Hi, a lot of communication in Debian happens over IRC. However IRC is not as nice to use as newer alternatives, creating a barrier for newer contributors.
Do you think Debian should be more active to establish (official) presence on newer platforms? A disadvantage is splitting the community, but I'm not sure keeping IRC forever as the world moves on is a good option either... In particular I also wonder if Debian should look at Matrix[1]: it is a free and decentralized platform, and the UI (of Riot[2]) seems more friendly than IRC clients. (I haven't used Matrix much myself yet... Just played a bit as ${work} might use it and they have set up a test installation.) Similar things also apply to mailing lists; there are solutions that might be more accessible to some users (e.g. mailman3's web interface which for example Fedora uses). Though I can't say much about those as I haven't used them so far. Ansgar [1] https://matrix.org [2] https://riot.im