The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting, we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete at latest by 13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for download soon.

At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat immediately. IRC channel names will (mostly) remain identical. You will be able to recognize Gentoo developers on Libera Chat by their IRC cloak in the usual form gentoo/developer/*. All other technical aspects will feel rather familiar to all of us as well. Detailed instructions for setting up various IRC clients can be found on the help pages of the IRC network.

According to the information published recently, there have been major changes in the way the Freenode IRC network is administered. This has resulted in a number of staff members raising concerns about the new administration and/or resigning. A large number of open source projects have already announced the transition to other IRC networks, or are actively discussing it.

It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo. We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that such a move will be an inconvenience to them.

At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.

Please check this page for future updates.

More information on the Freenode situation can be found at:

• Christian (Fuchs)’s Freenode resignation
• @freenodestaff tweet
• Open Letter On freenode’s independence
• Andrew Lee, We grew up with IRC. Let’s take it further.

2021-05-22 update

The Gentoo Council will be meeting tomorrow (Sunday, 2021-05-23) at 19:00 UTC to discuss the problem and the possible solutions.

The Gentoo Group Contacts team has been taking steps in order to ensure readiness for the most likely options.