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.
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.