Hi, everyone. We've moved our official support channels from Freenode to Libera.chat. All that's happened afterwards pretty much proves that this was the right decision. Maybe even to the point of saying that staying on Freenode would be dangerous to our users (e.g. because of the late NickServ impersonations, ops with bad reputation etc.).
However, there are still IRC clients in Gentoo that default to Freenode. I think the next questions we need to answer are: 1. Should we be proactively changing the default network in IRC clients (provided they have one) from Freenode to Libera.chat? 1a. If yes, then should we also make a change if clients default to network other than Freenode? 2. Should we be proactively *removing* Freenode from the network list in IRC clients (provided they have one)? 2a. Should we be adding Libera.chat to the list even if we do not remove Freenode? I think the answers depend on how strongly we feel about Freenode. Answering 'yes' to 1., 1a. and 2. generally makes sense if we assume that we should make it easier for our users to reach official Gentoo support channels. If we assume that Freenode is explicitly dangerous to our users, it might make sense to do 2. as well. However, I'm not really sure about this. Quick recap for people that haven't been following the news or got confused in the lots of data: 1. Freenode was sold in 2017 to some guy who apparently wasn't supposed to interfere with its operations. 2. In 2021, the guy actively started to interfere, then formed a one-man Board and demanded full compliance. 3. Most of the old Freenode staff (including people we've worked with) left and formed Libera.chat. 4. Many projects (including Gentoo) started moving their channels to Libera.chat. 5. New Freenode staff (including some disreputable types) went angry about this and started automated reclamation of channels that indicated move to another network (including some channels that didn't because they failed at grep). 6. Services started falling apart, random trolls started impersonating NickServ. While they were kicked shortly, they still could have grabbed some passwords from identifying users. 7. Eventually, the new Freenode staff announced yesterday that they are rebooting Freenode and therefore losing all past registrations. That's the most important events in my opinion. I'm sure some people have more to add. My main point today is that it's a series of unprofessional moves that in the end open a lot of impersonation opportunities. Just imagine unknowing Gentoo users having their systems compromised through advice from trolls pretending to be Gentoo developers. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
