[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Alejandro Exojo]

On Wed, May 19, 2021, at 8:16 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development wrote:
> * there's no registration required;
> * the $newthing has proven stability, staff, resources, etc., and won't 
>   disappear in a few months/years;
> * ...
> 
> then anything is fine.
> 
> All other things being equal, the simplest measure would be to simply 
> move over to Libera. (...)

Can Libera already be considered so quickly? A fork of a software is not so easy
as the "fork" of a service, isn't it? We don't know if they will disappear in a
month, or if Freenode will be fixed by then. Or if another "fork" appears.

Also, I don't understand how not having to register can be a requirement at all,
given that one needs to register, sometimes multiple times, to use some of the
other official channels. E.g. to participate in the mailing list I of course
need to subscribe to it, and to get an email account at all I would either need
to register with some provider or use a work email address (or self-host or...).
If at all, not requiring registration makes me more concerned about spam,
trolling, harassment, etc.

I have my own biases after going through many pains to have a modern-ish IRC
experience (self hosting Quassel, using IRC bouncers, etc.). I hope that the
current active community of people on IRC doesn't get alienated if something
else is chosen, but I also hope that something with proper features is chosen so
I can be back online on those communities, because my paste experience with IRC
makes me not want to go there again unless really needed.

FWIW, I'm now on other IM platforms, and all of Matrix, Telegram, Mattermost and
even Discord seem to have acceptable IRC integration, and some open source
projects treat both sides of the integration as official channels. People seem
to be aware of it, and the friction between the two feature sets and "idioms" of
the platform are more or less respected. So a middle ground is possible as well.

Cheers.