Forwaring for information... ----- Forwarded message from Joerg Jaspert <jo...@debian.org> -----
From: Joerg Jaspert <jo...@debian.org> To: debian-devel-annou...@lists.debian.org Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2021 18:44:28 +0200 Subject: Debian Presence on Freenode Hello everyone, as you may know, Debians official IRC presence moved from Freenode to OFTC 15 years ago. Freenode still had a lively community of users remaining and the #debian channel was pretty active too. As of today, this is no longer true. Debians IRC presence continues to be on OFTC and we have a nice growing community on the new Libera.Chat network, but anything on Freenode is neither official Debian supported nor endorsed. Quite the contrary, we urge anyone to drop their connections to freenode and join us in safer, more trustworthy places. Anything on Freenode that looks like Debian is to be considered unofficial, not supported and generally hostile. For those not closely following the events that lead us to this: A hostile takeover with an entirely new set of staff, most of which we would not accept as members in Debian, happened. Over the last weeks they have acted irrationally taking over many other communities channels and groups. Today that new staff made it worse and decided to drop *all* nick and channel registrations, forcibly taking control over many of those "in their new part of freenode". So, again: You are best of disconnecting from Freenode, if you haven't already, and join us on OFTC or Libera. For the new Libera.Chat network, we established a group registration and will also hand out Debian cloaks to members again. Please open an issue in our new Salsa project, if you want one: https://salsa.debian.org/debian-irc-team/libera-cloak (Please be patient, we will group them together and try not overwhelming Libera Staff with too many small requests). Many thanks to the #debian ops team who have spent the last 3 weeks setting up channels on irc.libera.chat and walking on eggshells trying to siphon off users from freenode to safer places while avoiding getting k:lined by the new staff of freenode for doing so. Most of them aren't DDs but spend huge numbers of hours looking after our community for us. -- bye, Joerg ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "Since phone messaging became popular, the young generation has lost the ability to read or write anything that is longer than one hundred and sixty characters." -- Ignatios Souvatzis