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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

The noteworthy (IMO, obviously) communities/projects that I have seen jump ship (either voluntarily or by force) are wikimedia & wikimedia, ubuntu, gentoo, centos, kde, postgres, sourcehut, wesnoth, mutt, vim, emacs, lisp, scheme, clojure, haskell. Any other ones that I haven't seen yet?

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Alpine (to oftc), voidlinux, grafana, prometheus, fosdem, curl, bastillebsd, couchdb, musl, ircpuzzles, jellyfin, gamingonlinux, xen, devuan, irssi, weechat, …. The list is too big to get it exhaustively

Archlinux: https://archlinux.org/news/move-of-official-irc-channels-to-...

Fedora is planning too, but it's colliding with our project of having our own Matrix server bridged with IRC.

Same with KDE, but the Matrix wnd Libera team are working on it.

FFmpeg already has registered channels there. Will update website within a day.

It might be easier to start a list of channels that didn't move.

3.2k commits as of now: https://github.com/search?p=6&q=libera&type=Commits

> 3.2k commits as of now: https://github.com/search?p=6&q=libera&type=Commits

Not all "libera" commits on GitHub related to "Libera Chat"

There are 470 commits for "libera chat"/"libera.chat"[0,1]

[0] https://github.com/search?q=libera+chat&type=Commits

[1] https://github.com/search?q=libera.chat&type=Commits

Indeed but note that if you search for "libera chat" or "libera.chat" (I think they are equivalent, github's search doesn't recognize punctuation I think), it filters out the commits that don't mention both "libera" "chat" in the commit message, and only turns up those that do. In particular, github's commit search does not search diffs, only commit messages, so even if the diff contains libera.chat, it won't turn up until the commit message also mentions it.

> clojure

While there is a #clojure on both Freenode and Libera, it's not official as far as I know. Also, https://clojure.org/community/resources still links to the Freenode channel. Most of the Clojure community hangs around on Zulip and Slack (Clojurians) more than IRC anyways.

The Freenode channel says it has moved:

> ChanServ: This channel is moving to #clojure on irc.libera.chat

Is irc the primary means of communication for all these projects?

IRC and mailing lists are still the most important communication channels for a lot of projects (see: kernel.org and similar projects). It haven't changed for 30+ years and I hope it won't change in the future.

Not sure I'd call it primary for all of them, but it's been a supremely useful, and speedy, support resource whenever I've needed it. Being able to just blindly /join #name_of_project and land somewhere useful (even if unofficial) is like magic.

The Bitcoin community has moved / is moving to Libera; I think #bitcoin was the second-largest freenode channel, after #ubuntu.

apart from what sibling mentioned: armbian, xmonad

#lobsters

#reprap, #smoothieware and #kicad are all on Libera now

edit: I see kliment beat me to it on 2 of those :)

Elixir apparently based on another HN front page post

gnuradio. We also got hijacked.

Python

ecl moved.

So did #clasp - forcibly.

Forcibly how?

All operators and bans were removed and the channel was forcibly redirected to ##clasp.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289071

freenode staff took over en masse all channels who mentioned "libera" in their topic. It's been discussed all over HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27285802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287750 (gentoo)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287807 (raku)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288673 (elixir)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288771 (alegro)

I don't know how I missed that...

The same thing happened with our local linux user's group #cialug

Both #ecl and #clim moved, yes.

lopsa - the League of Professional SysAdmins.

kicad, implicitcad, reprap, scopehal

Perl

NixOS

Moved to Matrix, but there are active IRC channels on Libera as well.

The move to Matrix was not a community decision, which is why it's now fractured slightly between the different systems. Maybe someone will bridge them in the future.

I'm seeing plenty of Nix/OS/pkgs IRC regulars and seniors in matrix rooms, and lots of active discussion going on.

There is demand and mourning for IRC bridges, and I'm sure that will be taken care of sometime soon, but to me it seems Matrix is the new home.

I thought Matrix group sizes are limited to 1024 members. I can't google if this limit still exists.

If a "group" is a room, then this is definitely not currently true. I'm in Matrix rooms well over this size.

There are no hard limit on matrix room member counts. e2e encrypted rooms with thousands of users se a lot of key negotiation traffic, but with such sizes maybe full encryption doesn't buy much as any user can share the log/history.

Umm, so O(n^2) key exchange traffic? In practice, is it noticable to users/ server admins?

O(N) per user for the initial key exchange when you join a room, and then O(1) thereafter - although you should re-key when someone joins/leaves or every N messages or X days (where N is typically 100 and X is typically 7).

openscad, spritely, elixir

also zig and go-nuts

rsync too i believe

bootstrap

Looking at https://freenode.net/static/img/wikimedia-forced-move.png the forced part is by people on the projects. Honestly, that sort of stuff is the main reason I stopped using IRC. I can completely believe that someone decided to do that and it shows contempt for the community it says they want to have.

It's easy to say the community moved when you kick and ban everyone from a channel and create a new channel on a different network. But how many people actually moved? Did they just damage their own community over this?

While it perhaps seems a bit heavy-handed, it's an easy way to ensure people notice the channel has moved, even if they haven't been following the news, and thus minimize damage to your community. I don't see how this action is "contempt for the community".

"How many people actually moved?" .. I'd presume everyone who wants to be in that channel and who has noticed that it has moved. Why would they not?

Also note that this example seems to be the exception, many channels that got hijacked merely mentioned the move in topic or even just mentioned libera in topic without any decision to move being finalized (though the hijackings did a great job at finalizing those decisions ;)

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