A sorry state of affairs all around.

I hope some of the free software projects which live on freenode will consider moving to Matrix.

I have nothing but fond memories of IRC, it changed my life in fact, but it just doesn't measure up to modern standards for chat. I don't mean stickers, reacts, and memes, I'm referring to TLS, E2E for private channels and messages, delivery to multiple devices, and providing missing messages when a client reconnects.

A lot of FOSS has moved to Discord in response to this, which is proprietary, and that's a real pity. Matrix is fully mature now, and the future is bright. We use it at my company (where 90% of the work is writing free software) and have no complaints at all, it's been an improvement over Slack on every dimension.

I know that a lot of old hands (and some newer ones!) are set in their ways and likely to respond defensively to this. Remember that Matrix is an open protocol and the reference clients are free software, it just does more, without having to pile a creaky stack of kludges and extension bots on top of a fundamentally insecure protocol.

IRC will always be around, and I'm glad libera.chat is setting up to fill the gap that losing freenode to some weird coup has created. I'll end this post where I started, by encouraging free software projects to consider using the disruption in continuity to move to Matrix.

"To this day, freenode has not been logging your messages."

Good to hear.

"As long as freenode is still running the same software stack, you can erase your NickServ registration with: /msg NickServ DROP <nick> <password>"

Oh no.

Does he own quakenet too?