IRC channel has moved from Freenode to OFTC

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

Hi everyone,

Some weeks ago while Freenode's status was starting to be unclear
[https://lwn.net/Articles/856543/], we registered a new channel on
OFTC [https://www.oftc.net].

OFTC has a long history of existence, and it is a member project of
SPI (Software in the Public Interest), which is a non-profit
organisation. This is in contrast to Freenode which never had a clear
ownership structure, which has led to the current situation.

Soon after, Freenode started to implode, and the official channel
switched over to OFTC along with other Freedesktop channels such as
#freedesktop #dri-devel, #pulseaudio, etc. The move was not announced
in the channel topic because the Freenode admins were unilaterally
taking over channels that did that.

Since then, the OFTC channel has organically become the preferred
medium for discussion. On the other hand, the Freenode situation has
become even worse (for instance, IRCCloud has been banned), and the
Freenode channel can now be considered defunct.

To reiterate: the new channel is #gstreamer on OFTC.

You can also connect to it using Matrix:
https://matrix.to/#_oftc_#gstreamer:matrix.org

Personally, I'm using Matrix to connect to the channel, and my
experience has been good so far.

If you want to read more about the Freenode situation, here's some material:
https://lwn.net/Articles/857140/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/o0263h/all_freenode_channels_and_users_gone/
(see the stickied comment for more info)

Cheers,
Nirbheek

Note: this email was sent in my capacity as a GStreamer maintainer,
but not after detailed discussion with other maintainers. Just
documenting the current situation.