Given the developments of Freenode today, we’ve begun migrating to Matrix. We have registered nixos.org as its own server, and #nix:nixos.org for the main channel. We’ll see how this goes. Further configuration and channel creation to come.
We also have a space: You're invited to talk on Matrix
Further context: Freenode now belongs to Andrew Lee, and I’m leaving for a new network. & Fuchsnet freenode resign letter.
Those who want to remain on IRC with their projects and channels might want to have a look at https://libera.chat, which is where the existing Freenode team and infra are mostly moving to.
Some of us will just stay on Freenode and see what happens when the dust has settled.
Independent of Freenode, I really welcome the change from IRC to Matrix, as I like the protocol and its modern features, e.g., history by-default, encryption/integrity.
Edit: More features I forgot: emoji-reactions, url-previews, reply-to-post, editing your messages, syntax-hightling for ` and ``` blocks, markdown-formatting
Yes, I feel that if we’re forced by the circumstances to move, we may as well move to something more modern than IRC.
Do we need more? I’ve tried a bunch of matrix client and I found them a bit sucking for group communication…
And I find them too much distracting, most of the time
In case we decide to bridge matrix and IRC together (let’s wait with that decision until it’s clear what the new overlords of Freenode have in mind or we’ve moved to another IRC network), then I’d advocate for hosting the bridge ourselves.
While the general usability of matrix-appservice-irc is pretty neat, the centralised bridge on matrix.org being overloaded make it a pretty bad UX.
IRC has problems that may one day be improved, but have not for a long time. One thing that sticks out to me is multi-line messages. If you’re new to IRC, you probably don’t know about pastebins … paste in a bit of config and you’re met with either users saying use a pastebin – or a bot that k-lines you for spam.
I really like IRC. I love it, really. It started my career and I’ve made life-long friends there. I am sad to see this day.
A few minutes ago, @qyliss said:
the decision should be analyzed, and the choice of move should be justified, and we should be open to a different long term outcome if that’s what the community once
and I agree with that. This morning, the signal we received from many Freenode staffers changed suddenly when I was paged at 4:30am from “all is calm and okay” to “crisis is now”. That is what spurned this albeit sudden move.
I think Matrix has a lot to offer, and I think it matches the expectations of more users today than IRC. And, I agree with what Alyssa said.
Why does this matter? You say that pasting maybe pages of sources in matrix is somewhat a better experience, leaving out the killing bots? I’m happy for the code to be out of the conversation most of the time… few snippets are ok, but longer texts makes following the channel a bit difficult
Matrix automatically creates a scrollable box for long messages instead of just filling the screen (or at least common matrix-clients like Element do that).
I’ve tried it, but unfortunately it’s all bells and whistles when I just want to read text, even with the avatars removed, the conversation density remains…sparse, and it’s another memory hungry browser window… but hey, that’s just me 
You might want to try the weechat plugin for now (CLI) or quaternion (still developed, but desperately needs a new release) for a calmer experience.
Take your time to settle on clients.
Element has a setting for a more IRC-like displaying of messages, should be somewhere in the settings, like this: IRC ui layout by JorikSchellekens · Pull Request #4531 · matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk · GitHub
Maybe that helps, I think your concern is completely valid, and probably also shared by others!
Alberto Berti via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com writes:
I’ve tried it, but unfortunately it’s all bells and whistles when I
just want to read text, even with the avatars removed, the
conversation density remains…sparse, and it’s another memory hungry
browser window… but hey, that’s just me
I use Matrix through WeeChat through weechat-matrix. Very IRC-like
experience, but also supports Matrix features like encryption (although
it doesn’t do cross-certification yet), multi-line messages, etc. Still
not quite as nice for me as IRC, but well beyond tolerable.
Thanks, just to clarify and compare, with IRC i’m using Emacs’ erc package, with logging to a folder, one file per channel. I’ve tried an on development package for matrix, but it’s completely different from the old plain erc…it tries to do the chat the fancy way, with many colors, previews and such, which it’s not for me…and it wasn’t really working so well at the time
<Fuchs> Arathorn: I shall see that we can discuss it at the meeting this weekend, it’s not an easy decision since Matrix obviously has a fair share of freenode users and there were some issues with the bridge
The matrix-bridged IRC channels could be “upgraded”/redirected to the new *:nixos.org rooms using m.room.tombstone custom events