[HCoop-Discuss] Proposal to change our official IRC presence

[Robin Templeton]

Hi all,

(TL;DR: Due to major and disruptive changes in freenode governance and
operations, I propose that HCoop should move its IRC channel to
libera.chat, the new IRC network created by now-former freenode staff
who recently collectively resigned; see the proposal at the bottom of
this message for details.)

As some of you are aware, the freenode volunteer staff resigned en masse
a week or so ago as a result of Andrew Lee (AKA rasengan, owner of the
freenode.net domain via freenode ltd) breaking his promise not to
interfere in freenode's operations. This led to the creation of a new
IRC network, Libera Chat (<https://libera.chat/>), run by the former
freenode staff.

freenode is now under the operational control of Lee and a new group of
staff selected by him, following a set of poorly-documented and
rapidly-changing 'policies'. Among a variety of questionably-ethical
decisions, I'll only mention one of the more egregious examples: there
was an unannounced mass takeover of hundreds of channels which mentioned
libera.chat in their topics, resulting in the loss of privileges for
operators of those channels and the deletion of the old topics as they
were deemed to be 'spam'. That action likely accelerated a mass
departure that was already underway; many projects have left freenode
entirely (including Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, FreeBSD,
Wikimedia, GNU Emacs, GNU Guix, GNU Guile, etc.).

For more information, see these articles:

 - https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/857140/9d69e4bef039e574/ (permalink:
   <https://lwn.net/857140/>)
 - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-the-crown-prince-of-korea/
 - https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409
 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-source-korea-crown-prince-takeover

The first week on Libera has gone well despite the influx of new users
(it's now the #3 network according to netsplit.de). Beyond setting up
Solanum (a new IRC daemon developed in collaboration with OFTC) and the
usual Atheme services (NickServ, etc.), they've set up a Tor hidden
service and webchat, and are in the process of setting up an official
Matrix bridge similar to freenode's. Libera is also a Swedish nonprofit,
rather than a group of volunteers relying on the goodwill of a
for-profit company as freenode was, making a distruptive split like this
less likely in the future.

I personally consider relying on the new incarnation of freenode
unacceptable and believe that we should either move to another
free-software-oriented IRC network (e.g., Libera or OFTC) or to another
free software chat service (e.g., XMPP or Matrix). Between the two, I'd
prefer to maintain an IRC presence as it remains a de facto standard for
free software communities, and we can use bridging to allow access via
other protocols.

Given the above, and that over half of our IRC users are already using
#hcoop on libera.chat (while no one has expressed a preference for OFTC
so far AFAIK), I propose the following change:

HCoop will move its official IRC presence to #hcoop on irc.libera.chat
on 2021-06-05.

...i.e., next Saturday, allowing a week for discussion. If there is
general consensus for moving to Libera, we can update our wiki, etc., to
direct members to the Libera channel, and the decision could be ratified
at the next board meeting. (We could also register as an official
project on Libera, which has some benefits beyond being an ordinary
channel.)

If you have other ideas as to what our reaction to the changes at
freenode should be, or questions about the overall situation, please
don't hesitate to share them here. If there are alternative proposals,
we can discuss them here and possibly take other steps, such as holding
a vote or scheduling a board meeting to resolve the question.

In Cooperation,
Robin Templeton