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.
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.