GHC and the future of Freenode

[Ben Gamari]

Hi all,

As you may have heard the Freenode IRC network, long the home of #ghc
and several other prominent Haskell channels, appears to be in the
middle of a rather nasty hostile takeover [1,2,3,4]. As a consequence,
it seems it will be necessary to migrate the #ghc community elsewhere.

The next question is, of course, where will this be. One option is
Liberachat, the spiritual successor of Freenode. However, in recent
years I have also heard an increasingly loud choir of users,
contributors, and potential-contributors note how archane IRC feels when
compared to other modern chat platforms. Using IRC effectively in a
collaborative environment essentially requires that all parties use a
bouncer; however, this is (understandably) isn't something that most users
are willing to do.

Consequently, I think it would be wise to expand our search space to
include other FOSS platforms. At the moment, I can see the following
options:

 1. Remain on IRC and move to Liberachat, the spiritual successor of
    Freenode

 2. Remain on IRC and move to OFTC, another widely used network

 3. Move to [Matrix]

 4. Move to [Zulip]

My sense is that of the non-IRC options Matrix is the truest successor
to IRC, being a federated protocol with a wide array of (if somewhat
immature) clients. I know some of our contributors already use it and in
principle one could configure an IRC-to-Matrix bridge for those existing
contributors who would rather continue using IRC.

Zulip, while also being FOSS, is far more centralized than Matrix and
appears to be more of a chat web application than an open protocol.

Do you know of any other options? Thoughts?

Cheers,

- Ben



[1]: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409
[2]: https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt
[3]: https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bdd66b8f491
[4]: https://mniip.com/freenode.txt
[Matrix]: https://www.matrix.org/
[Zulip]: 
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