Canonical shuttering some of its legacy chat channels

OS PLATFORMS

The Ubuntu Pastebin went in June, IRC gets demoted next

Canonical is closing off some of its older tools and communications channels for users, although some may remain – just unofficially.

Back in May, Canonical’s Aaron Prisk announced on Discord that the company was closing the Ubuntu Pastebin at the end of June. Now a comment from a different Aaron, Aaron Rainbolt, says that the IRC channels will follow.

The official Ubuntu chat channels are now on Matrix – there’s an introductory site and under Step 3: Join the Ubuntu space there’s a Matrix link to Ubuntu’s area: you can either type /join #community:ubuntu.com or follow a Matrix link. (Note: the preceding link will only work if you have a Matrix client installed, and your browser can open it.) This isn’t unprecedented: the Linux Mint project did much the same back when Mint 22 came out a couple of years ago.

For the record, the Ubuntu Wiki still lists all the for-now-still-official IRC servers and channels. As The Register reported at the time, they are hosted on Libera Chat, which was set up in 2021 after the widely used Freenode imploded. For the time being, the IRC channels should remain open – but they will no longer be official methods of communicating with the company, and users shouldn’t expect any staff to be present, whether that is to help, or to moderate, or anything else.

This vulture is crossing all available extremities that Canonical doesn’t also see fit to close down the Ubuntu mailing lists, from which he’s extracted a great deal of value and entertainment over the last 22 years — as well as giving a lot of advice and tech support. That was the Reg FOSS desk’s entrance into the FOSS community. Back when Ubuntu started, Debian was famously unwelcoming to newbies, and it was around the time that Red Hat pulled the plug on its original community distro.

If you’ve never encountered a pastebin, you may be one of those lucky folks who rarely need to venture into Linux troubleshooting. This often involves reading long screensful of text. This is pain to read aloud, and novices miss critical details. The idea of a pastebin is that you can just copy-and-paste the text into a website, then send a handy short link instead. The snag is that such reams of verbiage can include condfidential info, and the very newbies that might need help most are least skilled at spotting and censoring that.

The orignal pastebin.ubuntu.com disappeared a while ago. There are plenty of alternatives, from the original Pastebin.com – albeit behind Cloudflare protection, which as we reported last year blocks some legitimate accesses. For something less transient, even including revision tracking, Microsoft offers Github Gists.

This has led to a new field of encrypted pastebins. One is the AGPL3 CloakBin, whose developer emailed us to tell us about it. You can host your own with tools such as PrivateBin, or its progenitor ZeroBin. As we quickly discovered, there are many others:

• Paaster;

• PasteCrypt;

• Paste.sh;

• and Defuse’s PIEbin.

This, of course, is the real value in having an official one: users not only know where to go, but if they’re already using software from that vendor, they can also have some reassurance that they can trust an official tool. Not that we needed one, this could be seen as another demonstration of the problem predicted by Xkcd 927.

IRC and its pastebin are merely the latest examples of older tech Canonical has been phasing out in recent years. Last year, it officially deprecated its old revision control system, the GNU-endorsed Bazaar. The Breezy fork is still somewhat active, although the site has a worrying number of dead links. ®