! Love it.
  
  I hope you don't mind me linking https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1782:_Team_Chat
- I've lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can't deny that it's convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There's platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.
  Of course, it's a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn't feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn't call people stupid for using it.
  
  Mostly I think its fine for all that.
  But there's a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for "documentation".
  I get the temptation, I really do. But once you're taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.
  I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn't any.
  
  How is Discord a privacy nightmare?
- It's wild how a good deal of decentralization and FOSS focused communities insist on having Discord be their primary center for community. Worst one is privacy focused communities...
  I can't say that bridging them to matrix was a foolproof endeavor though
- Amen. Guess it's the curse of the unknowing youth. They grow up with this bullcrap. I hate discord so much. "oh buy nitro, have stupid stickers!" ugh.
  I really really really miss IRC. What was wrong with it? Why did it die? Did we all die?
  
  It is alive and well, never died. Many project still use it for communication, support...
- IRC is only text chat, Discord does a ton of other things on top.
  Personally I've been on the internet for the last.. 27 years or so? I've used ICQ, Teamspeak, Skype, IRC, Mumble, Discord, Teams, .. (Probably forgot a few).
  I never really liked IRC, yes, it's private servers which is nice, yes you can be relatively anonymous, but the channels were always a mess. Either too many people spamming so you can't follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
  Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient. But yeah, not much privacy there obviously (though everything you said in IRC was often saved away by a bot, so either way whatever you said was out there).
  
  CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large trout
  
  Sure, but when everybody's Discord content vanishes behind a paywall, or makes you watch a 2 minute advert to see a Wiki, what are you going to do?
  Already I can't just browse the content on a Discord community without "joining" and all that bollocks.
  Like I'm sure Discord is better than IRC, but it's not better than a collection of open standards so anyone can run a server.
  
  Either too many people spamming so you can’t follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
  How is this different to Discord? You have huge, medium and small channels in both.
  
  Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient
  Your personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc
  
  /me slaps Vlym about with a large trout.
- Except the lack of a decent mobile client that doesn't require you to self-host something to receive all messages
  
  This is genuinely the only problem why we switched to Signal for work communication. My colleagues wanted us developers to use Slack and other proprietary stuff but IRC was enough. Only issue was that you couldn't get push notifications on mobile.
- Better how? I can't message people when they're offline, everything is completely boring text, no images, it's not clear how I can easily setup my own server, everything feels archaic.
  I tried using it before Discord was even a thing, and I already thought it quite sucked. If you think it's great, then good on you for knowing everything inside and out, but the discoverability with any IRC client tends to be in the negatives. It feels awful to use.
  
  everything is completely boring text, no images
  You literally just listed some of the reasons IRC is better. That said, I don't see any reason an IRC client couldn't be made to support images, with the understanding that it would have to be done in a way that falls back to posting it as a link for people using text-only clients, but that shouldn't be too difficult.
  can't message people when they're offline,
  This functionality can be enabled on IRC servers or on a per-channel basis using bots.
  it's not clear how I can easily setup my own server.
  Again an advantage of IRC. Not every group of 2 people need their own server. And a simple 2 second Google search (or learning your IRC client) will show you how to create your own channel in seconds.
  the discoverability with any IRC client tends to be in the negatives.
  That really depends on the client. There are (or at least used to be) plenty of user-friendly IRC clients. How many alternate clients can I use with Discord?
  And heaven forbid someone should have to think for more than 3 seconds when learning something new to them.
  I swear I sometimes think that once all of us Gen-Xers are gone, there won't be anyone left who actually understands how the Internet or the technology that runs on it actually works, as prophesied by Idiocracy.
  
  boring text, no images
  Inb4 using an image to compliment no images
- ICQ was nice. It had an IM, a user directory, and alternative clients without games etc, until its owners went crazy.
  Old Skype was nice. It had fast file transfers, a good Linux client, network efficiency etc, until Microsoft.
  I think everybody thought that just like from proprietary ICQ everybody went to proprietary Skype and it was nice, there's going to be an equally good alternative when Skype rots and people will move to it.
  There are fscking none among the popular IMs.
  
  ICQ ... when you haven't logged in for a bit and then when you do your computer emits a fast-paced streak of uh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-oh
- How?
  
  Not centralised for a start. Think of it like 'federated Discord'.
- Any guides on how to get started on IRC? I gave it a try a couple months ago but couldn't find any good communities.
  
  Have you tried asking on alt.irc.die.die.die?
- I discovered IRC only 1.5 years ago and now all my social life is there.
  
  I find it difficult to get started. I have the client and everything but had trouble finding communities on irc.
  
  Which communities do you find are worthwhile? Like others have mentioned everything I've pursued has definitely felt like a ghost town.
  
  Do they support embedding images yet?
- It was better before, now non tech savy people prefer something I don't like, therefore they are stupid.
  
  No it's not cause it's easy to use, it's cause Discord is controlled by a single company with various features behind paywalls and only one functional client app.

My password is finally secure!
- You can type it here and be completely safe! It hides it from us!
  
