Private Internet Access partners with Reddit IRC hub Snoonet

Updated on Aug 26, 2020 by Caleb Chen

Private Internet Access is honored to announce a groundbreaking partnership with Snoonet. As a long time supporter of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Snoonet is a natural addition to Private Internet Access’s yearly donation efforts.

Snoonet is a true Internet community platform with a mission in which we can proudly stand with in solidarity. Society and communication are important and nowhere is that more apparent than online. We share this world together. We share interests together. Let’s as a world commit our efforts to making community better. We’re in this together.

Private Internet Access commits to funding Snoonet

Private Internet Access has donated $25,000. In addition to putting our money where our mouth is regarding community, we have also donated the following to Snoonet:

– $199,750 worth of free accounts (5,000 year-long accounts)

– 11 1Gbps IRC servers

Shane ‘rdv’ Allen of Snoonet commented:

Snoonet.org has had a vision for years, the vision at www.snoonet.org/missions
Private Internet Access shares this vision and we’re honored to work with them. Ready to make everything awesome? We are.

Comments are closed.

6 Comments

LateBird

To me, Snoonet does not look to be an initiative worth your support.

from https://snoonet.org/tor :

“Connections to Snoonet using TOR are currently not supported due to low utilization. You will need to find an alternative method if you wish to connect to Snoonet using a proxy/VPN.
There are no plans to restore our TOR hidden service in the near future.”

Also, as far as my experience suggests, more than half the Tor exit node IPs are banned.

8 years ago
xhh

PIA seems to be investing in IRC pretty heavily these days (5-6 figure capital investments is quite a lot). As a heavy IRC user, I’m happy to see that, but it also heavily worries me because I simply can’t understand what the business model is.

Could you speak a bit towards the return you are expecting? If not I’m stuck with only unfortunate theories, such as collecting and selling (or otherwise using) private data.

9 years ago
1. [RESERVED]
  
  Yes please. This is very good point! While I assume we will get an answer like “charity” PIA is a business, and that is no small amount they are donating. Power to you for making donations PIA, but what are you getting out of this…
  
  9 years ago
  1. Caleb Chen
    
    It’s more than about charity. Just look at who PIA donates to and how much. We truly believe in making the Internet a better place and have simply put our money where our mouth is. As mentioned in the blog post, Snoonet is a natural addition to Private Internet Access’s effusive yearly donations.
    
    9 years ago
2. Caleb Chen
  
  These aren’t capital investments, they are tax deductible donations and financial support (sponsorships) for essential Internet companies.
  
  To be absolutely clear, Private Internet Access has never and will never collect, use, or sell private data of our users. We pride ourselves on our privacy policy and would never break that trust.
  
  9 years ago
  1. IRCgeek
    
    I’m surprised that this donation would be tax deductible. Snoonet doesn’t seem to be registered as a non-profit (at least no information about this on their website) and I know larger and more organized networks struggled with the registration process. They seem to lean heavily on the reddit angle but there doesn’t appear to be any official connection or endorsement from reddit despite using their trademarks. Searching reddit.com also shows some pretty controversial stuff about the organization and its founders and it’s a pretty tiny IRC network for this amount of investment.
    
    Why Snoonet and not a larger, more transparent network like Freenode?
    
    9 years ago