As a result of this meeting and our review, the FSF and GNU have decided to relocate our IRC channels to Libera.Chat. Effective immediately, Libera is the official home of our channels, which include but are not limited to all those in the #fsf, #gnu, and #libreplanet namespaces.
On June 25th, at 10:00 AM EDT (UTC 14:00), we plan to forward any channels remaining in the #fsf, #gnu, and #libreplanet namespaces on the Freenode network to their corresponding ##fsf, ##gnu, and ##libreplanet counterparts. As per Freenode policy, channels with the ## prefix are unofficial “topical” channels, and accordingly, they will not be moderated by GNU or FSF staff.
Please note that the irc.gnu.org address, which has historically pointed to the Freenode network, will be disabled on June 25th, to give any users still connecting with this address sufficient notice.
and an at least equally thriving community of XMPP users… They just tend to be less vocal about it and just use it because it actually works nicely.
I don’t think i have seen a real problem with the Matrix protocol, it works nicely for me, many open source projects are opting to use Matrix instead of XMPP, in that sense, it’s not about which community is more vocal, Matrix is just being seen as an ideal replacement for Discord and IRC at the same time.
Can you tell me a single open-source project that actually switched away from XMPP? Yes there are a few that switched from IRC to Matrix, but is vastly pales compared to those that sadly switched from IRC to Discord.
My very subjective user experience with Matrix: super slow and laggy messages (has improve a bit lately), the element client is a resource hog with very little actual functionality (and everything feels half-baked an buggy), and the bridges break left and right. In addition to that nearly everything is centralized on the matrix.org servers and even on those there are just hundreds of lurkers and otherwise mostly dead channels (and people that just seem to use Matrix as an IRC bouncer). If I compare that to IRC or XMPP… well those have seen better days for sure, but there are at least real people talking in the channels about topics that interest me.
Honestly, i wouldn’t say that people are switching away from XMPP in favor of Matrix… because i think most FLOSS projects never switched from IRC to XMPP to begin with, i don’t have proofs, but i don’t have any doubts, i assume that most projects switched from IRC to Matrix because XMPP was never an option to begin with.