RFC: Move Away from Freenode

[Joel Sherrill]

Hi

Community input is needed and appreciated!

The #rtems IRC server (freenode.net) has undergone some turmoil and we need
to discuss what to do. This email provides some hopefully unbiased
background on the Freenode situation, the options I identified, and my
personal recommendation.

If you follow the nerdy type of news, you may be aware of some serious
turmoil. I won't even try to rehash all the news but the basic outline is
that the owner of the domain name has pushed some uncool things, forcing
some elected leaders out, most/all the volunteers have left, etc. There is
some concern that any information on freenode will be commercialized. This
isn't much except for registered users who have a nickname and password.
That much should all be covered here with lots of links.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/freenode_staff_resigns/

This is a starting point to read things from the volunteer viewpoint that
was posted to a GCC mailing list:

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409

At this point, open source projects are bailing on Freenode for libera.chat
which was founded and setup by Freenode volunteers. I saw over 400 projects
have moved to the libera.chat. Showing the tone of what's happening at
Freenode, if libera.chat was mentioned in a channel, the admins for that
channel had their permissions removed and new admins were assigned. This
has only increased the rate of the exodus.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbgvg/major-internet-projects-are-leaving-freenode-after-korean-prince-takeover

Our Discord setup seems to be doing well and is more active than I ever saw
on IRC. The question to the community is what should we do? Options are:

(1) Drop Freenode and IRC entirely. Focus on Discord
(2) Drop Freenode. Add libre.chat (or another). Still keep Discord
(3) Drop Freenode. Drop Discord. Focus on IRC on libre.chat (or another).

I'm leaning to (1) but whatever we do, the git commit -> IRC bot is
down/broken and will have to be addressed. If we commit completely to
Discord, we need bot(s) there and git commits need to go to Discord.

Even if we go with (1), it may make sense to claim #rtems on the two IRC
servers that open source projects are moving to. Just in case something
else happens, we will have those channels reserved and some admins lined
up. But we can leave them unused.

If anyone knows or wants to now about Discord bots, I am sure help would be
appreciated.

What does everyone thing should happen?

--joel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.rtems.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20210527/7e8872ca/attachment.html>