  Wait, let me try *******
  Does it work?
  
  A true bash.org reader :)
- But what should I do with this robe and wizard hat?
  
  What the f*ck, I told you not to message me again.
- It would have been awesome Easter egg to code in Lemmy that hunter2 would been always changed to stars.
  The confusion it would have caused would have been legendary
  
  But ******* is already stars. I don't see the point.
  
  I miss word filters. How else would we have come up with such greats as weeaboo instead of wapanese?

And he donned his robe and wizard hat for the last time :'(
- doffs robe and wizard hat solemnly
- Oh that! Lol.

It vanished 7 years ago and came back. It's possible they forgot to renew.
- First week of the new year. This seems likely.
  
  Probably is exactly what happened here. The FreeCAD wiki went down on the 1st too, thankfully they have it mirrored to a GitHub repo so that ended up not being a major issue
  
  Oh shit… be right back.
- Registry Expiry Date: 2025-03-08T05:00:00Z
  
  They went down in August too. Maybe they just need better help keeping things running

Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
Phew. Otherwise we'd need to share all the quotes by mouth around a hobo campfire.
I've read Fahrenheit 451 so i noe.

I guess he'll never put on his robe and wizard hat nor cast level 3 eroticism ever again.
not gonna lie, I am like..genuinely kinda misty eyed over the end of the era.

Man, first time I went through the top posts, I was in tears.

Oh man, I forgot how much I used to read bash.
- We used to read it as kids when we went over our internet quota for the week and it was the only thing that still loaded
  
  How old were you then? What was your internet quota? It's so interesting to hear how different age groups or demographics interacted with the same content.
- I read it a lot, but it feels like there hasn't been new content in years, so I stopped visiting at some point.
- Gosh, me too! Honestly for a good decade there I think Reddit was the only URL I knew.

Damn, I hope it comes back. Bash was one of the greatest monuments to internet history.

Qdb.us has gone about two years ago as well. None of these had remained?

d-_-b
- Wait, how you make that backwards b?
  EDIT: never mind.
  Or whatever it was...been a while.
  
  I was about to laugh at you but then I got the reference.
  
  I like you

I'm glad it got archived, but if you think those weren't fake I have a bridge in New York for sale cheap.
- Some were.
  You'd be surprised how many were not. I spent an awful lot of time on irc in the 90's...
  
  Yeah, seconded. I saw a decent chunk of things in person like I saw on bash.org. People were silly and/or dumb long before friendster, myspace, facebook, etc. and did plenty of shitposting (and just general cringe-y teenage obnoxiousness) on IRC and the like.
  
  There's an actual submission from there written by me (and posted by someone else). I am (very) mildly internet famous, under another handle.
  Can confirm that at least one of them is genuine.
  
  I have massive logs from IRC in the 20teens. I used IRC loads when the web was new, and revisited it and built a couple of bots in 2015ish, and one of those logged everything as part of a game - it was a spy
  IRC is chat. Chat is sometimes nuts
- Who cares if something is 'fake' if you get enjoyment from it? It's the same as any scripted comedy.

Just going to shamelessly paste this one for the memories

    
&lt; Cthon98 > hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars  
&lt; Cthon98 > ********* see!  
&lt; AzureDiamond > hunter2  
&lt; AzureDiamond > doesnt look like stars to me  
&lt; Cthon98 > &lt; AzureDiamond > *******  
&lt; Cthon98 > thats what I see  
&lt; AzureDiamond > oh, really?  
&lt; Cthon98 > Absolutely  
&lt; AzureDiamond > you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2  
&lt; AzureDiamond > haha, does that look funny to you?  
&lt; Cthon98 > lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******  
&lt; AzureDiamond > thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that  
&lt; Cthon98 > yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******  
&lt; AzureDiamond > awesome!  
&lt; AzureDiamond > wait, how do you know my pw?  
&lt; Cthon98 > er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw  
&lt; AzureDiamond > oh, ok.

E: formatting EE: formatting EEE: more formatting??? EEEE: omg I don't know how to fix this anyway you get the idea

We hunter2'ed for years, man, years.

Great quote I just found.
- Soundtrack
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Soundtrack
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  🤘

Yeah, I noticed a couple months ago :(

Now I'll never know how to make that inverted d
- It's called b
  
  You mean q, right?

General tip: https://web.archive.org/save/ (including http://) to save a page. We used to be able to spam save, but they've implemented some throttling there, so you can't save the entirety of your personal website all at once, but oh well.

Bashforever.com
- Holy popup spam, Batman.
  
  Wouldn't know, have ublock.

Ctrl-D to pay respects.
- I remove my wizard hat, out of respect

As of February first, Usenet is done also. Google will not allow joining or new postings anymore. But they will continue to host it as an archive, until they don't....
- Usenet isn't a centralized thing though.... This is just Google groups stopping Usenet support. Plenty of newsgroup providers.
  
  Can confirm, long live the Usenet.
  
  Any good replacements for Google groups?
- Usenet will be around long after Google.