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.
In mind with what other people here are saying. Pushing matrix/element for stuff like this would be much better for the community. GNU and FSF still using IRC just sets up so only like hardcore oldschool enthusiasts that can get engaged in the movement which is a group that will die off pretty soon.
and the bridge stuff is not a viable option either. Or if so I’d like to see matrix bridged with IRC with matrix being main-
(I love XMPP but I don’t really see it happening and pushing XMPP is like pushing IRC at this point)
IRC has a much lower entry barrier and very nice webclients (for example KiwiIRC, Thelounge, Convos etc.), for public chat rooms it is IMHO the better technology.
Not really. People expect this and that from software and you have to play into that. IRC is antiquated and dying
If you want libre software to be a part of mainstream society you have to work for a group grander than just programmers. Continuing to use IRC is killing the community in the longrun in my opinion.
Edit: IRC is for most people 15-20 years older than me something they used when they were kids and never want to go back to. Pople younger than that aren’t nostalgic enough of accept how it works to use
So you want people to find a suitable homeserver and create an Matrix account just to shortly pass by a public chat to ask some simple questions? Doesn’t seem very realistic and your argument works even better with Discord because people already have an account there in most cases.
Compared to IRC, where you can have a nice slick looking web-client that only asks a nickname and nothing more?
You sound like you haven’t used IRC for years (or maybe never?) and have no idea how it works these days.
yeah, if they made a discord copy or something that is opensource and decentralised it would be much better.
I’m not old enough to have used IRC for years. I’ve used every once in a while and thought it was cool to try a old technology like that. But when I found out people are happy with the current state of IRC it quickly soured, the same as when I got to talk with people in XMPP world.
I’ve used KiwiIRC, but it is terrible branding, terrible most things that got to do with drawing people in.
IRC isn’t made for anyone but people but people like yourself. And insisting to use such a technology is excluding more people than it is including. Like how many non-programmers use IRC? none, none at all.
https://kiwiirc.com/
this is not acceptable to push for a organization if you want the organization to be gathering more than pure enthusiast people from the 80s and 90s, which is a very small demographic.
KiwiIRC is no branding? That’s just a name of a software to be used by server admins. It literally would be just part of the GNU website where people easily can click, type a nickname and have a nice easy to use and convenient chat interface that almost looks like Discord.
Edit: you seem to assume people want some new chat messenger, when in reality they are fine with using WhatsApp/Signal/Discord (what ever) with their friends and just want a quick way to join a public chat room via their browser.
I never understood, why everyone directly wanted to force to Matrix last years. My experience with Matrix was, that it’s slow, complicated key handling and old-school-looking web UI compared to, e.g. The Lounge. And as already said in the thread, forcing people to register an account, just to ask a single question in a public room is rude, when IRC only wants a nickname to chat.
Same with Discord. Joining a Discord channel is only possible with a private invite link, and one directly exposes the complete profile to anyone in the channel. Thus, IRC is simply the best in terms of data privacy, which is what the FSF and GNU represent too.
If you take the argumentation for Discord and Matrix, you could also directly throw Rocket.Chat and Mattermost into the ring. But that is not the point.
It’s not nice, it’s not convinient. No one but old school enthusiasts use IRC and they get thrown off using kiwi. It’s not enough having a nice graphical assety in a chat. It has to build on the communication strategy and branding strategy. It has to have an experience where you feel welcome.
I consider the whole IRC netwo0rk very bad in this regard and don’t have much of a future
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding what IRC is. It is not something like Matrix or XMPP or Signal or whatever. It is just a convenient & standardized way to have a simple public chat somewhere. If you want you can have a simple link on your website saying “click here to join with your preferred XMPP or Matrix client”. Works perfectly fine with IRC as the base and some bridges running on the server.