quassel-announce

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June 2021

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Moving our Home - Good Riddance Freenode, Hello Libera Chat!
by Manuel Nickschas 13 Jun '21

13 Jun '21

Hi all, Since the beginning of development more than 15 years ago, we, the Quassel IRC development team, had called the Freenode IRC network our home. For the longest time we have enjoyed the network, its people and communities, its helpful and friendly staff, its services and ease of use. Freenode was the home of a large body of Free and Open Source software, also the home for communities close to us, such as the Qt, KDE, Gentoo or Ubuntu/kubuntu communities. Unfortunately, recently the situation has changed drastically. What happened was what many people call a "hostile takeover" of the Freenode network and organization by people who basically treat with contempt Freenode's original values that formed the core of the community, and a main reason for many projects to choose that network in the first place. As a result, basically all of Freenodes volunteer staff has resigned, afterwards many channels have been taken over by the new management, their former admins robbed of their rights and ownership. I don't want to go into all the details here; there should be ample information about this on the internet. As a starting point, feel free to read through the discussion (including links to various sources) that ensued in our own, the Quassel community, as part of a Pull Request [1] created to deal with this matter. As it turns out, the core of the former Freenode volunteer staff have founded a new network, Libera Chat [2], with safeguards in place that should prevent another hostile takeover to ever happen. Many projects have moved to Libera Chat, and the Quassel IRC team has decided to follow suit. Since we know the people behind the network, and their philosophy, we expect Libera Chat to continue the legacy of the original Freenode. And as a more practical consideration, the network setup, the services, the processes behind the scenes, all are pretty similar, and thus from a technical perspective, the move was rather straightforward. So going forward, you'll find the usual suspects of the Quassel community in Libera Chat, in the same channels they joined previously - #quassel, #quassel.de, #quasseln and so on. We will change the links and network list in the client with the next release. For the time being, our channels in Freenode are still open, but we expect participation of our most active users to cease, and we always have to expect a hostile takeover of channels by Freenode admins, so we urge everyone to join Libera Chat instead. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side! ~ Sput [1] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/pull/571 [2] https://libera.chat/ -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Libera Chat) Member of the Quassel IRC Project - https://quassel-irc.org Come visit us in #quassel!

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