Foreman on Freenode IRC

Currently there’s a storm of activity around Freenode. https://kline.sh/ has more, but the CentOS project already announced it will move over to libera.chat.

Do we, as the Foreman community, want to follow?

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We must have written at the same time

I have missed this thread and replied in the other one.

I suggest to wait a bit for other projects and do the decision later. From what I remember from my morning twitter browsing, Fedora is moving the the libra.chat and some other major projects too.

Maybe we can merge those threads if there is a feature like that enabled?

Based on what we are seeing, I think like other communities we should begin making a move to give us as much time as possible to inform and help the community transition. Some communities appear to be debating Libera vs. Matrix as the future direction they go from Freenode. The easiest move is probably for us to stick with IRC by migrating to Libera and allowing for a Matrix bridge as we do today. However, given the opportunity it is fair to ask ourselves if we wanted to go a Matrix native route.

No matter the route we go, we need to have a model to decide a direction and likely some dates for moving and cutover.

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I would like to support moving off Freenode as among other questionable decisions things like the removal of policies governing hate speech are concerning[0].

As for Libera vs Matrix, I do not understand how Matrix is different. Though if we can have a matrix bridge and be on Libera that sounds like a good direction, but if there are other advantages to moving to Matrix and someone feels strongly about it I’d be more than happy to consider it.

[0] policy update by realrasengan · Pull Request #513 · freenode/web-7.0 · GitHub

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This is what I am thinking also.
Matrix has a lot more functionality than Libera. With Matrix, for example, we could host video callss or demos in the same chatroom.
FOSDEM was entirely hosted in Matrix rooms. It’s pretty cool. We already have a Foreman community presence on Matrix with a Freenode bridge.
I would be pro slowly fading off of Freenode and moving onto Libera for those who want traditional IRC. As long as we’ve a bridge, we should be good.

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From what I’m seeing on Fedora, they will migrate to Libera and will setup the bridges to Matrix.

After this weekend policy update, I can’t trust freenode anymore.

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I do agree we should move away from Freenode given the recent events. So where to?

Personally I’m in the camp of people who like IRC because it is simple. So to me Libera would be the logical choice. However, I also understand people like Matrix. Bridge libera.chat · Issue #1324 · matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc · GitHub is tracking the progress of bridging those two. Perhaps it makes sense to wait for that and then migrate to Libera?

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I agree, this is a very good point. I am all for moving to Libera but waiting until the bridge is rolled out for production use.

I like the idea of making Matrix our primary space for community chat.
I would love to see, for example, could we in time run demos or meetups in our Matrix room.
So, I suppose, I am asking would there be objections to Matrix as primary with a Libera bridge for those who (for very valid reasons) would prefer to remain with a simpler IRC client?
PS: I’m +1 for doing this when the time is right.

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hundered of channels have just been taken over by freenode staff, the staff contain known network trolls who have in the past accused channel members of being sexual offenders and posted slander on the net.

This cannot be a network a project like foreman remains on.

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:+1: from me to bridging libera to matrix once it is possible. discussions on that thread seem to indicate work is underway already to enable that. I’m one of those that prefer using a regular IRC client and I’m already connected to libera as well, I’d suggest everyone who is using IRC join our channels there too.

It would seem that freenode is automatically taking over any channels that attempt to change to topic to point to libera, so we should not update the topic there yet so we don’t lose control of the channels. We should definitely update our docs and point people over there once the matrix bridge is ready.

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Good point, once Libera-Matrix is ready and we move, probably some of us (not all) could stay there and reply to users who come there to ask that this is not the official channel. We should not change the topic however, yeah.

I volunteer for this!

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I am connected to libera and think we should move there rather sooner than later.

(Personally no need in a Matrix bridge, but that is different for other users I guess)

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I’ve a deep dive later and the demo tomorrow. I’ll mention that this exists.
I’m happy to start shepherding folks over in general.

Looks like the matrix - libera bridge might be ready as soon as tomorrow:

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Wow!

I just typed a reminder this morning in both channels:

Good morning, friendly reminder: we will be moving our channels to LlBER4 IRC network. Channels are up, feel free to continue conversation there, as long as the M4TRlX bridge is up we will make this official.

I saw Mel doing this the other day and I like it, let’s avoid that word for a moment on our channels so we maximise the time we have the control.

Also I’ve noticed that amount of people on the support channel before this was about 230 and now we are looking at 130 (+ 30 on libera). Looks like we had some idlers who decided either go to Matrix or no longer join our channel. Not good.

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