Cluenet.org was a community of computer enthusiasts and other users who came together, pooled resources, and created a distributed infrastructure of servers and services. In other words, it was a "shell account" site. (Not to be confused with the ClueNet.DE ISP, which was run by different people.)
Though the website still exists and some infrastructre is remaining, the project in general had been slowly dying for many years and is now officially closed.
History
What I remember, or have gathered from logs:
- somewhere 2004–2005
- Chules.Net shell service is created, with w00t.chules.net as a server, later secant.chules.net
- somewhere in 2006
- clueirc.net is created;
#chules.net and #clueirc exist on clueirc.net
- Jan 2007
- cluenet.org registered, #clueirc created again.
- 2007 to 2010
- The ClueNet shell network is born, connecting ~5 to 10 shell servers at any given moment, along with various extra services. The signup procedure is a bit stricter than elsewhere, but generally
#clueirc consists of 100–200 people, plus some in the semi-related Arbelos Services channel.
- around 2009–2010
- Cobi introduces a new, more granular signup procedure; instead of answering a single 5–6 question application, it is split to individual "requirements", each of which is voted individually. Nobody bothers to vote, and the queue only gets longer.
- 2009 to 2011
- Slowly, people start leaving. Some grow up, some get bored, others don't need the service anymore. New people sometimes come in, but get scared of the "new & improved" bureaucratic signup procedure. Shell servers go down, often without announcement.
- Oct 2012
- Activity on IRC suddenly drops rapidly, from ~20k messages in September, to ~8k the next month, and doesn't recover anymore (barely reaching ~5k per month afterwards).
- 2011 to present
- The only remaining 'service' is
#clueirc (although grawity still keeps LDAP & Kerberos running). Approx. 5 active members and 30 persistent lurkers.
- Apr 2017
- Nothing has changed since 2012 – the Cluenet project is effectively dead.
- May 2018
- The final shutdown of remaining core infrastructure (i.e. LDAP and Kerberos), which until this point had been running on Nullroute servers. There were 481 user accounts total.
- Sep 2019
- The final shutdown of Cluenet IRC servers hosting
#clueirc, the last remaining service that still was online (and only barely).
Archived sites: