My first thought is that the current status is good enough for me, I use IRC and there is a bridge. So I don’t mind any action we take - staying on freenode, moving to a different IRC network or ditching IRC completely, perhaps my least favorite option.
I suggest to wait until things shape up. We will see a lot of IRC servers being migrated to the new network, freenode might be degraded to a unusable degree (huge lags). Or things can settle, maybe the new company will give up the domain. Also it will be interesting to see what other projects will do like Fedora or Ansible. I would not like to see FOSS projects to be spread across several IRC servers to be honest, that’s always a bummer to join on wrong networks. Let’s see.
One thing we can do - issue a recommendation to our community (perhaps via blogpost) what to do in case freenode IRC network collapses. I think we can suggest Matrix in this case as the meeting place, that should always work. And of course our Discourse and Blog for more details going forward.
