Libera Chat

In the last week, there has been some momentum around freenode.org.

In short, PostgreSQL IRC channels moved from irc.freenode.org to libera.chat.

This is not the only community that is migrating to the new Libera Chat IRC Service, and most notably (to me) Raku and FreeBSD decided to migrate.

The main question about this service migration should be, obviously, why?

It is possible to find out a lot of articles and discussion on the web about, but in short the Freenode admins clashed with the owner of the network, and decided to quit and “fork” a new service.
In particular, as you can read here:



I have not mangled all the information, and so my opinion is still blobby, but surely what you can read here is not a good start to me: [...]I've been the guardian and owner of freenode since 2017[...]. This is the kind of approach that makes people irrational, since while it matters how much money you put into the project, this does not automagically provides you a role as guardian, or even gives you the ability to take decisions.
This is open source, after all.

But there is more to read, and to make your own opinion.

What is libera.chat? It is an organization providing an hosting for IRC channels.
I clearly suspect a lot of projects will progressively move to libera.chat, and this will kill, I suspect, freenode.org.
We’ll see.