Hello everyone,

as you may know, Debians official IRC presence moved from Freenode to
OFTC 15 years ago. Freenode still had a lively community of users
remaining and the #debian channel was pretty active too.

As of today, this is no longer true. Debians IRC presence continues to
be on OFTC and we have a nice growing community on the new Libera.Chat
network, but anything on Freenode is neither official Debian supported
nor endorsed. Quite the contrary, we urge anyone to drop their
connections to freenode and join us in safer, more trustworthy places.
Anything on Freenode that looks like Debian is to be considered
unofficial, not supported and generally hostile.

For those not closely following the events that lead us to this: A
hostile takeover with an entirely new set of staff, most of which we
would not accept as members in Debian, happened. Over the last weeks
they have acted irrationally taking over many other communities channels
and groups. Today that new staff made it worse and decided to drop *all*
nick and channel registrations, forcibly taking control over many of
those "in their new part of freenode".

So, again: You are best of disconnecting from Freenode, if you haven't
already, and join us on OFTC or Libera.


For the new Libera.Chat network, we established a group registration and
will also hand out Debian cloaks to members again. Please open an issue
in our new Salsa project, if you want one:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian-irc-team/libera-cloak

(Please be patient, we will group them together and try not overwhelming
Libera Staff with too many small requests).


Many thanks to the #debian ops team who have spent the last 3 weeks
setting up channels on irc.libera.chat and walking on eggshells trying
to siphon off users from freenode to safer places while avoiding getting k:lined by the new staff of freenode for doing so. Most of them aren't
DDs but spend huge numbers of hours looking after our community for us.

--
bye, Joerg

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEEcty+znVan90Ug4AV81V4v5iAVmAFAmDI2O0ACgkQ81V4v5iA VmB9OA//SAAuzYiUD0sDgb/NCiRklYObN7q4G4CHJSGCyc4KIHNq+cSFcE7PE4bP Tgx1uLrpMPV9EcoX0NpiBq2hFdjD4wKr0xjV5g88/p81OdDwQFNHOITeMRq6ZZY+ 3JKsnT3dIPkEIcTcy5OjwhnNuW3nQ6aGieOq5n3szxqzaskujuxTwMwLKApZtovC UOLdlyodpvVDPWkj7xqdP0wkUkgdfMWKiwjyv7Y+kdZ8etNkIJsNSTnJkefw7Cv1 ptxtEotR/vMsf+OfkSm1iHIdCIfVegp1qn4TtatQL1wjDyyU6UDn5SB7/tvgFGyx CYl1P520xnRQmyOakURxjv6Yky+cC5lGWbiZXkbjrJBD0aLe0+N0aAY7C3FUIF3E AUroUx4dWJi01GoiVFbi/bDYf+6Ooxg0iW9/zdmGN3up8qI70onDwS5VYVZVtDbf cs3rptrMh83oehaEg3fnNbGizbs1tGOy+/r8K+oth3I3zS9t7S0qKGw4r+vu6fal 90cGcDqEGeWdCIdGJAmWUOUP9uXDpuCIAN6CC+6JH2vJBkeJylUlocdr8KfrWZ+G LbMUH29X7cUD31p7X0VTVY8WYDhYDQ+7KBZEYczAEWrYxgTFdjxqM0h9x1Z0AwT4 PxCAU+8qqD2G3gRLtE2ODbRSBUlUpMP1GSlymTSHAolxLDe9ih0=
=iUQQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)