We recently released Pidgin 2.14.5
and mentioned in that post that we changed the default IRC network in Pidgin
from Freenode to Libera.chat. We’ve also posted on Reddit, Twitter, and
Facebook that we established #pidgin on Libera.chat and aim to meet our users
“wherever they may flock.” As part of those posts we said we were monitoring
the ongoing situation, implying that we would take whatever we felt would be
appropriate action when necessary.
Yesterday (2021-06-15), Freenode threw away its decades of history. All user
and channel registrations were removed. All active connections to the “old” IRC
infrastructure of Freenode were terminated, forcing everyone onto the “new”
Freenode. As part of this, Pidgin developers' nickname registrations and, in
fact, #pidgin’s registration too, were lost. This is the ultimate outcome of
what was described as a “hostile takeover” of the Freenode IRC network some
weeks ago.
We have re-registered #pidgin on the new Freenode infrastructure and fully
intend to maintain our presence on the new Freenode. However, as a result of
these Freenode shenanigans and the overall general movement of the open source
software community away from Freenode, we decided that we will now consider our
presence on the Libera.chat network to be our “official” IRC presence.
Additionally, we also registered #pidgin on the OFTC IRC network and are
maintaining a presence there.
You will now notice that the IRC link on the side bar has been moved to our contact page and now points to Libera.chat’s web chat and that we’ve removed the Freenode links and information on our contact page. This is in keeping with our decision to make Libera.chat our “official” IRC presence.
We aren’t leaving Freenode as a project, although some people who used to be
stalwart presences in #pidgin there may not be present anymore. We’re going
to continue maintaining our presence there as long as the network is not
hostile to our presence. We continue to aim to meet our users wherever they
may flock.